i hate how thoroughly capitalism and "wellness" industry have poisoned the term "mindfulness meditation"
when the words come out of my mouth i feel like i'm talking about "manifesting", or embracing my "inner girlboss" or having a "growth mindset".
it fuckin sucks.
mindfulness meditation as a practice has been so important for us in so many ways, and it's infuriating that now the term is drenched in this connotation of corporate retreats and becoming a more productive manager. fuck.
Mindfulness is a huge base skill for DBT that all the other skills are based on. It's a way of slowing down the space between thoughts and action to regulate impulsiveness and feel able to think through what coping skills will help.
But when I talk about it everyone thinks about the fucking Headspace App and the ways it gets prescribed to people as a way to Fix Stress when they're overworked and underpaid.
It makes me so mad because I really do feel like it fundamentally fixed something in my brain when I learned how to be mindful and returning to my mindfulness exercises always helps me center and ground myself.
Much like CBT (not that one) is a major reason I am still around to post on this website and yet it has been poisoned by overuse in situations it has absolutely no right to be used in (such as when 'catastrophization' is 'actually just a reasonable estimation of things going on'). Mindfulness is a useful toolkit of skills that has limits, and that concept is anathema who try to sell it as a service, so they pretend it will work if you just keep doing it, and also that it can help things it has no ability to actually help beyond triage. I'm in the not-uncommon but still interesting position of having gone into education for therapy and counseling before switching to library work, so I'm constantly exposed to both ends of the scale, where some of my coworkers/regulars desperately need Anything to help understand internal states of being (self or others'), while others are eyeballs deep in the Grindset Optimizing flavor of mental health and I swear if I had the chance to put an ear up to their chest I'd hear a ticking bomb.
