How mindfulness became a billion dollar industry.
Lessons learned from the monetization of world peace.
Over the last decade mindfulness has become the defacto ritual of the aspirational self-improvement movement.
The internet is awash with advice on ways to earn more and stress less. And it’s never long before meditation is brought up as the magic pill to achieve both.
The emphatic evangelism of its practitioners has been so successful that there are now over 9.3 million Americans who meditate.
And whether its selling snake oil or serenity, there’s a billion dollar industry in peddling world peace.
But mindfulness’ journey from religious obscurity to the secret weapon of the super successful has much more to do with economics than it does with enlightenment.
From East to West
Mindfulness is essentially a bastardized adaptation of the kind of meditation practiced by Zen Buddhists. Which, itself, is a hybrid of the rituals and beliefs of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Chinese Taoism.
