The Dark Side of Mindfulness

I was into meditation before it was cool.

Actually, I was into it long after it was cool. I was born in the early 80s, and in my late teens I came across the scattered and dishevelled remnants of the meditation boom of the 60s and 70s. 

In my university library I read dusty tomes of esoteric religious mysticism supplemented with time-capsule bits and pieces like Jack Kerouac’s crazy adventures, breathless enthusiasm over the scientific power of Transcendental Meditation, and erstwhile attempts to find a bridge between religions East and West through shared practice of the kinds of methods once ridiculed in Medieval Eastern Europe as “Omphaloskepsis”, the original “navel gazing”.

Meditation is cool again. Not The Beatles hanging out in India with the Maharishi in ’68 kind of cool, but the Paleo diet, Bikram yoga, gluten-free, activewear, corporate sociopath kind of cool.  

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