Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral, but it is loaded with troubling assumptions about the self and the cosmos.

I have a long history with meditation, although my involvement has been superficial. I was crushingly bored when my parents took me to the temple as a child. Later, I turned to psychotherapy to manage my academic load. I drew my self-influence from Buddhist philosophy, one aspect of which was mindfulness. I was instructed to observe my breath, scan my body, note bodily sensations, and play with the thoughts and emotions in my mind. The last exercise often involved considering your feelings and thoughts in visual images—such as clouds floating freely in the sky.

I concluded that mindfulness meditation reduces stress and builds resilience, but I could not tell whether I had particular thoughts and feelings simply because I was stressed and inclined to give in to melodramatic thinking, or if there was a valid reason to feel those things. I think mindfulness made me feel estranged from myself and my life.

Practitioners are advised to maintain nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. While eating a raisin, the focus is on the process of consuming it rather than on whether you like the taste or not. Similarly, while observing your breath or scanning your body, the focus should be on the process itself rather than on the train of thoughts and emotions.

In doing so, we make it harder to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and to tell a broader story about ourselves and our lives. We do not tend to think of thoughts and feelings as disconnected, transitory events that just happen to occur in our minds. Rather, we see them as belonging to us—reflective of who we are in some way. People who think they are neurotic often do so because of repeated feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and their own nitpicking tendencies. It is often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. But after a certain point, mindfulness does not allow one to take responsibility for or analyse such feelings. Mindfulness can only offer the platitude: I am not my feelings.

The problem lies in the tendency to present mindfulness as a panacea for all manner of modern ills.