With the recent increase in adoption of mindfulness, there is also increased resistance. Here's why.

In my recent travels on SteemIt I discovered some concentrated anti-mindfulness sentiments. I thought to myself, "that's odd, why are people so against being aware of thought?" I can understand spending most of your days not being completely unaware, I do it all the time. But I don't understand being opposed to it.

Most of communication difficulty is due to differences of definitions, I suspected that this anti-mindfulness sentiment would be due to a basic misunderstanding either by me or others. With this hypothesis in mind I set out to do some research.

I searched Google for 'Why I hate Mindfulness' and other similar searches, and then read a dozen articles.

Findings

Common definitions

Most of the authors had their own definition, but they were all roughly similar. One quoted from the Mindfulness wikipedia page

“In this (Buddhist) context mindfulness is defined as moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, characterized mainly by “acceptance” – attention to thoughts and feelings without judging whether they are right or wrong. Mindfulness focuses the human brain on what is being sensed at each moment, instead of on its normal rumination on the past or on the future.”

Some authors summarised this as "mindfulness is chillin’ and living in the moment." and "Mindfulness, the practice of sitting still and focusing on your breath and thoughts." Both of these are poor summaries, but they aren't completely ignorant.

Origins of the term 'mindfulness'

I learned that Jon Kabat-Zinn coined the term 'mindful' in the west. He defines it fairly well