The Mindfulness Gap: Why Doesn’t Science See the Life-Altering Changes I Experience?

The research findings on mindfulness meditation are far less effervescent than my experience of it. Why is that?

Illustration: created by the author using Midjourney.

There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Over and over, mindfulness meditation gets damned with faint praise from the scientific literature. With each new publication, researchers demonstrate that mindfulness meditation provides modest relief from anxiety and depression for some people, though these practices are not necessarily superior to other spirit-lifting activities.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. But reviewing this research gives me cognitive dissonance. I have not found mindfulness to provide modest relief. I have found it to be deeply transformational.

How can a practice that I find so mind- and life-altering have such lukewarm effects under the microscope of clinical trials?

Maybe I’m just a sucker. Or one of the lucky ones.

In 1979, John Kabat-Zinn brought meditation into the mainstream of the medical community by creating a…