Avoiding Mindfulness

If you can't meditate, it boils down to two problems:

You don’t know how to be at home in your head, or you do know and have concluded that home is no fun.

If the former is what’s stopping you, then by all means, dig into the extensive and growing technology and literature on mindfulness. You might try formal meditation or simply pay attention more to your current surroundings.

But if your problem is the latter, you need to face the source head-on. Avoiding yourself won’t work in the long run.

Avoiding mindfulness to avoid emotions makes things worse, not better.

Many of us, even if we don’t travel for work, do something similar by avoiding spending time in the home of our own minds. If being fully present—or in the parlance of modern meditators, being mindful—is boring, stressful, sad, or scary, you’re not going to want to do it very much. You c...