Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies
True Story.<p>I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).<p>When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn&#x27;t live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.<p>Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually <i>doing</i> loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could &quot;use their suffering as an object of meditation&quot;. Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.<p>It was unreal, I&#x27;m used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there&#x27;s always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.<p>It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.<p>One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy <i>so hard</i> and <i>so calmly</i> that you don&#x27;t feel any urgency to take actual action.