“Die to the past every day, you don’t need it.” —Eckhart Tolle

The current backlash against mindfulness, as evidenced by the growing number of articles warning of the dangers of meditative practices, was inevitable. The elementary law of physics of, “what goes up must come down,” aside, it was clear that the explosion of personal and societal ills reportedly cured through mindfulness was going to create skepticism.

Added to this basic mistrust of something sounding too good to be true, there is the reality of the publishing world that tries its best to hold our attention in a world of distractions. It’s hard to keep people interested, especially in good news, since we’re a society hard-wired for the bad stuff. How to get noticed when writing yet another piece about the meditative arts? The simple answer is scare them, by reporting on harmful consequences of mindfulness.

As a long-time student of Eastern traditions and meditation teacher, I was somewhat surprised to see the mindfulness movement catching on. We are, after all, a culture habituated to living in the past—ironically a very stressful place for most of us. I refer to this as "Past Tense Disorder" or PTD for short, which is the inner tension created when we live in the there-and-then. (This is not an official diagnosis.) I was certain there would come a moment of collective cognitive dissonance when people realized that choosing to live in the present goes against everything they’ve been taught.

How was it possible, I wondered, that the underlying Eastern teachings, from which mindfulness springs, were blending so seamlessly with the Western notion that we are our memories? Curiously, people who were raised with the motto “Anywhere but here, anytime but now,” were being drawn to the concept of “be here, now” like moths to a flame. What were they going to do, I wondered, when they discovered that the flame has the potential for burning down the very structures they’ve come to know as reality?

To understand both the interest and eventual criticism of mindfulness I came up with the theory that, much like the introduction of yoga, people were not interested in the practice itself, but the prizes that were being promised. In an ironic twist, many chose to ignore meditation’s history and, instead, focused on the promises of future rewards.

As a therapist, I’m fascinated when clients come to me and, after regaling me with the stories of their lives, tell me they want to learn mindfulness. I will ask, “So you want to learn to live more in the present moment?” What usually follows is the same look one gets when asking someone who wants to lose weight if they’re ready to start eating less. To keep them engaged, I will point out that their reaction does not mean they carry some character flaw, but instead, suffer from a culturally induced compulsion to the past. I tell them it’s due to the inherent contradictions that resulted when we imported Eastern traditions and tried to square peg them into the round hole of a Western mindset. I also assure them that they, too, can learn mindfulness, despite this conditioned avoidance of the now.

To push the point home, I describe the symptoms of PTD:

1. Thinking that we are our stories.
2. Valuing what we’ve done more than what we’re doing.
3. Avoiding future anxieties by taking refuge in the past.
4. Preferring history lessons over current events.
5. Believing that we can solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s mind.

I finish by saying that, while there’s no cure for PTD, there is an antidote. This remedy, I assure them, does not require an intensive undoing of years of cultural conditioning but rather the simple act of witnessing the conditioned state as it presents itself. At this point, some catch on and declare, “Oh, you mean meditation.”

Inevitably, I’m confronted with fears of falling into the land of Woo Woo, becoming a welcome mat for whatever the world dishes out, or becoming a consumer of the McMindful Happy Meal of false bliss. I’ve learned to hear these concerns as the grinding of someone’s mental gears as they try to shift from their inherited mindset of thinking and doing to awareness and being. I find it helpful to point out that there is a difference between working at mindfulness and mindfulness at work. I try to dissolve the image of a person sitting, usually at the beach or more recently on top of their desk, in lotus position. My aim is to replace it with the image of someone fully engaged with the flow of life—an active participant in events, reacting spontaneously with much less effort.

Frequently, I encounter clients who report that they “can’t meditate” or that mindfulness did not bring about the promised changes. My standard reply is, “Before you drop your meditation practice, try dropping your expectations and see what happens.”

Perhaps, there will come a day when we no longer need to write articles, blogs or tweets about the pros and cons of meditative practices. Maybe fate, karma, divine intervention, etc. will force our collective attention to the present moment and the need for questions and answers will subside into a shared felt experience of the now. Until that time, however, we should take comfort in the knowledge that the very questioning of the benefits of mindfulness fits nicely into the Buddha’s teaching that “after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”