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Mindfulness has reached such a level of hipness that it is now suggested as a cure for essentially every ailment. Anxious? Broke? Sneezing? Definitely try meditating.

This vogue is in part due to the real benefits of mindfulness, a form of attention and awareness often (but not always) achieved through meditation or yoga. It’s a trend for a reason. But its increasing application to every situation under the sun has some people concerned.

In The Atlantic, Tomas Rocha writes about the little-discussed possibility that, for some people, meditation could actually be dangerous. He talks to Dr. Willoughby Britton, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who works with people who feel they’ve been harmed by meditation — one man described going through “psychological hell” as a result of his practice, while another worried he was “permanently ruined.” Dr. Britton has tracked “dark nights of the soul” — spiritual experiences that are frightening rather than calming — across a variety of religious texts, and she believes that meditation’s potential ill effects have been under-studied. Mr. Rocha writes:

“Many people think of meditation only from the perspective of reducing stress and enhancing executive skills such as emotion regulation, attention, and so on.

“For Britton, this widespread assumption — that meditation exists only for stress reduction and labor productivity, ‘because that’s what Americans value’ — narrows the scope of the scientific lens. When the time comes to develop hypotheses around the effects of meditation, the only acceptable — and fundable — research questions are the ones that promise to deliver the answers we want to hear.”

And for Dr. Britton, Mr. Rocha writes, mindfulness in its original Buddhist tradition “is not about being able to stare comfortably at your computer for hours on end, or get ‘in the zone’ to climb the corporate ladder” — it’s about gaining insight into the human condition.

She’s not the only one to question the emphasis on meditation as a path to productivity. In Salon earlier this year, Joshua Eaton argued that the new corporate embrace of mindfulness — he mentioned a panel titled “Three Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way” — privileged a particular kind of “individual spiritual development” over any kind of collective consciousness or social activism. “Many Buddhists,” he wrote, “now fear their religion is turning into a designer drug for the elite.”

Michael Stone sounded a similar note a few weeks later, also in Salon, when he called for Buddhists to speak out against the use of meditation by large corporations and the U.S. military. “Mindfulness is a deeply political practice,” he wrote, “designed to reduce stress and suffering both in our own hearts and in the world of which we are a part.” It shouldn’t, he argued, be used to make members of the world’s biggest military better at killing.

In a response to Mr. Stone at BigThink, Derek Beres argued that what Google and other companies are offering isn’t really mindfulness, because it’s in the service of a product that’s fundamentally anti-mindful (that is, the Internet). If your goal is to make people surf the web more, he wrote, all the meditation in the world isn’t going to bring you true enlightenment.

At the core of this debate is a question about what mindfulness should be. For some, it remains a fundamentally religious practice, one rooted in Buddhism’s ethics and understanding of social justice (Stone writes, “The first ethical principle that the Buddha taught in his description of living mindfully is ‘not Killing’”).

But in the mainstream, mindfulness is often seen simply as a tool, a way of calming and focusing oneself. As such it can be used to de-stress after a long day, to get more done at the office, or even to wage war.

In some cases, the tool seems to work. Research has found it can help people pay attention to a task, keep success in perspective, and make better decisions. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2012, Bill George perfectly summed up the mindfulness-as-tool ethos: while he “never adopted the spiritual portion” of meditation, the practice allowed him “to stay calmer and more focused in my leadership, without losing the ‘edge’ that I believed had made me successful.” Never mind the Buddha: Just deep breathing will make you a better boss.

But for Dr. Britton at least, the view of mindfulness as a harmless stepping-stone to success ignores its potential dangers. For her, meditation has the potential to open practitioners up to darkness (she once called her research “The Dark Night Project”), and those who paint it as no more than a career-booster or a stress-reliever may be misunderstanding both its power and its purpose.