The trouble with mindfulness

Mindfulness makes you smug. And not just mindfulness; a whole raft of alternative spiritual practices such as chakra cleansing and past life regressions feed a sense of superiority over normal mortals.

That’s the finding of research from Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands involving some 3,700 people. The leader of the research, Professor Roos Vonk, first engaged in this field of study when she found that a boyfriend who went on a quasi-Buddhist spiritual retreat for clinical psychology students came back with ‘an enlightened, elevated look in his eyes’ and became really tiresome.

In particular, she wanted to test whether the ideals of a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, Chogyam Trungpa, who taught renunciation of self, actually worked out in practice. She doesn’t say categorically that mindfulness and other spiritual therapies are proven to make you narcissistic, but she does observe a striking association between them.

As the study, published in the European