I am sitting on a folding chair in a dim, carpeted room, waiting for my turn to introduce myself. There is a loosely defined half-circle of women around me in the meditation room, but I have shoehorned myself into a spot in the back, partly because that's the place I'm most comfortable, partly because I was late and the only other open spots are front-and-center. Taking one of those, under the circumstance, could reasonably have been classified as a form of torture.
The circumstance is my formal entry into the pursuit of mindfulness.
I am not — and I may be the last person in America to admit this — mindful. At least not in the modern sense of the word, which has mostly been understood in Western society as participation in a meditation practice. Its popularity has been spreading like wildfire. It's bigger than Kanye, in all his iterations. In fact, mindfulness is now so pervasive that even researchers who study it professionally find it hard to get their hands around it.
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