With mindfulness becoming very popular in the last couple of decades, it has become divorced from its’ beginnings. In its journey to the West it had to shed some baggage as well as some babies in the bathwater, which has left it ‘refreshing’ and rather ‘lite’, simultaneously. While popularity, and its marketing appeal will set people in motion to explore and investigate it in great depth, my sincere wish is that it becomes a tracer round leading people to investigate in depth, and set down lasting roots into the ground, rather than die the natural death of a ‘product’, only to be replaced by the next new trend.
The ‘trend’ of mindfulness as lasted 2600 years, and its journey to the West (and indeed to the far East) has be eventful. What has served it well is that it has a certain simplicity which cannot be distorted. And therefore it is resilient. But it can be ‘stripped down’ of its travelling companions, the other seven factors of the Noble Eightfold Path.
