The Trouble with Mindfulness
I have to admit, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the word mindfulness. It feels both overused and misunderstood—like a word that has carried too many meanings for too long.
In my early days listening to Adyashanti, I don’t recall him ever using it. And yet, those teachings shaped my deepest understanding of awareness. So, where was this mindfulness everyone later started talking about? Was it something new—or something we had simply renamed?
The Buddhist Origins of Mindfulness
When I later began studying Tibetan Buddhism here in Switzerland, I discovered that mindfulness isn’t a single, monolithic concept. In the Pali canon, the word is sati, which translates roughly as “to remember to observe.” In early Buddhist teachings, mindfulness isn’t a state of calm or even awareness in the broad sense—it’s the mental faculty that remembers where our attention belongs.
In meditation, sati functions as the gentle hand that notices when concentration has wandered and brings it back to the object of meditation. As Geshe Kelsang Gyatso writes, “The function of mindfulness is to prevent distractions. The more stable our mindfulness, the fewer distracting thoughts we will have.”1
This definition is refreshingly specific. Mindfulness is not serenity; it’s vigilance. It’s not relaxation; it’s remembering. It’s the quality of consciousness that keeps us anchored to our chosen point of focus—moment by moment, breath by breath.
Thich Nhat Hanh and the Practice of Presence
Years later, I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, a foundational text that reframed the practice completely for me. His words carried a softness and a poetic simplicity that made mindfulness feel less like a discipline and more like a way of being alive.
He wrote, “If, while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’ What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.”2
In Hanh’s view, mindfulness is the practice of keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality. It’s not about meditative skill—it’s about intimacy with life. Every ordinary act—washing dishes, drinking tea, walking across the room—becomes a gateway to awakening when performed with full presence.
What I find most powerful in Hanh’s teaching is that mindfulness is not something we “apply.” It is something we are. When awareness is alive, life becomes both ordinary and miraculous at once.
How Mindfulness Became a Corporate Buzzword
By the time mindfulness entered Western corporate life in the early 2010s, the word had been stripped of much of its depth. It became a management trend, a productivity enhancer, an HR wellness initiative.
I was working in the high-tech world at the time, immersed in engineering teams and corporate culture. I remember seeing mindfulness workshops popping up on company calendars—lunchtime meditation, stress-reduction seminars, “resilience” trainings. My cynicism at the time told me these were boxes to be ticked, not transformations to be lived.
There’s some truth to that skepticism. Many of these programs borrowed the outer form of mindfulness but lacked its inner substance. Yet it’s also true that the movement opened doors. Programs like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction gave millions of people their first experience of stillness. And for some, that doorway led deeper—to real inquiry and genuine self-awareness.
Still, I often wonder: when corporations teach mindfulness as a way to make people more productive, does it remain mindfulness at all? Or does it become just another tool for efficiency, stripped of its liberating potential?
Mindfulness, Then and Now
Across traditions, definitions of mindfulness range from the precise to the poetic:
Noticing when concentration has ebbed — the technical aspect of sati in meditation.
Being fully with what’s in front of us — the psychological and experiential sense.
Allowing the present moment to be the only moment — the spiritual dimension.
Relaxing into a serene awareness — the emotional fruit of practice.
Each is true in its own way. Yet the diversity of definitions also reveals why mindfulness can feel elusive. We use the same word to describe both a mental discipline and a way of life. No wonder it has become a kind of Rorschach test for the modern mind.
Mindfulness as a Way of Being
For me, mindfulness is not a technique—it’s a relationship. It’s how I relate to myself, to others, and to life itself. It is remembering that every moment offers a choice: to be lost in thought or to be present with what is.
In my retreats in the Swiss Alps, mindfulness is woven through everything we do. We meditate, yes—but we also walk, breathe, eat, and converse mindfully. The mountains themselves become teachers. The silence of early morning, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sound of wind through the pines, and the gentle ringing of cowbells in the distance—each invites us to return, again and again, to awareness.
Sound, especially, has a way of bringing us home to the present moment. A single bell echoing across a valley can become a meditation. The ear opens; the mind softens. In that instant of listening, there is no past or future—only presence. In this way, even sound itself becomes a teacher of mindfulness.
In my coaching practice, mindfulness becomes ontological—it’s about being with one’s inner world, noticing one’s moods, bodily sensations, and linguistic patterns without judgment. Seeing how we construct meaning moment to moment, and how our attention either opens or constrains what’s possible.
Mindfulness, in this sense, is not about detachment. It’s about intimacy—with one’s experience, with one’s emotions, with one’s humanity. It’s not the absence of thought but the presence of awareness.
Beyond the Word
I sometimes wonder if we’ve worn the word mindfulness too thin. Perhaps what we’re really pointing to is something far older and more universal—presence, awareness, stillness, consciousness, attention, remembrance. Each carries its own shade of meaning, yet all gesture toward the same fundamental invitation: Be here now.
The word itself may come and go in fashion. But the essence remains timeless: to live awake to the moment we are in.
An Invitation to Mindful Living
So, what do we mean by mindfulness?
Maybe it’s all of these: remembering to observe, keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality, living awake.
Or perhaps it’s something entirely personal—something you discover only in your own direct experience.
You don’t need a program, a cushion, or an app to find it—just a moment of willingness.
Pause.
Breathe.
Notice.
As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, “While washing the dishes, wash the dishes.” When we live like that—awake to the small moments of our day—we step into something vast.
And that, to me, is the real miracle of mindfulness.
1 Gyatso, Geshe Kelsang. How to Understand the Mind. Kindle Edition.
2 Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (pp. 7-8). Kindle Edition.
