I don’t want to be better, I just want to be myself.

I take part in an online writing group. The author facilitating the group recently shared a concept from the book she is working on. She has done some really fascinating research into a wide variety of healing modalities, identifying alternative healing practices that actually work according to a western scientific model.

As she presented a wide ranging list of practices that have been scientifically proven to help us feel better and be healthier, I felt uncomfortable looking at the list. One of the practices listed was “meditation”.

I once heard the author and meditation teacher Sam Harris talk about how many people are drawn into meditation by the provable benefits it has on our health and wellbeing. He says, if he found out tomorrow that none of that research was true, he would still meditate every day. He claims that meditation reveals to us a whole new experience of what it means to be human. He compares it to reading and asks you to think about how much poorer your life would be if you could not read. For him, meditation is like reading: a passport into a whole new world.

As I looked at the list, I was thinking about how deeply we are entrenched in a consumer mindset when it comes to taking up so many of these practices (I don’t want to list them, as I don’t want to break confidentiality). We consume “healing” and self development practices, from other cultures and our own in the way we might pop an aspirin. We do them because they promise to make us feel better, more successful and productive and we need to be sold on the benefits to try them.

As I looked at the list, all I saw were ways we can explore being human. Ways to enrich our lives. Ways that I think have been devalued in our materialistic culture. What made me uncomfortable was the way my teacher had medicalized these practices as things we can use to feel better.

It made me think that I am not sure we feel better when we meditate or do other spiritual or creative or religious practices. I don’t think we feel better when we move our bodies or sing or get creative or connect to nature. I think inevitably WE DON’T FEEL SO GOOD WHEN WE DON’T DO THEM.

We are missing something, we are possibly grieving a part of our humanity without knowing it even exists.

We don’t feel good when we get caught up in a culture that tells us that only the material world is of value and anything else is frills. We just don’t feel good when we simply don’t realize as much of our human potential as we could.

If you look at something like mindfulness, it is often sold, at the end of the day as a way to be more productive. Better. A way to improve ourselves. Patch ourselves up, relieve our anxiety so we can go right back into the situations that caused that anxiety without kicking up a fuss.

What if mindfulness is just a way to support us in being ourselves? What if there is endless value in that alone? What if we are abusing these practices and abusing ourselves when we use them to just participate more fully in the systems that are breaking us?

I have spent years looking to this world of self improvement and healing to fix me up enough so I can somehow participate more successfully in our culture, only to find that the culture I want to succeed in is partly the source of the pain I am trying to fix!

I have no problem with teachers and healers being paid for their valuable work. I am particularly fond of this convention when I am in the teacher role. But because we are paying for these services (or selling them) let’s not fall into the mistake of treating them as commodities. Commodities with “benefits”.

That just puts us on the consumer hamster wheel, never fulfilled because there is no such thing as “fixing” humanity. We can’t fix the pain, the heartache, the full reality of being human. We just can’t. It is part of what we are here to experience.

Let’s open our hearts and minds and souls to all the incredible experiences we can have as humans on this planet. The beautiful ways we can recover, engage with the essential regenerative nature of ourselves and the way our human curiosity, fragility, creativity, emotions and healing capacity can help us just be ourselves. And we are enough.