Eastern spirituality has been hip and cool in the U.S. since the counter-cultural era of the 1960s.

(It had earlier phases of appeal too, particularly to educated and elite populations — from Transcendentalists getting their hands on the first English translations of Eastern scriptures, their writing and perspectives infused with these influences, to Swami Vivekananda being the first to wow people in person, at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.)

These days, blooming lotus paintings and statues of meditating Buddhas are as likely to be found in the décor of a massage studio or therapy office as are feeling wheels and herbal tea stations.

On a visit to a chiropractor or physical therapist, posters of chakras and energy meridians may hang nonchalantly alongside those of the skeletal or fascia systems.
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​And depending on the neighborhood, Buddha statues may be more or less numerous in people’s gardens than ceramic gnomes or Virgin Mary and St. Francis figures.

What’s going on here?

Six Explanations for the Ascendance of Eastern Spirituality

The cultural position of Buddhist, Hindu, and other Eastern symbolism is NOT primarily due to the presence of ordinary people who have immigrated here from Asia, carrying Eastern religious heritages with them.

No, exposure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Eastern perspectives to gain popularity in the West.

Rather, the following six factors help account for the prominent place of Eastern spirituality in American pop culture today.

Intrinsic Appeal

To state the obvious, people can respond to ideas that make sense to them, rituals or practices that are effective for them, religious stories or art that move them, etc., from any source, because of the thing itself.

​When I studied “world religions” for the first time in college, I felt a natural affinity with the Tao te Ching. I carried a pocket edition around campus with me, pausing between classes to read a passage or two.

The book’s imagery, drawn from nature and daily life, its elegant wisdom, and the natural yet ineffable concept of the Tao itself — all these connected with me in an intuitive way.
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Whether it’s an idea like a cyclical sort of cosmology (and at the individual level, reincarnation), an orientation like seeking illumination, a practice like meditation, or an aesthetic sensibility, aspects of Eastern spiritual traditions can genuinely appeal to people on their own merits.

Clean Slate

When I see a stranger, I tend to assume the best of them — or at least, to be open to who they may reveal themselves to be.

But with someone I know, the better I know them, the more I know not only their finest qualities, but also their most frustrating ones.

That’s true of religious traditions too. One can more readily recognize the flaws in the thing we know more intimately.

Whether it’s through direct experience, or through exposure to the Christian-dominant culture of our country, many Americans know well one or another expression of Christianity (or Judaism). Thus we are familiar with the pitfalls in the particular ways these traditions have taken shape and been practiced around us.

​I grew up attending a United Methodist church with my family. There is plenty to admire in the Jesus tradition (which I still claim, in my own way). I benefited from my participation in that Methodist church, and still appreciate what I learned about religious community, the biblical literacy I acquired, and the introduction to the prophetic figure of Jesus.

Yet, the more I learned about that religion — particularly through two years of confirmation classes in junior high — the more I began to chafe and question.

The patriarchy in the Bible was stifling. In the church sometimes, too.

Some of the practices and the debates around them seemed arcane to me. Should Holy Communion be done by intinction? What does this rite mean? Who is allowed to take communion? (To their credit, Methodists welcomed anyone to do so. That wasn’t true at my neighbors’ Catholic church.)

For baptism, should babies be sprinkled or should people old enough to choose for themselves be dunked? Is a non-baptized person at a cosmic disadvantage — or even bound for hell — regardless of whether they had exposure and access to this tradition?

I had difficulty with various ideas of The Way Things Are. What’s up with atonement theology — why so much focus on sin and death? What kind of God would sacrifice his child?

​And the dogmatism in general rubbed me the wrong way. Why was Right Belief the main thing? Isn’t it more important how a person actually treats other people? It didn’t make sense to me.

I did not get confirmed, as I did not feel I could stand before the congregation with integrity and publicly confirm all the things that one must confirm at Confirmation.

I had more questions than answers. I found other questions more relevant to spiritual living than the ones the church emphasized in its membership process.

​The adage “better the devil you know” suggests that people often prefer to deal with a problematic, but familiar and predictable, person or thing, rather than encounter something new and unknown. That may be true for a sizable portion of any population, when it comes to religion.

But I’d guess there is at least a significant minority who are more like I was, with the opposite tendency — knowing all too well what I find problematic in my native religion… wondering if some other spiritual tradition or group has managed to hold onto the kernels of goodness, and steer clear of the accidents of history that plague my own religious heritage.
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Emerging into adulthood with such an attitude, it’s no surprise that Eastern traditions would pique my interest, when I had occasion to encounter them.

Personality Differences

Humans are born with a variety of temperaments, and we are socialized in particular ways. Regardless of the religious experience or exposure one has as a result of family and culture, some of our personality traits are, at least to a degree, inborn.

One of the Big Five or Five Factor personality traits, Openness, could help explain why some people are more adventurous about religion than others. The Big Five model names — you guessed it — five traits that vary across humans. This model has shown high scientific validity.

The trait of Openness to Experiences refers to a curious attitude toward life. People who score high on Openness are more likely to be creative, to try new things, and to enjoy playing with abstract ideas. Such a person’s brain will show more interconnections across certain, disparate brain regions.

In contrast, those who score low on Openness are more focused on the concrete. They tend to be traditional, practical people. Their brains exhibit fewer connections across different brain regions.

The trait of Openness is inherited to a certain degree. At an estimated 61%, Openness actually showed the highest genetic component of all five traits in one study. [i]

Along with nature, nurture must play a role too. If we have a genetic predisposition toward Openness AND are raised by curious, creative, intellectual people, it’s a double whammy — one might have a particularly robust trait of Openness in that case.

Neither of these ways of being in the world — with high or low Openness — is right or wrong, better or worse. Human communities probably benefit by having people of both types in them.

Which type of person would you expect to be more likely to be spiritually inquisitive?

Savvy Marketing

When describing something perceived as foreign or exotic, the marketer enters the marketplace with a distinct advantage over the consumer. It’s harder to be a shrewd consumer when you lack a frame of reference upon which to make reasoned judgments. Such is the situation with cross-cultural contact.

In Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, Gita Mehta chronicles an era of spiritual tourism that began in the counter-culture of the 1960s, when “the West adopted India as its newest spiritual resort.” [ii]

Mehta describes the peculiar collision of cultures:

“We were Indians but we had caught the contagions of the American Age. Speed was the essence of action, and America proved it daily… [Western spiritual tourists to India] thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong. Then the real action began.”

What was this “real action”? As American mass marketing penetrated the Indian countryside, “the unthinkable happened. The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi.” [iii]

When the Beatles embraced meditation and mysticism via an Indian guru, Mehta indicates, “the East” was able to turn the tables. Suddenly the spiritual heritage of the East was a hot commodity for Westerners.

“Eventually we succumbed to the fantasy that Indian goods routed through America were no longer boringly ethnic, but new and exciting accessories for the Aquarian Age. From accepting the fantasies it was a very short haul to buying them and, later and more successfully, to manufacturing them. As our home industry expands on every front, at last it is our turn to mass market.” ~Gita Mehta [iv]

​Of course, plenty of Eastern teachers — and not just from India — have migrated westward, publishing books, teaching meditation in classes and retreats, building audiences and ashrams.

I have described elsewhere how the religious roots of meditation practices were often softened when presented to Western audiences (see How Was Meditation Mainstreamed?). That may be true, to some degree, for these religious traditions generally — and whether introduced by cultural ambassadors of the East or the West.

Esoteric elements may be downplayed, and universalizing vocabulary adopted. The language of science, in particular, may be used to communicate that this Eastern wisdom is not at odds with modern metaphysics.

The Orientalism that is a legacy of European colonialism may be leaned into, as intangible qualities associated with the East are sold to Western audiences weary of materialism.

Om-washing may cue people to relax the reasoning, monkey mind. To lean into imagery, into intuition, into mystery — into be-ing rather than do-ing.

Ah, that’s better…

​(Or is it?)

The Questioning Stage of Faith Development

If you’ve heard about the six stages of faith development, you might guess where I’m going with this. When people reach the fourth stage (if they do), they’ve moved from a conventional faith to a reflexive or individual one. [v]

In the synthetic-conventional stage (stage 3), people move beyond the literalism that previously guided their relationship to myth and symbols — engaging more abstract thinking — and synthesize the different areas of their life into a single whole. People in this stage are strongly rooted in relationships and community. They may find it hard to think outside the parameters of their inherited tradition, looking strongly to authority figures to guide them in their beliefs.

​In the individual-reflective stage (stage 4), people bring critical reasoning to their faith. They think carefully about what they believe, often questioning previously taken-for-granted ideas, and take responsibility for their faith on an individual level. Self-identity becomes more integrated with one’s values and worldview.
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There is no universal pace for moving through the stages. A person can remain indefinitely at any stage. But stage 3 is typically associated with adolescence. Stage 4 may begin in late adolescence, young adulthood, later, or not at all.

Those in stage 4 sometimes become critical of the faith they inherited. They may even reject it. I expect it is at this stage that many people may become open to wisdom from other traditions — particularly ones that do not exhibit the same flaws now perceived in one’s own first faith.

Other religious traditions may be of interest to people in later stages too.

Stage 5 is called the conjunctive stage. This is when people find balance in the contradictions in their religion, and in reality. They develop a new appreciation for paradox, recognize their own finiteness (including of mind and perception), and are open to multiple meanings that may be found in faith symbols. This stage is typically not reached until mid-life, if at all.

Stage 6 is called universalizing faith. People at this stage exhibit deep openness and understanding, having been transformed and possessing a holistic kind of faith. They recognize wisdom from many sources. Often spiritual leaders and mentors to others of all stages, they typically lead lives of service. This stage is considered rare, most likely occurring later in life.

I hypothesize that in a society that is predominantly Judeo-Christian, interest in Eastern traditions is especially likely to develop, when it does, around stage 4 — particularly if it is readily accessible to the person at that time.

​People in stages 5 and 6 may also take an interest in traditions other than the one they grew up with. This may be enriching to them, and be part of the process of developing a greater awareness of one’s own and others’ perspectives, and integrating that knowledge.
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If not brought into contact with other traditions, though, I suspect people at these more developed stages would not feel a need to search outside their own native tradition. They could resolve the contradictions of their own tradition from within it, and access deeper levels of wisdom that are available in every major religious tradition — including their own.

In today’s interconnected, multicultural world, many people will gain exposure to diverse religious traditions, and need to decide how to relate to them.

Still, I see stage 4 as the stage when the greatest numbers of people are likely to both analyze and come to personal terms with their own faith tradition — warts and all — as well as go into seeking mode, becoming curious about diverse sources of wisdom.

Intercultural & Racial Identity Development

How can we understand Westerners’ relationships to Eastern spirituality? Another type of developmental approach that may offer some insight into this question comes from models of racial or cultural development.

Let’s start with the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) created by Milton J. Bennett. [vi]

“Each orientation of the DMIS is indicative of a particular worldview structure, with certain kinds of cognition, affect, and behavior vis-à-vis cultural difference typically associated with each configuration… it is a model of how the assumed underlying worldview moves from an ethnocentric to a more ethnorelative condition, thus generating greater intercultural sensitivity and the potential for more intercultural competence.” ~ Milton Bennett [vii]

Once people have enough exposure to get beyond Denial that different cultures exist, they move into the stage of Defense.

Defense describes well the emotional tone of this stage, which is defensive. The cognitive structure here includes mental categories that can recognize cultural difference; however, the original world view is protected by poor integration of the new categories. This may lead to a hardening of categories.

Initially, a person might respond by focusing on what is good — in fact, better — about one’s own culture, and evaluating the differences in another culture in a negative fashion. A person in this situation may be most comfortable staying in bubbles where their own culture is dominant. At the extreme, they might embrace supremacist attitudes and even behaviors.

An alternate response in this stage is to regard the other’s culture as superior, and see one’s own as inferior. The dynamic is the same — only one can be “right” or “good” — this position just flips which culture is regarded as right/best and which as wrong/lesser. This version of the stage is called Reversal.
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​The DMIS was developed in relation to whole cultures. My sense is that it was intended to speak to situations of cross-cultural contact such as occurs in the context of international business, or prolonged immersion in a new culture, such as for a Peace Corps volunteer or a person who immigrates to a new country.
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To me the DMIS seems useful for understanding religious differences. Religion is, at least in part, a cultural phenomenon. Religious perspectives are part and parcel of what makes “the West” or “the East” or specific countries (the U.S. or Canada, India or Japan) what they are, culturally.

The stage of Defense, alternately called Polarization, can be seen in how people orient themselves when they encounter a religion that is foreign to their culture.
A non-Asian Westerner who engages with Asian religion and worldviews, and chooses to continue to do so, if still in the Defense stage would most logically come to it from the point of view of Reversal — seeing the other’s religious culture as superior to one’s own religious heritage.

I say that because a person at the other pole of polarization, Supremacy, would have little motive to remain deeply engaged in Asian religion, while regarding it as inferior, and in a stand of cognitively and emotionally defending one’s own, Western religious upbringing.

It’s hard for me to remember now, but I might have been at this stage in college. As I’ve indicated, I was very much interrogating my own, Protestant Christian heritage. At the same time, I was curious about other traditions, and especially drawn to Taoism.

My engagement with Eastern religions was not very deep then — it was largely intellectual, through college coursework and independent reading. It did not bring me significantly into contact with the baggage that one encounters in an embodied expression of any tradition, as practiced by real people and woven into institutions.

So it would have been easy for me to remain discriminating and critical with the devil I knew (Protestant Christianity), and have a sunnier disposition toward very different traditions (such as Taoism).

Even once a person begins to develop a deeper exposure to a new-to-you tradition, I suspect it often takes a while to see its shadow side. Especially if its emissaries have taken pains to make it appealing to Westerners (as indeed, plenty have).

It strikes me that an Asian Westerner is in a more complex situation. I think of the person who introduced me to the meditation teacher whose community I would one day move to. (I describe the beginnings of our connection, while we were both in India, here.)

She was (is) Chinese American, from San Francisco. I don’t know if her family were practicing Buddhists (or Confucian or Taoist), or Christian converts, or identified as non-religious. But there was surely some influence of the religious worldview of her Chinese ancestors, carried over into her family and their ethnic enclave in San Francisco.

Yet, Linda (I’ll call her) would also have grown up very much an American, socialized by American schools, friends, business, culture in general. She may be several generations away from the immigration experience — when it is common for people to reclaim their cultural heritage, as I remember from sociology classes.

I don’t know what brought Linda to take up the method of meditation taught by an Indian guru, and become close to his ashram community, and grow so enthusiastic that she evangelized me. Any or all of the other motives I describe in this piece may have been alive for her.

But I suspect it is more than coincidence that of all the people with whom I have shared the shocking new things I have learned about that guru recently, she is the only one who has cut off contact with me. She doesn’t want to be exposed to this information — she has said as much to me. It seems to be threatening to her in a way that it isn’t, or to a degree that it isn’t, to all of the other people that I knew personally through this group and with whom I have shared information over the past 15 months.

It’s possible that Linda is, or at some point was, in a developmental stage where it is important to honor one’s heritage. And that part of the draw to Sri Acharya (I’ll call him) was the way he affirmed the wisdom of the East. He was complimentary to Western religions too, and drew on all traditions in his teachings. But at heart, he viewed everything through the lens of his own heritage. And he encouraged all people to see the East as the purest source of spiritual wisdom.

I could be wrong about Linda. I acknowledge this is mere speculation. Either way, it illustrates how the dynamics may be different for a person in the West, who has Eastern heritage themselves, when relating to Eastern spirituality. Their own identity is caught up in it in a different way than for a person who is white or black, Latina or indigenous American.

Another developmental model, this one focused on racial identity, speaks to this. Beverly Daniel Tatum indicates that for a person of color in a white-dominant society, the stage of Immersion / Emersion — which comes after a person has recognized the impact of racism on their life — is a time of removing oneself from symbols of whiteness and immersing oneself in symbols of one’s own racial identity.
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​“Individuals in this stage [Immersion] actively seek out opportunities to explore aspects of their own history and culture with the support of peers from their own racial background.” [viii]
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Besides Linda, I also wonder how these dynamics affected other Asian or Asian-American people who developed ties with the ashram community of Sri Acharya. There were several Indian or Indian American young adults in my cohort of meditators.

There are many reasons they may have been drawn to this teacher and his particular way of teaching, and likely more than one at play for any person (as is true for his students of any other background). But for people with Indian heritage, the respect and gravitas Sri Acharya ascribed to India and its spiritual treasures may have been very healthy, even needed, at certain points of personal development.

Other stages from the DMIS no doubt also pertained to people involved with this group. Our meditation teacher’s approach was in essence congruent with the next stage after Defense, which is called Minimization.

In this stage, the polarization of the Defense stage is overcome by focusing on the common humanity of all people, and other kinds of commonalities that bridge cultures. In religion, this could show up as acknowledging that there is wisdom in every tradition; no one faith has a monopoly on virtue or insight.

But as the name Minimization signals, the down side of this stage is that it downplays and underestimates the real differences between cultures. While focusing on physiological similarities (“we all bleed red,” “we all want our children to be safe”), or subsuming difference into generalities (“the basic need to communicate is the same everywhere,” “we are all children of God, whether we know it or not”), minimization remains ethnocentric to one’s own culture.

People in Minimization actively support principles they regard as universal, whether they are religious, moral, or political. Niceness prevails — definitely an improvement over the antagonism of defense! But the institutionalized privilege of dominant groups may go unrecognized.

​Milton’s model indicates that the developmental task for those in Minimization is to develop cultural self-awareness. To learn to see all the things about one’s own culture which are so taken for granted they are not visible to a person as being culturally specific, but are instead taken as universal.

For someone like me with ties to Acharya’s ashram community (a white American), that would require engaging more deeply with my own (Western) religious heritage, instead of ignoring it in favor of Eastern sources.

To his credit, whatever else may be said of Acharya (and I’ve said much!), he did encourage his North American audience not to discard their own heritage, but to find the treasure that is there, too.

(That said, he still looked at that treasure through his own Hindu lens, himself. So perhaps he himself was in Minimization, with a tail in Superiority of his own Indian heritage. When I first took the DMIS, many years ago now, I was in Minimization with a tail in Reversal — still more acutely aware of the drawbacks of my American culture than of its strengths. I see the fingerprints there of the ashram’s conditioning!)

This review of some of the pertinent stages of development in cross-cultural sensitivity and racial identity provides helpful context for understanding some of the observations of Gita Mehta, who wrote insightfully and cleverly about the marketing of the mystic East to the West. Consider this one:

“The trick to being a successful guru is to be an Indian, but to surround yourself with increasing numbers of non-Indians. If this is impossible, then separate your Indian followers from your Western followers in mutually exclusive camps. That way, one group accepts the orgies of self-indulgence as revealed mysticism and the other group feels superior for not have been invited to attend.” ~ Gita Mehta

Wondering what comes after Minimization? That’s the stage most people are in, by the way, at least in the U.S. The next stage is Acceptance.

In Acceptance, a person fully recognizes their own, rich cultural identity. They also accept that other cultures have differences that are more than superficial. And they are curious about those differences.

​A person in the Acceptance stage holds onto their own core values, while acknowledging that their ways are not necessarily better or worse than those of other cultures — they are just different. And those differences make a difference in how people of different cultures work, and could work together.
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In Acceptance, curiosity is the predominant feeling. Cognitively, a person is gaining knowledge and developing a more complex understanding of cultural differences. The developmental challenge is to refine one’s analysis of cultural contrasts, between one’s own and others’ cultures.

This can lead to Adaptation, in which a person has gained the skills to behave sensitively in other cultural contexts. A person at this stage can communicate more effectively cross-culturally, and see the world from the point-of-view of other cultures. This person may be gaining skills at code-switching.

For ex-pats, global nomads, and world citizens — people with deep and prolonged cross-cultural immersion — continued development of knowledge and skills may lead to the final stage, Integration.

The racial identity model is fascinating too. I won’t sketch out the other stages for people of color here, other than to mention that after Immersion comes Internalization. At that stage, a person is secure in their own racial identity, and their affirming attitudes to their own ethnic or cultural identity “become more expansive, open and less defensive.” [ix]

While those in Immersion may prefer to remain among people of shared identity, those in Internalization are ready to be in meaningful relationships with white folks who respect their identity, as well as to build coalitions with people who have other kinds of marginalized identities.

My Chinese American acquaintance, Linda, might well have been (or by now be in) this stage. That’s true also of the Indian and Indian American folks affiliated with Sri Acharya and his community.
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There’s a separate, somewhat different set of stages for racial development in white people. All of these models — the DMIS, and the racial identity development schema for both people of color and white people — are well worth learning more about. But for purposes of this article, I’ll stop here.

It’s Complicated

There are many reasons Westerners turn to Eastern spirituality. I have introduced six of them here:

1. The intrinsic appeal of Eastern traditions and their content — concepts, practices, stories, scriptures, etc.

2. The ability to encounter a tradition afresh, with a clean slate — in contrast to the baggage one may carry from one’s own tradition, and the particular, intimate history one has with it

3. Personality traits like high Openness to new experiences and cultures, which may predispose a person to be a seeker spiritually

4. The savvy marketing of Eastern traditions to Westerners, which may use Orientalism to the benefit of particular Eastern teachers or communities

5. Being in the questioning stage of faith development, often with some degree of rejection of or distancing from one’s faith of origin

6. Being in a stage of development that leads one to be open to — or even needful of — Eastern perspectives, in terms of cross-cultural contact and personal racial identity

There may well be other reasons that I have not touched on here. If you see one I missed, feel free to name it in the comments!

For any particular person, one, several, or all of these could be in play.

If you are a Westerner who has had some level of involvement with Eastern religions or spiritual practices, which of the above factors resonate with your own experience?

What I Am NOT Saying

To be clear, I am not saying that Westerners should or should not turn to the East. I’m simply saying that why and how that happens is complex.

I believe there is value in understanding why we do the things we do. Both for the individual in their personal journey, as well as for recognizing patterns across groups.

Wherever your journey takes you, I wish you insight, growth, and well-being.

​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles that may interest you.👇
How A Cult Is Like An Onion … The End of Silence — On Spiritual Bypassing and the Costs of Denial … Is This Normal? Meditation Surprises

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study” by K.L. Jang, W.J. Livesely, and P.A. Vernon, September 1996 in The Journal of Personality. Accessed at PubMed March 2025.

[ii] Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta, 1979.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] This section draws on Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning by James W. Fowler, 1981.

[vi] I was introduced to this model in training sessions offered in October 2013 by Adam Robersmith and Jill McAllister, as part of the fall retreat of the Heartland Chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. In this section, I draw on understanding developed there, as well as on Bennett directly.

[vii] “Intercultural Competence for Global Leadership” by Milton J. Bennett, as provided by the Intercultural Development Research Institute, with this note:This reading is an edited compilation of two articles by Milton J.

• Bennett: “Developing Intercultural Competence for Global Managers” in Reineke, Rolf-Dieter (Editor) (June, 2001)
• Interkulturelles Managment. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, ISBN: 3–409–11794–6 and “An Intercultural Mindset and Skillset for Global Leadership” from Conference Proceedings of Leadership Without Borders: Developing Global Leaders. Adelphi, MD: National leadership Institute and the Center for Creative Leadership, University of Maryland University College, 2001.

[viii] From a handout on Racial Identity Development drawn from “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial identity Development Theory in the Classroom” by Beverly Daniel Tatum, in the Harvard Educational Review, 1992.

[ix] Ibid

Adverse effects of spiritual practices were well-known within the religious contexts in which those practices originated. Yet as meditation and mindfulness moved from monastics to the masses, this essential information has been increasingly withheld.

Why?

I believe it has everything to do with attempting to separate the practice from its religious roots, to sell it to a secular public.

You Can Take Meditation Out of the Religion, But…… can you take the religion out of meditation? If you present it in a lay-friendly, pseudo-secular, science-sounding way?

I don’t think so. Not entirely.

The Buddhist monk in colonial Burma who first started teaching meditation to laypeople wasn’t trying to take the religion out of it. Quite the contrary. Amid all the Christian missionaries running around, he was trying to keep his people Buddhist.

My old meditation group presented its method as universal and inter-spiritual, suitable for a person of any religious background, or none. That was a good part of the draw for me, along with the promised practical benefits of the spiritual practices.

But when it came right down to it, the program was rooted in a universalized form of Hinduism. Other traditions of East and West were incorporated in and interpreted through the Hindu lens of the founder. It’s no coincidence that the loaded language of that group (a high-control group, I finally realized) was heavy on Sanskrit.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), acknowledges his aim to remove the religious clothing — if not the actual religious worldview behind it — from mindfulness meditation.

He believes that mindfulness ultimately does not belong to Buddhism, but speaks to “universal qualities of being human.” He was also well aware that science, not spirituality, was the key to getting mindfulness accepted into the medical model and secular settings. [i]

“Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism”..? [ii]

Kabat-Zinn intentionally developed and described mindfulness practices in ways that would downplay its Buddhist origins, so as not to undermine “our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.” He pitched his program to medical colleagues as a way to offer “relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga.”
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Yet, his efforts were inspired by a vision he had at a meditation retreat, at the Insight Meditation Society. He realized that his “karmic assignment” or personal dharma was to “share the essence of meditation and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them .., with those who would never come to” a religious retreat center.
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His ultimate goal? To relieve the suffering of individuals, to foster awakening, and even to help bring about a spiritual Renaissance that would enable the whole planet to flourish.

Quite noble. Also pretty darn religious. Specifically, Buddhist.

Mindfulness has many meanings. It’s used as a catch-all term, understood by Kabat-Zinn to be explicitly tied to “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddadharma.” Mindfulness can be used “as a place-holder for the entire dharma,… [carrying] multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously.” Early papers on MBSR recognized its roots in Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism, as well as “yogic traditions” like Vedanta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ramana Maharshi.

“Mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one,” Kabat-Zinn writes. He lifts up the need for advocates like himself to embody loyalty and vision “in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership, education, etc.”

In other words, it’s not enough to have integrated an essentially spiritual practice with “important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances” (which are made invisible) into mainstream medicine — champions of mindfulness want to penetrate all other major social institutions, too.

While Kabat-Zinn’s most immediate hope in his clinic teaching MBSR has been to ease the suffering of people in pain, he notes that what people learn in the clinic can take hold in their lives. Indeed, for many, formal meditation becomes “an ongoing feature of one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.” He’s pleased when clinic participants learning MBSR exclaim, “This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life.”
​

Kabat-Zinn knows that in the freedom-of-religion U.S., Buddhism must be extracted from mindfulness — at least in its language and presentation — in a setting that serves the general public.
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But he still believes that the teachers of mindfulness in such settings should have their own fervent practice. They should sit long meditation retreats at centers (“a laboratory requirement” for teacher training), study with teachers from (usually) Buddhist traditions with well-defined lineages, and be firmly rooted in what sounds to me like Buddhist cosmology or theology.

In turn, these teachers in secular settings will be capable of offering “direct transmission” to the people they teach in any group course. The student group in such a class, he suggests, is functionally a sangha.

Such teachers, Kabat-Zinn writes, should not rely explicitly on Buddhist frameworks or vocabulary in teaching. Instead, they should cite scientific evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness, draw from direct experience with the practice, and help students accumulate and learn from their own direct experience.

In sum, Kabat-Zinn stresses the importance of “embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development.”

Sounds to me like a well-intentioned, humanitarian, culturally astute, and deeply religious endeavor. Sounds like stealth evangelism, 21st-century U.S. Western Buddhist style.
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Thought experiment: How would decision-makers and end-users respond if a movement grew to take Christian contemplative practices, deeply rooted in Christian theology and culture, into secular settings? Would heart-centered prayer (or whatever was chosen, and however it was renamed) be threaded throughout American institutions and culture within a few decades? Would the same sorts of people who have championed Buddhist-style meditation regard quietly Christian practices as equally appropriate?

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Buddhism and yoga seem to get a pass among many Westerners who are otherwise indifferent or averse to religious influence. Most Americans are familiar with Christian culture; whatever their own relationship (or lack of relationship) to Christianity, Abrahamic religion forms the basis of many people’s ideas of what religion is. Just because Buddhism — at least, as presented to Westerners — avoids god-talk, and offers a different diagnosis of and solution to the human predicament than Judeo-Christian faiths, does not mean that its worldview and practices are not religious.

What happens when a person turns to (quietly Buddhist-rooted) mindfulness practices for purely practical reasons? If one just wants to manage anxiety, develop the skill of detachment, or improve patience, can they keep it at that?

The Accidental Buddhist (or Hindu)

Let’s return to Dan Lawton, a young mindfulness teacher whose spiritual crisis I described in a piece on the adverse effects of meditation.

A “firm secularist” when he attended his first 10-day meditation intensive as a young man, Lawton did a breathing practice and an attending-to-your-bodily-feelings practice as a part of the retreat. It got intense. A lot of suffering came up; he remembers letting out a blood-curdling scream. He kept going through it, and got to the other side.

“And then I spent the next three months in uninterrupted bliss,” Lawton told Rachel Bernstein. “And so this was the experience that really made me convert. And I didn’t have a context and I didn’t understand that experience at all.” [iii]
Lawton explains that that experience

“reorganized my entire reality. And it essentially made me reliant upon Buddhist ideas, because there was no other framework that I had at that point to explain what happened to me.” [emphasis mine]
​

​Over a decade of practicing mindfulness, and teaching it for several years too, Lawton reaped “extraordinary benefits.”

Gradually, he absorbed much Buddhist doctrine. The idea that craving or desire is the source of all suffering particularly made sense to him.

“I was also impressed,” Lawton writes, “by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.” [iv] [emphasis mine]

Then, a decade or more after his first experience, at another meditation retreat, Dan experienced a deep crisis. The distinction between himself and the world dissolved, and he “was basically unable to turn the mindfulness off,” which was debilitating and distressing. He was later diagnosed with PTSD, stemming directly from his spiritual practice.

Lawton reflects on how this experience affected him:

“It led to a deep re-examination of my own involvement with American Buddhism, with the mindfulness movement in the context of wellness…. [and] a deep examination of many of the other actors in this movement… their various motivations, different power structures that were there, the history, a lot of the confusion.

“I sometimes say that I’m not sure what was more unsettling to me, the symptoms that I experienced in the aftermath of this retreat, or the fact that I started to realize that I had been part of an organized religion, which I had never really comprehended during the time that I was in it. It was kind of like the floor fell out from under me in some ways.” [v] [emphasis mine]

Lawton felt betrayed by the practices that had previously served him so well. And he felt betrayed by the community of teachers who had talked up the positives of meditation, treated negative experiences (when mentioned at all) as normal parts of spiritual progression, never offered guardrails, nor indicated that meditation could do real harm — and had only “keep plugging” platitudes to offer when adverse effects rocked his world. [vi]

Intention vs. Impact

I assume that people who have helped popularize mindfulness, in both Buddhist and secular contexts, have done so with a desire to help other people. I doubt anyone set out to cause suffering.

Yet, what has happened has been a kind of lying by omission on the part of authorities —those who treat spiritual practices as if they can be severed from their religious roots, who downplay adverse effects if they acknowledge them at all, and who more often than not advise doubling down on a practice, even when it is not serving someone well — or blame the meditator for difficulties that are predictable.

Indeed, it appears many of the people who become teachers of meditation and mindfulness are not themselves well-trained to understand adverse effects, or to know how to support people who experience them. Is it any wonder they are unprepared to help?

Whatever the original reasons for softening the religious basis of contemplative practices —to benefit a public skittish of organized religion, to make meditation acceptable in neutral settings like hospitals and schools, or simply as a result of looking through the saffron-colored glasses of a true believer — the outcome is the same. Some people end up seeing their suffering INCREASE, in ways they never bargained for.
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​Unless we change how we talk about, teach, and practice powerful disciplines like meditation, stories like Dan’s (and mine) will keep happening. Meditation advocates need to get real with themselves and others about the full spectrum of possibilities in these practices.

It won’t be easy. Next time I’ll explore some of the forces stacked against the meditation teacher or organization that aspires to transparency and skillful support.

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Endnotes

[i] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[ii] Ibid. All quotes and paraphrasing in the section “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism” are from Kabat-Zinn’s 2011 article.
[iii] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice.
[iv] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.
[v] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. Except where otherwise indicated, the source of material in the section The Accidental Buddhist is this podcast conversation.
[vi] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.