Meditation Is Not a Skill
The mind is like a car that has 3 pedals which are all accelerators (Sadhguru)
The mindfulness industry now has over 100 million users on Calm and Headspace. The category is worth around $100M and projected to triple within a decade. Critics call it "McMindfulness."
The critique is correct, but mostly for the wrong reason.
Meditation is not a skill. It is the absence of the kind of effort that skills are made of.
Every other thing you learn rewards trying harder. Meditation punishes it. The state the apps point you toward is the state your effort to reach it destroys.
Alan Watts had it right: "a watched pot never boils". If you watch your mind to see it concentrate, it stops concentrating. The watching is motion.
This breaks the industry's product logic:
- Products need steps. Meditation has one: sit down.
- Products need progress. Meditation has none to track. The abbot of 40 years and the beginner of 40 seconds are doing the same thing.
- Products need complication. Meditation is the removal of complication.
A useful distinction: simple vs. easy, complicated vs. hard. Most problems are complicated but easy — many parts, none difficult. Meditation is the opposite. Simple but hard. There is nothing to learn, and that is what makes it hard. There is nothing for your competitive instincts to grab onto.
You cannot buy a subscription to do nothing.
The real instruction has not changed in 2,500 years. Sit. Close your eyes for an hour. Make no effort for anything. Make no effort against anything. Thoughts run; you let them run. The mind settles when you stop stirring it.
That is the practice. There is no advanced version.
The McMindfulness problem is not that the industry is commercial. It is that meditation is the one good the market cannot package without destroying.
If you want to start, you already know how.
Sit down. Close your eyes. Stop trying.