These days, every leader committed to excellence and effectiveness has some version of a mindfulness practice. They meditate before work. They use the Calm app on red-eyes. They cite the research and encourage colleagues to find their own nervous-system regulating practices.
And many of them still describe feeling scattered, overwhelmed, burned out, and oddly hollow. All of these practices must be doing something, but it’s not quite the right thing, or at least not enough of it.
Liz Bucar, PhD, a religion professor at Northeastern University and author of Beyond Wellness, has a theory about why. The version of mindfulness most of us are practicing has been carefully, deliberately, and strategically emptied of the very elements that made it work in the first place.
“Self-care doesn’t matter if it doesn’t help us stay engaged,” Bucar told me in a recent conversation. “If it’s just about the individual and survival, it’s not enough.”
How Mindfulness Became a Performance Tool
The mainstream mindfulness industry is largely the creation of one man’s vision. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist at MIT, developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the 1970s, and it spread through hospitals, corporations, and universities with remarkable speed. More than 30,000 people have now completed the program, offered across more than 700 medical centers worldwide.
To make that scale possible, Kabat-Zinn made deliberate trade-offs. He famously said that mindfulness is “the heart of Buddhist practice, but it has nothing to do with Buddhism.” He translated Buddhist concepts into clinical language, removed references to community, ethics, cosmology, and collective purpose, and presented the practice as evidence-based secular therapy. It was an intentional extraction, and it worked, commercially. But according to Bucar, it came at a cost.
What got subtracted was what she calls a worldview: the coherent framework of meaning, purpose, and obligation to others within which the original practice was embedded. Without that framework, mindfulness becomes, McMindfulness: a productivity technique masquerading as transformation.
The Data on What’s Missing
The research base for mindfulness in adult populations is genuinely robust. Meta-analyses consistently show reductions in anxiety, depression, and perceived stress. The American Psychological Association recognizes Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy as an evidence-supported treatment for depression relapse prevention. This is not contested.
What is less discussed are the edges of that picture. The My Resilience in Adolescence (MYRIAD) project – a large-scale study of school-based mindfulness training engaging more than 28,000 children – found that for that specific population, the practice offered no meaningful advantage over standard social-emotional curricula, and sometimes increased anxiety in adolescents already prone to over-monitoring their inner lives.
And psychologist Willoughby Britton of Brown University has documented that a meaningful minority of meditators report adverse effects, particularly at higher doses and without adequate context or guidance. The practice, it turns out, is not universally neutral, which suggests it is more powerful, and more specific in its requirements, than the wellness industry tends to acknowledge.
Bucar frames this through the lens of worldview mismatch. The original techniques were developed within a Buddhist framework in which the self is understood as an illusion. The point of meditation in that context is not to improve the self, but to dissolve the illusion of it. When someone approaches that practice with the goal of self-optimization, the two frameworks are on a collision course. The result, she argues, can be disorientation rather than relief.
What a 97-Year-Old Monk Said
To understand what was lost in translation, Bucar spent a week on silent vipassana retreat at Bhavana Society, a monastery in rural West Virginia founded by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana: one of the original advocates who brought mindfulness to the United States. At the time of her visit, Bhante G was 97.
She asked him for something she could bring back to her students, many of whom were pursuing a mindfulness minor at her university, largely as a trendy credential.
He gave her a parable. If someone comes to him wanting water, he said, he tells them: pick a spot and drill 100 feet. But if they go away and dig ten holes of only ten feet each, they will never find water.
“You confuse your practice if you do too many practices,” he told her. “Pick one spot and drill.”
For leaders managing fifteen wellness apps, three productivity systems, and a tipsy stack of morning habits, that is a tough, but essential lesson that can be transformational if taken to heart.
The Dimension Most Leaders Are Skipping
Bucar’s deeper argument in Beyond Wellness is that the real problem isn’t the techniques we choose. It’s their purpose. Most of us are using wellness practices to optimize the individual self: manage stress, increase output, extend performance. But virtually every contemplative tradition Bucar examines understands wellbeing as fundamentally relational. You are not the main character.
In Buddhism, mindfulness is one leg of a three-legged stool, alongside ethical behavior and generosity toward others. In the monastic tradition, it is inseparable from community practice. What makes contemporary secular mindfulness hollow for many practitioners is precisely that the other two legs have been removed.
This maps onto something I see consistently in the leaders I work with. The ones most likely to report that their success doesn’t feel as good as it looks are also the ones whose wellbeing practices are exclusively inward-facing, focused on the ME dimension of leadership without integrating the WE and WORLD dimensions. Stress management as an end in itself is not a life strategy.
“Real wellbeing,” Bucar said to me, “is about something bigger. Wellness is too low of a bar.”
What This Means in Practice
Bucar is not arguing that leaders should convert to Buddhism, or any other religion, or that mindfulness is useless, or that the contemplative traditions of the world should be appropriated into workout studios or workplaces everywhere. Her framework is more useful and more honest than any of those options.
Her approach to each practice is a three-step inquiry: uncover what has been stripped from it, evaluate whether restoring that context deepens or transforms the practice for you personally, and then, maybe most importantly, make a conscious choice about how to apply it in your life.
For some leaders, that may mean choosing not to pursue a given practice at all. Mindfulness framed as enlightenment toward the dissolution of the self is a very different proposition than mindfulness framed as career optimization, and not everyone will want the former.
For others, it may mean adding back the element most consistently scrubbed out: community. Not a meditation community necessarily, but some form of shared practice oriented toward something more satisfying than individual performance.
Bhante G’s drilling metaphor is a useful guide here too. The question isn’t which wellness practice you’re doing. It’s whether you’re going deep enough in any of them to reach something real.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
