The Time Problem in Modern Mindfulness
Rohan Gunatillake | 3:58
Transcript
So, as you might know, mindfulness meditation is enjoying a bit of a boom at the moment. And if anything, there's never been as much interest in mindfulness as there is right now today. But the truth is the majority of people who are interested in mindfulness don't actually do anything about it. And the reason that's the.
It's because they think they don't have time. Because mindfulness meditation is typically presented as something which is very time intensive. You have to go to a class or course or use an app which needs 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day, a Wednesday night for an hour. All these sort of things take time.
And if anything, time is the number one most scarce resource in our culture at the moment. And so for me, this is sort of the heart, what I could think of as like the heartbreaking. In mindfulness today, which is on one side we have these great messages about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, um, how good it is for you and so on.
And then the other side, we have this mess. The same message saying, to access those benefits, you need to have the thing you don't have, which is time. And I think that's a real sad and a real shame because it's really limiting, um, the benefits that people can have. And also it's really limiting the idea of.
Meditation is, so, typically meditation and mindfulness is seen, is described as what's, um, if you, so example, the simplest way to understand this is if you do do a Google image search for meditation or mindfulness, you'll see the picture you'll see is someone sitting with their eyes closed, maybe with, uh, sitting in a, maybe an uncomfortable.
Maybe in a beautiful environment, like a rainforest on the top of the mountain or whatever. And that's what's called formal meditation. Formal meditation is taking special time, um, and doing a dedicated practice, um, with that time, whether that's 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it is, right? And that is what it's typically taught.