Try to Just Do Nothing

Now that they've made mindfulness completely overwhelming, how about trying nothing at all?


Mindfulness has been industrialized and suffers from the hard sell of hucksters who are convinced that they know best for you what you need to do.  It's a shame, because meditation is very effective  for everything from relaxation to predicting oncoming episodes of depression, mania or anxiety.

But it just sounds like such an investment, both in money and time, in this cookie-cutter method that the mindfulness industry has sold to us.

If mindfulness just feels like another task you have to do, it can stress you out like everything else.  There's even a condition, relaxation induced anxiety, that people with anxiety disorder often suffer at the hands of poor mindfulness teachers.

Then there are the wonderful success stories of mindfulness practice that the mindfulness industry keeps telling us.  Boy, can they make you feel like a failure while you fidget and obsess on thoughts during the twenty minutes you really don't have to listen to a calm voice tell you everything is OK as your life burns all around you.

So what can you do?  Maybe nothing.

This article in the Guardian tells of the author's quest to find a way to relax while he tries to meet deadlines, feed the kids and manage a career.

The sellers of mindfulness seem bent on replacing suffering with guilt.  Guilt that you aren't practicing correctly or enough.  They glorify solitude, which most of us have no time for at all.

Maybe the answer, as the author found, is to just watch birds in the backyard, or imagine a football game that takes place only in your head.  Maybe it's to keep the phone in your pocket while you wait in line and allow your mind to wander.

Peace can come in fragments, and daydreaming, long-derided by mindfulness gurus, might not be so bad after all.