I was in Dublin yesterday and took advantage by visiting the Hodges Figgis bookshop on Dawson Street, which I had not seen for a good number of months. I looked around the psychology  section and then sought out books on meditation, which I found spread across religion, and the ever-growing sections of “popular psychology”,  “Mind, Spirit and Body” and  “Self-Help”. One or two things struck me as I browsed. There is a real risk of making terms like “mindfulness” completely meaningless  as the state of mindfulness (which seems to increasingly simply mean an easy to develop calm  state or present-moment attention) is applied to all types of areas without a similar focus on the daily practice of mindfulness needed to slowly discover its benefits, or on the underlying vision of society and ethics which give it life.  A second problem is that it becomes part of an overall dissatisfaction with ourselves which is very prevalent today and leads us to find books which will help us create a  better version of ourself.  There are even more reasons now to be unhappy with myself – I am not only not rich enough, or not successful enough but I am also not mindful enough to get either.  The danger with this is that it sometimes only increases our dissatisfaction with who we actually are, and the sometimes, less exciting place, our lives are. Sometimes these versions of ourselves and the ideal how-we-would like-to-be can come from the way Western society places an emphasis on achievement and can take us away from the person we actually are.  We set up a juxtaposition between the “I” am now and the “I” I should be and believe that this is a good thing.  However, in many cases this type of  self-help and even spiritual practice can eventually increase our self of inadequacy. We have just shifted the method but we remain within the dynamic of winning and losing unless we begin to tackle the underlying cause and effect.  Instead of always moving on,  our practice can ask us at times to stay with what we have. It is there that we work out the unique person we are meant to be. It reminded me of Rabbi Zusya’s words,  a short while before his death : “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why where you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’