What’s wrong with “the mindful brain”? Moving past a neurocentric view of meditation

Abstract Meditation is trending right now. From classrooms and hospitals to business meetings and phone apps, our culture is enthralled by meditation as a powerful tool to train our brains and shape our private mental lives—to make us happier, more productive, and more peaceful on the inside. But meditation is not just about training our brains. It’s a deeply social—and fundamentally embodied—collection of cultural practices. If we reduce meditative practices to just a set of brain patterns, we miss the richness of how these practices work and ignore much of what they have to teach us about our own subjective experience.