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Buddha Pill

Mindfulness without paying mind to it can apparently lead to bad things:

It’s important to recognise that these studies examined the effects of mindfulness exercises in very specific contexts, when guilt was salient in the participants’ minds. “We shouldn’t over-generalise and conclude that mindfulness makes you a worse person,” Hafenbrack says. 

His results might, however, encourage us to be a bit more thoughtful about when we apply it. We should think twice about using it after a disagreement with a friend or colleague, for example, particularly if you already know that you were in the wrong. “If we 'artificially' reduce our guilt by meditating it away, we may end up with worse relationships, or even fewer relationships,” he says. 

As someone who has forever struggled to practice mindfulness despite being convinced of its benefits, I am not sure what to make of this. What little I have been able to do has centered around making peace with situations and people that aggravate me and there is very little if anything I can do to change that. The peace is very fleeting because my "practice" is very rudimentary. But even with that, there is a clear value that makes me stick with it as limited as my abilities are. Meditating guilt away is an strange concept - it would appear than a person would likely try to calm the raging fires of guilt by meditating and find a better channel to expatiate it. 

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