Is it time to drop out of the mindfulness revolution?

What went missing when meditation became mainstream

The phone’s screen turns a serene blue, and Calm, the leading mindfulness application, opens. At the very center, without capitalization or punctuation, small and faint, are the words “take a deep breath”.

That gives way to a menu. “What brings you to Calm?”

The app offers options to “reduce anxiety,” “develop gratitude,” “build self esteem,” even “increase happiness.”

The next screen offers a sevenday free trial. Once the trial has ended, the annual rate is $69.99, a small price for happiness.

Somewhere around 2010, according to experts and Google search data, the practice of mindfulness began an upward swing. In less than a decade, it has become the fastestgrowing health trend in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mindfulness rules the online app store. The San Franciscobased Calm is valued at $1 billion, and its competitor Headspace at $350 million. (The industry as a whole has been estimated to be worth as much as $4 billion.) Meditation retreats are en vogue. Corporations offer access to mindfulness in the same way they do for gyms. Even the military uses mindfulness breathing techniques to boost soldiers’ performance.

But as with any Next Big Thing, there are reasons to be cautious. Some say this rush into mindfulness has outpaced the science and stripped it of its cultural context. All of this threatens to turn a tool for wellbeing, for situating oneself in the current moment, into a tool for standard American commercialism.

Around the same time mindfulness began its upward trajectory, Ronald Purser, a management professor at San Francisco State University, started to feel the familiar weight of doubt. He’d been doing a fair amount of corporate management training and consulting — redesigning the workplace to work better, at least in theory, for everybody. “I became somewhat disillusioned and disenchanted,” he says. “Even when we were making progress, trying to redesign work so employees would have more autonomy and decisionmaking, the management sort of pulled the plug on some of those experiments.”

It was around this time, too, that ChadeMeng Tan, a software engineer at Google, gained notoriety for integrating mindfulness into Google’s corporate culture through a series of inhouse mindfulness seminars. In 2012, Tan turned those courses into a blockbuster book, “Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace),” and Purser found himself attending Tan’s very first public offering.

“I became very disappointed by what I saw, just in terms of what the program was and how superficial it was,” Purser says. “I just saw this as part of the interest in behavioral science techniques as a way of yoking the interest or subjectivity of employees to corporate goals.”

A year later, Purser published an essay with the Huffington Post. It was titled “Beyond McMindfulness.” Mindfulness meditation, he wrote, “was making its way into schools, corporations, prisons, and government agencies including the U.S. military.” Purser, a student of mindfulness for 40 years, wasn’t knocking the practice but was wary of its growing reputation as “a universal panacea for resolving almost every area of daily concern.” Last year, Purser expanded on the

Illustrations by Don Asmussen / The Chronicle