Is Mindfulness a Luxury Belief?

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By Mo Edjlali, Founder and CEO, Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR

The Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince surrounded by opulence. His father constructed an elaborate cocoon of luxury around him, deliberately shielding him from witnessing suffering. Only when he ventured beyond the palace walls did he encounter the realities of illness, aging, and death that most humans confront daily.

This origin story contains an uncomfortable parallel to our modern mindfulness movement. Like the Buddha, many of today's most prominent mindfulness advocates come from positions of extraordinary privilege. Unlike the Buddha, few seem willing to acknowledge this foundation of advantage, let alone abandon it.

The Mindful Country Club

Several years ago, I attended a popular mindfulness and technology conference. Between sessions, a friend of mine introduced me to a group of wealthy tech founders. At some point the topic of retreats came up, and they started discussing their favorite retreat center, where an extended weekend stay can cost thousands.

"I don't think I've seen you at <said fancy retreat center?>" one turned to ask me, the implicit assumption being that anyone serious about mindfulness would naturally frequent this exclusive coastal retreat.

The question hung in the air with unmistakable country club energy. I remained silent, thinking to myself, "No, you haven't seen me at <fancy retreat center>, you spiritual snob." But instead of voicing this, I smiled and replied with some light banter about how busy I have been and haven't had the opportunity to go there yet. Something shifted in me that day.  I no longer wanted to attend this retreat center, and became acutely aware of how I had flaunted my spiritual status myself. 

The Luxury Belief System

This interaction perfectly illustrates what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs" – ideas that provide social status to the upper class with little personal cost while often imposing real costs on the lower classes. Henderson, who grew up in foster care before attending Yale and Cambridge, observed how educated elites adopt certain beliefs primarily to signal virtue and status.

Has mindfulness become the perfect luxury belief? The wealthy can espouse its transformative potential while purchasing premium access through exclusive retreats, expensive workshops, and pricey certifications. Meanwhile, the rest of society receives the subtle message that their suffering persists not because of structural inequalities or material deprivation, but because they haven't cultivated the right awareness.

This pattern was meticulously documented in Jaime Kucinskas' book "The Mindful Elite," which reveals how mindfulness was deliberately spread through elite institutions like Google, Harvard, and the World Economic Forum before trickling down to the masses in diluted form. The mindfulness revolution wasn't grassroots, it was orchestrated from the top down by what Kucinskas calls "the mindful elite."

When Mindfulness Becomes White Savior

Several years ago, I advised a non-profit helping formerly incarcerated individuals reintegrate into society through mindfulness programs. When I advocated for measuring results and understanding how our program fit within participants' overall reintegration needs, I met fierce resistance.

After a tense conversation, the executive director,  a wealthy, white, middle-aged woman, finally revealed her true motivation: "The purpose of the program is to spread the dharma."

This approach wasn't just misguided, it completely missed the point. For people struggling to secure housing, employment, and rebuild family connections after incarceration, offering mindfulness as the primary solution wasn't merely insufficient; it was self-serving. The organization was essentially packaging Buddhist practices as secular "mindfulness" while ignoring the actual needs of those they claimed to serve. They weren't listening to the community or adapting their services accordingly. They were imposing their own spiritual agenda under the guise of help, all while feeling virtuous about it.

The Mindfulness Hierarchy

This pattern creates a troubling mindfulness hierarchy:

At the top: Exclusive retreat-goers who can dedicate weeks to silent meditation, paying thousands for premier access to teachers and techniques.

In the middle: The professional and upper-middle classes who attend workplace mindfulness sessions and use premium meditation apps.

At the bottom: Those receiving diluted "McMindfulness" through underfunded community programs, often as a substitute for addressing their actual needs.

This hierarchy reveals a fundamental contradiction. Mindfulness practices emerged as responses to suffering, yet those suffering most intensely from material deprivation have the least access to quality instruction. Meanwhile, those with the most comfort and security dominate both the teaching and consumption of mindfulness resources.

The result is not just economic exclusion but cultural distortion. The mindfulness that gets taught becomes increasingly detached from life's harshest realities. It evolves to address the particular anxieties of the affluent: productivity pressure, digital overwhelm, the emptiness of consumerism, and real struggles, but it is categorically different from food insecurity or lack of healthcare.

A New Vision: Open MBSR

My experience watching mindfulness become a luxury belief influenced the development of Open MBSR, a framework that maintains the proven benefits of mindfulness-based stress reduction while confronting its entanglement with privilege and power.

Open MBSR acknowledges what mindfulness can and cannot address. It's not a substitute for food, shelter, or justice. It won't solve structural inequality or systemic racism. These limitations aren't weaknesses; they're honest boundaries.

Within those boundaries, Open MBSR insists that everyone deserves equal access to practices that can alleviate suffering. This means:

• Making high-quality instruction available regardless of economic status
• Dismantling guru-based teaching models that concentrate power
• Ensuring transparent governance rather than hidden hierarchies
• Adapting practices to diverse contexts without diluting their effectiveness
• Building communities of practice that distribute rather than concentrate power

Perhaps most importantly, it means acknowledging the Buddha's core insight: material comfort alone cannot eliminate suffering. The prince had to leave the palace to find his path. Today's mindfulness elite must similarly step beyond their bubbles of privilege to understand the full spectrum of human struggles. 

Beyond Luxury Beliefs

True mindfulness has never been about creating another elite club or offering simplistic solutions to complex problems. It's about seeing clearly, not just our breath and bodily sensations, but the conditions that shape our collective suffering.

Wherever mindfulness becomes an escape from addressing injustice, wherever it becomes a status symbol rather than a genuine practice, wherever it's offered as a Band-Aid for wounds requiring systemic healing, we must call it what it is: a luxury belief masquerading as wisdom.

Yet we must also acknowledge the complexity here. While accessibility issues are real, the popularization of mindfulness through elite channels has undeniably brought these practices to millions who might never have encountered them otherwise. Many sincere practitioners within privileged spaces are genuinely working to make these tools more widely available and to combine mindfulness with social change. The question isn't whether mindfulness should spread through powerful institutions, but how to ensure that as it does, it retains its transformative potential rather than becoming merely another status symbol.

The path forward demands more than making current programs slightly more accessible. It requires reimagining how mindfulness is taught, who teaches it, and who benefits. It means creating structures that distribute rather than concentrate power and acknowledging the limitations of awareness practices while honoring their genuine value.

That's the vision behind Open MBSR: Reimagining the Future of Mindfulness. It's not just another approach to teaching age-old techniques. It's a framework for ensuring that mindfulness serves human flourishing rather than elite signaling, a practice that honors its roots in addressing suffering by remaining genuinely available to all, not just another luxury good for the privileged few. Yet even as we work toward this more inclusive vision, we must remain mindful of our own motivations, continually examining whether we too are creating new hierarchies of spiritual status even as we critique the old ones.

Learn more about this concept in my upcoming book Open MBSR: Reimagining the Future of Mindfulness.