The Dark Side of Mindfulness

Eastern meditation usually focuses on your breathing, a certain word or something similar.  This practice is quite different from Christian meditation:

I will meditate on your precepts

    and fix my eyes on your ways. ...

Even though princes sit plotting against me,

    your servant will meditate on your statutes. ...

Make me understand the way of your precepts,

    and I will meditate on your wondrous works.

(Ps. 119:15,23,27)

Mindfulness has even reached into many public schools, often in very subtle ways and going under unusual names to camouflage the connection to Eastern mysticism.  Here is an excellent and well documented paper by a lawyer on the dangers of on stealth Buddhism.  Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), said that this technique will  

... take the heart of something as meaningful, as sacred if you will, as Buddha-dharma and bring it into the world in a way that doesn’t dilute, profane or distort it, but at the same time is not locked into a culturally and tradition-bound framework that would make it absolutely impenetrable to the vast majority of people.

Christopher Dingwall-Jones, writing for the Church Times, has noted some lesser known aspects of mindfulness:

As far back as 1992, David Shapiro, a professor in psychiatry and human behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, observed in a study of the effects of meditation that, out of 27 subjects, 63 per cent had experienced negative effects, such as anxiety, depression, sobbing, and mild dissociation.

Some mindfulness practitioners have become detached from themselves or had dark psychotic hallucinations.  Others feel a sense of terror or may turn suicidal.  When mindfulness was taught to inmates, it did not have the positive effects hoped for.  The title of the paper with the research on this is quite explicit: "Is There a Dark Side to Mindfulness? Relation of Mindfulness to Criminogenic Cognitions."  Criminals usually have these characteristics: "... feeling more deserving and entitled than other people, a failure to accept responsibility, a negative attitude toward authority, a tendency to focus only on short-term outcomes, and being fairly insensitive to the impact of criminal behavior."  Mindfulness training did not cure these ills.

Let's follow the example of the first Psalm:

Blessed is the man

    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

    and on his law he meditates day and night.