Mindfulness Meditation Became a Multibillion-Dollar Business. It Spread by Stripping Out Religion — and Turned Into a Religion of Its Own

Celebrity endorsements, no religious theory to learn, courses cut down to size — mindfulness has ridden the world's anxiety to fame.

"Close your eyes gently, and let your hands hang naturally at your sides."

"Slowly bring your attention to your breath."

"Don't try to control it. Just experience the breath, feel the air moving through your body."

"Move your attention gradually to your abdomen. As you breathe in deeply, feel your belly rise; as you breathe out slowly, feel it fall again."

"Stay with the rhythm of each breath, and let everything else go."

……

Every day, instructions like these, in different languages, are practiced by people of different backgrounds in different ways.

CNN's star anchor Anderson Cooper, riding to his next assignment. The political and business elite seated in the halls of Davos. Students and their teacher in a French class at a high school in Massachusetts. Yoga practitioners in a Shanghai studio, chasing a shift in consciousness.

Mindfulness has taken off. After yoga, another concept borrowed from religion has swept the globe.

The practiced no longer need a voice to guide them.

As Twitter prepared to go public, co-founder Evan Williams once walked for 20 minutes without his phone. In his words: "If I had done that a year earlier, I would definitely have had more fleeting anxiety. But because of my long-term mindfulness practice, I was actually able to look around and think things through."

People have reached the point where leaving the phone behind for 20 minutes takes spiritual support.

Earlier this year, more than 3,000 people from technology, investment and the arts gathered in San Francisco for Wisdom 2.0, the largest mindfulness forum in the United States, sponsored by Google. Tickets cost $325 to $750, and the theme was a grand one: living mindfully in the digital age.

Anderson Cooper was one of this year's hosts and speakers. He said his daily practice over the past few years had helped him enormously.

"Mindfulness makes me more present," Cooper said. "Now even in the car I don't keep checking my phone — I'll sit quietly and watch the scenery go by outside the window... someone walking slowly past, someone jogging, so many stories happening out there, and I feel truly alive... My life really is so much better, noticeably better."

The talk was devout, the applause fervent.

Companies were not going to miss a fervor like this.

Google began running an in-house mindfulness leadership course, Search Inside Yourself (SIY), in 2007. SIY spun off as a nonprofit in 2012 and now sells mindfulness stress-reduction training to large companies including American Express, Ford and LinkedIn; its two-day workshops for 50 people cost as much as $35,000.

Last December the sportswear brand Lululemon ran an online meditation event, livestreaming a 15-minute class on Instagram every morning at 7 a.m., with tens of thousands following along.

Headspace, a phone app built on the idea of mindfulness, has been downloaded more than 20 million times, claims more than 12 million active users, and is valued at over $250 million. More than 1,000 other apps have also attached themselves to the word.

YouTube carries more than 1.74 million videos about mindfulness, and a search for "Mindfulness" on Amazon returns 30,000 books.

Mindfulness came out of religion, and became popular by shedding it

After yoga and juice cleanses, "mindfulness" is the latest byword for the "healthy lifestyle" that celebrities and tech elites favor. Practitioners are told again and again to hold their attention on "the flow of the breath," and by doing so to stay in the present, see the world as it is, and sharpen their attention. This kind of meditation, the claim goes, is not about "removing" stress but about finding a way of living that "coexists" with it.

Like yoga and juice cleanses, mindfulness comes from Buddhism.

A Sri Lankan Buddhist monk explains it this way in Mindfulness in Plain English: "The mind is like a wild elephant; mindfulness is like a rope; the breath is like the post the rope is tied to. In meditation that concentrates on the breath, this wild elephant is tamed, becomes calm and focused, and can see through all the illusions that cover up reality."

Silicon Valley founders and meditation bring to mind Apple's Steve Jobs. Jobs practiced for years and made a pilgrimage to India in 1974, where he wore robes and shaved his head. He said meditation eased his stress and even fed his creativity.

"Over time your mind calms down, and you can hear more subtle things — that's when your intuition starts to blossom. You start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse, far more than you ever saw before."

But Jobs was a hippie then, part of the counterculture of a turbulent era.

The celebrities who recommend mindfulness in public today — the actress Emma Watson, the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, the basketball player Kobe Bryant — are the mainstream of their time.

Davos, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, Facebook: it does not get more mainstream than that.

The move from the fringe to the center began with Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American molecular biologist and long-time meditator. He was doing molecular biology research at MIT in the 1960s and 1970s, while the Vietnam War raged.

Liberalism and conservatism in the United States were pulling further apart. The baby boomers, stifled for years by the Cold War, had finally become the young people holding the microphone. On war and peace, on equal rights and racial discrimination, on Christianity and atheism, they wanted to throw out the old social order and build a new world, rich in spirit.

Kabat-Zinn was one of those rethinking the meaning of life in this upheaval.

He became an anti-war activist, and as one thing led to another he met Zen missionaries and other Buddhist teachers, and studied meditation with them.

The word "mindfulness" comes from "sati" in Pali, the language of Indian Buddhism, and means attention. Kabat-Zinn played down the Buddhist meaning and the mystical overtones and redefined it as "awareness of the present moment, without judgment." He then founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and started an eight-week program for patients with chronic pain, cancer, paralysis and industrial injuries, which he called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR.

Celebrities carried mindfulness outward.

In 1993, Bill Moyers, a former White House press secretary, moved into public broadcasting, documentary film and journalism. Perhaps because of the stress of the work, he enrolled in Kabat-Zinn's stress-reduction program. When the eight weeks were up, Moyers had become another convert, and he made a five-part documentary series, Healing and the Mind. It ran on public television and drew more than 40 million viewers.

The other branch of mindfulness meditation is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, or MBCT, which the clinical cognitive psychologists Mark Williams, John Teasdale and Zindel Segal built on top of MBSR while looking for a treatment that could keep depression from coming back.

Depression is an erratic disorder that returns in cycles. Recovering from an episode solves only half the problem; the other half is staying well afterward. Yet patients who relapsed used to be treated exactly like patients in a first episode. The risk factors that set off a relapse were never pinned down.

While developing MBCT, the three professors found that sadness was the trigger.

Sadness tends to come with self-scrutiny and self-criticism. So they reasoned that if patients could stand up to sadness, they could recover fully. But sadness is part of human feeling and cannot be removed. Mindfulness training can help people build a different relationship with it.

The pattern repeated MBSR's rise. The comedian Ruby Wax was looking for a treatment for her own depression at the time; after she came across the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Mark Williams proposed, she promoted mindfulness hard in her book Sane New World.

The two therapies drove growth in mindfulness research. Last year alone, nearly 700 academic papers examined mindfulness meditation from a psychological or clinical angle.

What sets mindfulness apart from other forms of meditation is that it has "left religion behind." It leans on no outside force, only on "yourself," to improve your thoughts, your state of mind and your circumstances.

That lowers the price of entry. Christian churches now run mindfulness sessions. And an anxious world is looking for something to hold on to.

In the United States, out of every 100 people, on average 6 have depression and 18 have an anxiety disorder. In a 2017 survey by ComPsych, an international employee assistance organization, 59% of employees said they were under heavy stress, felt exhausted, and at times could not control their emotions.

China is much the same.

The sociology researcher Eric C. Hendricks argues that in big Chinese cities like the first-tier ones, people are unhappy with much of their lives but find it hard to change any of it. Mindfulness offers a way to "save yourself" that appears to have something to do with science.

In the Urban Stress Survey Report published jointly by CBN Weekly and Omron Healthcare, 43% of respondents said "the pressure is too much, I can barely take it," and nearly a third said they felt stressed several times a day. About half of those blamed "a severe imbalance between work and personal life."

These people, worn down by the pace of the big city, are looking for a way out.

That goes double for people in the internet industry, where the hours are long and the pressure is heavy. Collapsing into bed at night, they may still be turning over the things "I didn't finish today and pushed to tomorrow." They want to relax and do not always know a reliable way to do it.

Bo Shao, co-founder of Matrix Partners China, has in recent years led a nonprofit, the Evolve Foundation, in raising a nearly $100 million fund called the Conscious Accelerator. Its purpose is to fight the loneliness, meaninglessness, fear and anger that technology creates around the world, and it has already invested in a meditation app called Insight Timer.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Shao said a great many wealthy people feel anxious or depressed, and that much of the reason lies in how people use technology, especially social media.

A 2011 study by Moira Burke of Carnegie Mellon University found that passive consumption on social networks — taking in information with no purpose — can weaken people's sense of connection and leave them lonelier.

An uncertain world also makes people afraid of the future.

Plenty of data reports show that people today live better than in any earlier era: poverty is being addressed, women earn more, life spans have grown longer, child mortality has fallen.

But in places that were already wealthy and peaceful, good jobs are getting scarcer, privacy is leaking, fights break out on social networks, North Korea makes nuclear threats, and #MeToo has raised questions about gender — one after another. Kabat-Zinn believes Trump's threats toward North Korea, the uncertainty in U.S.-China relations, and the school shootings that come around every so often have all deepened the need for mindfulness meditation.

Kabat-Zinn has moved with the trend, selling his courses on his website on CD and in computer and phone versions. To fit different schedules and habits, each version comes in three series: a long, 45-minute guided meditation; a shorter guided meditation you can do lying down; and, new this year, a series on sensory training that works mindfulness into every corner of daily life. Each series costs $20. Kabat-Zinn recommends practicing alongside his three books.

To keep the eight-week length from scaring people off, he has also launched a five-day intensive course, taught in Austria, South Korea, Japan and other countries.

By 2012, at least 18 million Americans had meditated at least once — 8% of the adult population. Another 920,000 children between 4 and 17 had meditated too.

Celebrity endorsements, no religious theory to learn, courses cut down to size — mindfulness has ridden the world's anxiety to fame.

Companies are mindfulness's customers, and its missionaries

Facebook and Twitter both hold meditation sessions in their offices. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has said mindfulness has helped him succeed in every part of his life: by noticing his own mental state, he can keep his behavior and his thinking connected.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Loic Le Meur once said: "Every entrepreneur I know has started practicing mindfulness meditation. In Silicon Valley there's social pressure if you don't meditate." He took it up himself soon after, of course.

Goldman Sachs and General Mills, the third-largest food company in the United States, both opened in-house mindfulness workshops a decade ago. The bank set its up to give employees more "resilience" during the financial crisis; at General Mills, nearly 90% of executives said "mindfulness" had made them better communicators.

McKinsey and Accenture both run internal mindfulness leadership courses. Joanna Barsh, a McKinsey employee, surveyed the subject with colleagues and found that what separated great leaders from everyone else was their use of "mindful leadership." They turned it into a book, Centered Leadership: Leading with Purpose, Clarity, and Impact.

Since 2012 the World Economic Forum in Davos has put mindfulness or mindful leadership on its morning schedule every day; one year it brought in Buddhist monks to lead the morning meditation talk. The WEF's own website says it plainly: WEF loves mindfulness.

Even the Seattle Seahawks and the Boston Red Sox are said to practice mindfulness in the locker room before games.

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich argued in Natural Causes that mindfulness is usually within reach only of people with money — people who can afford to be good to themselves and take "responsibility" for their bodies.

A 2016-2017 survey of 9.3 million American adults who had meditated found the typical meditator to be a middle-aged white woman with a college degree or better, living in the United States or Europe, in the financially secure middle class.

Qingliu (Zhuang Xiaodan), a counselor with a master's in mindfulness-based counseling psychology from Naropa University in the United States, said: "'Mindfulness' has become a buzzword — it's as if anything gets impressive once you stick the word on it." Very few products, she said, are actually built around mindfulness itself.

Mindfulness is only one form of meditation, but most products on the market do not bother to draw the line. App descriptions and press articles use "mindfulness" and "meditation" interchangeably. And for most people in the business, being "mistaken" for mindfulness does no harm at all.

There is no market report on "mindfulness" as such yet, but meditation in the United States is already a billion-dollar industry.

According to Marketdata's research on the American meditation market, the industry — mindfulness is its dominant form — has grown in value for three straight years, reaching $1.21 billion last year, up 26% from 2015. Since 2012 it has drawn $260 million in investment. Marketdata expects average annual growth of 11.4% and a $2.08 billion market by 2022.

The country now has more than 2,450 meditation studios, taking in about $660 million. Books, magazines, CDs and DVDs account for roughly $100 million more.

The word "mindfulness" appears in the titles of 30,000 books on Amazon in the United States. There are also more than 1,000 meditation apps, and counting websites and online courses, that side of the business brings in over $100 million a year.

Meditation did not only shape Jobs himself, or quietly seep into the offices where Apple employees work.

In 2016, at its most closely watched product launch, Apple announced that iOS 10's Health app would add a "Mindfulness" module, alongside "Activity," "Nutrition" and "Sleep."

The Apple Watch's watchOS 3 also gained a "Breathe" app: the watch vibrates gently to tell you when to switch between breathing in and breathing out. Attention to the breath is exactly what mindfulness asks for.

Aetna, the largest health benefits company in the United States, started offering employees mindfulness and yoga classes in 2010 and drew 3,500 participants. It later packaged workplace meditation and yoga into a service and sold it to clients.

MNDFL, a New York meditation studio open for more than two years, has refused to run corporate courses, on the grounds that meditation should not be used to help people reach material goals outside themselves but to change them from within. Its annual membership, interestingly, is not cheap: $2,200.

Lululemon, the Canadian sportswear brand that grew out of yoga, is a devoted follower of the mindfulness wave. Whatever the exercise, the company says, a "mindfulness practice" helps you talk to yourself and settle your energy.

Last August, Lululemon opened a meditation space called Mindfulosophy in New York. Customers sat on Zen-pod cushions, headphones on, listening to guided meditations recorded by the brand's mindfulness director, Danielle Nigel. Lululemon also filed a patent application for Mindfulosophy with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, covering downloadable meditation and yoga content, meditation masks, DVDs and other products.

That December it ran the online meditation event, livestreaming a 15-minute class on Instagram every morning at 7 a.m. User feedback was not good, because social media is full of distractions. Many participants started chatting in the comments, so Lululemon turned comments off to let the sessions run.

Lululemon's stores in China have recently started offline community classes that mix mindfulness meditation with exercise. One of this year's big campaigns, "Run With Your Heart," threads meditation and mindfulness practice through an entire run, which the brand says helps runners improve their fitness as much as possible.

The company recorded a voice track for runners. Unlike sports brands that push you past your limits, this one says: "Slow down, and you'll go faster. Mindfulness doesn't label this moment good or bad, doesn't compare it with the past, doesn't dwell on unfinished goals — it simply embraces each moment exactly as it is."

Judging by Lululemon's recent earnings, consumers are buying the lifestyle it sells.

First-quarter 2018 results showed double-digit growth in tops, bottoms, sports bras and accessories, and its community and online strategy brought in 28% new customers. The day the numbers came out, the stock rose 6.6% in after-hours trading to $111.95, an all-time high.

The online side of mindfulness meditation is no small business either. In California, a crowd of meditation apps aimed at easing anxiety and sharpening attention has come to market. The biggest share belongs to Headspace, based in Los Angeles.

Headspace, founded in 2010, has been downloaded more than 20 million times, claims more than 12 million active users and is valued at $250 million. It sorts its courses by the capacity you want to build — creativity, focus, well-being, courage — and after a free trial charges 88 yuan a month, 618 yuan a year, or 2,598 yuan for life.

Headspace has also raised more money than anyone else in mindfulness meditation: $36.79 million last year, the second-largest deal in the mental health industry since 2013. It supplies in-flight meditation channels to 8 airlines, and recently launched Pods, relaxation booths about the size of a phone box, set on the street for anyone who needs to duck in and meditate.

Jimmy, 26, who works at an internet company, uses Headspace. He told QDaily that hours in the industry are unusually long and he often works from 10 a.m. until after 9 p.m. Six months ago, after learning he had mild depression, he came across the app by chance and began setting aside three to five days a week to spend a few minutes before or after work following the voice inside it, holding his attention on his own breath and clearing the clutter out of his head.

Mild depression left him with thoughts he did not choose — putting himself down, sometimes wanting to kill himself. He could not stop his mind from running. Seeing a doctor, taking medication and meditating with Headspace together helped a great deal. "The first time I finished," he said, "I suddenly felt like I could hear the sounds outside."

Headspace CEO Ross Hoffman says meditation is only the company's first step into the "mental wellness market." The goal is a "guide to health and happiness" that users can follow at every stage of life, from birth to death.

Headspace recently worked with Nike — which had just run the line "There's a kind of fast called Shanghai" — on three audio tracks that combine running and meditation. Through them, the two companies say, runners will become more aware of their own thoughts.

Headspace's biggest rivals right now are Simple Habit, incubated by Y Combinator, and Calm, which won Apple's App of the Year last year.

Simple Habit raised a $2.5 million seed round last year that included Dropbox. It charges an annual fee and offers thousands of meditation tracks sorted by time and situation — morning, break, commute, work, bedtime, before a big event — with the promise that anyone can find some peace in the gaps of a day.

Simple Habit founder Yunha Kim says people were not that keen on running long ago, and lifestyle companies like Nike made it popular. She wants to do the same for mindfulness.

Calm, founded in 2012, also runs on subscriptions; its $60 annual plan includes 7 days of sleep audio and a 21-day calming course to reduce stress and anxiety. It is valued at $250 million, and the feature people bring up when comparing it with the other two is that, besides the guiding voice, it layers in natural sounds like ocean waves and rain.

But strictly speaking, the counselor Qingliu says, real mindfulness meditation has no background music at all — and even the heavy-handed instructions in tracks like Lululemon's, "don't dwell on unfinished goals," never appear in clinical mindfulness therapy.

More companies keep arriving.

Some mindfulness has been packaged into one-minute products, turning meditation into an interlude between scrolling Douyin and flipping through Weibo. Some companies claim to have found the "minimum effective dose" of meditation that can change a life. On Amazon you can buy One-Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World.

Besides course blurbs promising to help you "master mindfulness" in a few weeks, mindful meat, mindful mints, mindful mayonnaise and mindful clothing have all appeared abroad. There is even a paint color called mindful gray.

The research isn't there yet, but mindfulness, having shed religion, has built a faith of its own

As the industry has grown and people have put more money into it, doubts about whether mindfulness works have started to surface.

Some research shows that mindfulness meditation may make certain regions of the brain more active, tighten neural connections and ease participants' stress; it may also change the structure of the brain itself, though researchers are not yet sure what good that does.

There is not even an agreed definition of what mindfulness is. Most mindfulness training goes back to Kabat-Zinn's original stress-reduction model, but the intensity and length of practice vary widely between versions. How "mindfulness" is taught and practiced differs from country to country.

Kabat-Zinn was feeling his way as he built the method, so his early therapy and his later therapy are not the same, and teachers trained early on teach differently from those trained later.

Several psychologists and neuroscientists say that unless mindfulness research becomes more standardized, no one can confirm its benefits scientifically.

By Kabat-Zinn's own account, "90% of mindfulness research is subpar."

The people selling it do not promise results either. Pierson, a Headspace co-founder, has said the trouble with growing the business is that people expect "if I do X, I should get Y." Meditation does not work that way. "Meditation is the complete opposite," Pierson said. "If you're going to try it, I'd suggest you go in with no expectations at all."

Feedback from Xinshixiang's closed beta of a mindfulness course shows the same thing.

According to Shao, half the people who listened to the test version felt drowsy afterward, and the other half felt energized — some said knots they had been stuck on suddenly came loose, and that their attention had improved.

Apsara, a meditation teacher and creative arts therapist, told QDaily that reaching mindfulness feels like the heart springing open. But in her classes, one student said they had seen Guanyin; another said they had heard that they themselves were the savior. Neither sounds quite right.

A study published this year in a psychological science journal by 15 scholars, Mind the Hype, makes the point that mindfulness, as a mental capacity, varies so much from person to person that it is very hard to quantify in clinical research. Two mindfulness studies may be studying two entirely different things.

Its value for people with depression is in question too. Clinical evidence shows mindfulness therapy cuts the relapse rate by 43%, as effective as staying on antidepressants long term.

But in 2016, Miguel Farias, who holds a doctorate in experimental psychology at Coventry University, reported the opposite result in the British Journal of Psychiatry: mindfulness lowers the relapse rate for patients who have relapsed three or more times, but it may raise the odds of another episode for those who have relapsed twice or fewer. More than 60% of people also said long, intense meditation had harmed them — more anxiety, indecision, mental confusion.

Mindfulness can also make bad feelings and psychological problems worse. One test subject said that while practicing, she suddenly felt a forgotten childhood trauma surface. "I saw that something extremely painful buried inside me had never been properly resolved," she said, "and finding something that powerful inside me was terrifying."

Individual differences, or the wrong practice, can leave people with wildly different outcomes. One explanation is that because mindfulness stresses focus and awareness more than other forms of meditation, a flawed practice, or a stronger "predisposition" to depression, can sharpen unhappy feelings rather than dull them.

Mindfulness was built, after all, to change how a person sees themselves, other people and the world around them. It is no surprise that the process can be emotionally hard. In one cross-sectional study, some participants came out of eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction more stressed and more depressed, not less.

On the research so far, this thing that shed religion is still not a rigorous scientific method. Yet many people hold to mindfulness as firmly and devoutly as they would to a religion — even though every person interviewed for this article said they were not Buddhist.

New York Times columnist Ruth Whippman argues that the finest thing about the human brain is its ability to wander through past, present, future and imagination at once, rather than fixing on trivia like the dishes or the breath. Whippman asks whether mindfulness, with its emphasis on looking inward and adjusting yourself, makes it too easy to repackage real problems as "your thinking is the problem," and to ignore an unbearable workload or a marriage in crisis.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Natural Causes, makes a similar point. Mindfulness, she writes, combines individual effort with mysticism, and persuades people that if they only try hard enough their minds will return to clarity. Underneath sits the assumption that with body and mind working together — perhaps with a pair of Lululemon leggings and a juice cleanse thrown in — self-awareness can be brought under control like a machine.

Mindfulness, having shed religion, is everywhere. It has become a religion of its own.

Cover image source: Unsplash