Name: How mindfulness got weird | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T16:30:57.000Z
Duration: 43 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Jon helped really pioneer the mindfulness movement in America in the late 70s and early 80s.

He wrote a hugely popular book in 1994 called Wherever you go, there you are.

This is a really interesting conversation that spans a lot of topics, but mostly it's about two things.

What it means or what it was supposed to mean to live mindfully as a a kind of practice.

And how the mindfulness movement slowly over time has been co opted into something like a productivity hack.

John is a very kind and generous and thoughtful person and you really see that in this conversation.

So check it out and I'll see you next time.

That's a line you've probably heard me say a few times on this show.

Usually when I'm talking about the way that capitalism co ops are culture's best ideas.

Whatever the domain, fashion, music, wellness industry will find a way to take something cool, something special and make it banal, turn it into a product.

Mindfulness meditation is an interesting example.

The number of Americans who've tried meditation has tripled since 2012.

The practice is being offered in workplaces, schools, healthcare facilities.

There are tons of meditation apps you can download.

On the surface, that may seem like a great thing, and in many ways it is.

But has the mainstreaming of mindfulness come at a cost to the practice itself when meditation becomes a productivity hack?

the author of several books, most notably his mega bestseller, wherever you go, there you are.

It came out in 1994 and has just been republished as a 30th anniversary edition.

John is a pioneer of the mindfulness movement in America.

I followed his work for a while and I've always found him to be an uncommonly thoughtful and generous person.

So on the anniversary of his book, I invited him onto the show.

We had a wide ranging discussion about mindfulness.

We talked about what it means to him, why it's so damn hard to practice in everyday life, and

what meditation has come to represent in our culture.

It is truly hard to believe that it's been 30 years basically since you publish.

Back then, mindfulness wasn't a part of the lexicon at all.

You know, of course, I want to know what the term means to you.

But instead of asking it straightforwardly, I think I'd rather ask you what you think the opposite of mindfulness is.

Because I think that's actually more clarifying.

The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness.

And what that means to me is unawareness.

One is actually out of touch with aspects of reality that are salient and potentially vital to living life fully.

So mindfulness in my vocabulary is synonymous with awareness, with human awareness.

So it's not something you have to acquire.

It's basically, you're born with this capacity for awareness.

But the opposite of mindfulness really is inattention.

What Actually, it's the one human activity that you engage in for no purpose.

Not for some kind of contrived goal that you want to attain.

And then you'll be happy or proficient at something or whatever.

But this is more so that you actually are living the life that's yours to live in.

The only moment that you ever have to live it, which we don't usually realize, is this one now.

So we're always on the way to some better place, better moment, or running away from the awful moments.

And so we haven't developed that skill that you could learn in elementary school to actually be with things as they are, whether they're pleasant, unpleasant, or neither.

You're just neutral and see how that actually feels.

There's no place to go, there's nothing to do.

And there's no special state or feeling that you're supposed to attain.

It's more about can you be with things in your body in this moment as they actually are?

And that's a real discovery, that, holy cow, I can actually inhabit this moment and not be tyrannized completely by my thoughts.

I mean, that's something that, like, is really a useful skill to be able to not miss your life.

It is pretty horrifying to realize that at the end of our lives, it is practically certain that at least one of our biggest regrets will be that we wasted so much of our attention that we simply cared about the wrong things.

And yet, very, very few of us live as though we've internalized that insight.

If you look closely, in fact, I think you'll see that most of us live as though we think we're going to live forever.

Because that would be the only justification for wasting so much fucking time, wouldn't it?

There's a certain way in which I think you can live forever, and

Because this present moment has no dimension to it.

You can reside in the present moment outside of time.

So that is as close as I think we're ever going to get to immortality.

Do you think if you meditate long enough, you eventually come to the conclusion that the self is an illusion?

That the self, at least what we mean by the self, is really just a story that gets reinforced by our environment?

The story of Me, starring me, put it up on the marquee.

The story of Me, you know, starring me with all the trials and tribulations and triumphs or whatever.

Well, when you sit down to meditate, the first thing you realize, because everybody wants to be good at everything, right?

Well, if I'm going to meditate, I better get a good result.

But remember I just said this isn't about having.

It's the one thing that you do for its own sake without getting a result.

But that doesn't matter because you'll sit down and after a few moments, something's going to drive you crazy.

Either your body's going to get fidgety and you say, well, what's the point of this?

Or you're going to fall into some kind of narrative.

And what I'm going to have for dinner, or what I forgot at the grocery store when I went shopping, whatever it is, you begin to realize that, oh, my God.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How mindfulness got weird | The Gray Area

potential

meditation

recognize

present