As a practitioner of mindfulness meditation for 46 years, and a teacher of it for 25, I’ve followed the rise of the mindfulness movement over past two decades with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s been refreshing to see something I so value getting some airtime. On the other hand, its popularization, a.k.a. McMindfulness, has trivialized the practice beyond recognition, depicting it as a faddish skill you can pick up over a weekend. Mindfulness isn’t a new way to think or an attitude to adopt. It’s a practice, a way of being, diligently cultivated over time. It saddens me to see so many apostles of mindfulness, who clearly don’t practice it themselves, monetizing it.