Journal
Calmer, and Just as Lost
What happens after three years of practice, when the promised clarity never arrives.
Somewhere in the last fifteen years, mindfulness stopped being a practice and became infrastructure. It is in the schools and the hospitals, in the onboarding deck and the therapy protocol, in the app on the phone of nearly everyone I know under forty. By most measures this was a public health success. The evidence that attention training reduces stress and reactivity is real, and I have no interest in the contrarian sport of pretending otherwise.
But I am a physician, and I keep meeting the same person.
They have been practising for two or three years. They are noticeably calmer. They can tell you, with real precision, what is happening in their body when they are angry. And they are exactly as lost as they were before about what to do with their life.
When I ask what they expected, the answer is almost always some version of: I thought it would tell me something.
It didn’t, because it was never designed to.
This is an excerpt. Continue reading the full essay →
Julius Barreto-Lins, MD, MPH, PhD, is a physician and the creator of Logomeditation, a contemplative method grounded in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy.
Your clients are calm. Now give them direction.
If you recognized your own caseload in this essay, there is a method for the part that talking alone is slow to reach — and a training that teaches you to lead it.