The Mindfulness Movement

Matt Fagerholm April 10, 2020

Has there ever been a time in human history better equipped to

achieve global healing through the guidance of meditation? We’re
spending the majority of our days confined to our homes not
because we are antisocial, but because we now have a heightened
awareness of how our choices impact our neighbors next door and
around the world. As Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight
Meditation Society, observes in Robert Beemer’s documentary,
“The Mindfulness Movement,” the therapeutic techniques she
prescribes bring each of us a profound knowledge “that our lives
have something to do with one another, and the indication of that
is that everybody counts and everybody matters.” I fully endorse
the message blatantly expressed by Beemer’s picture, but as a
work of cinema, it drove me nuts in how its style was antithetical
to the principles its numerous subjects were championing.
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The first red flag occurs early on, as a title card informs us that we
are entering the first chapter of Jewel’s Journey, detailing
how Jewel Kilcher’s rise from homeless youth to successful
singer/songwriter was enhanced by her achieving an inner peace
about her present experience—in others words, mindfulness. After
breezing far too quickly through Jewel’s story, which joins her
talking head interview with grainy recreations of a faceless girl
wandering the streets of San Diego, we suddenly jump ahead to
Chapter One of Dan Harris’ story about having a panic attack on
live television after “self-medicating” with cocaine and ecstasy.
Then we’re tossed into Chapter One of George Mumford’s life
story, one that he barely has time to discuss (his promising
basketball career was cut short by an injury, leading him to get
hooked on pain medication) before the film cuts to the first
chapter of Salzberg’s story. Had the film been comprised solely of
these four parallel narrative threads, juxtaposing how each
person’s life was profoundly transformed by meditation, resulting
in Harris devising the popular Ten Percent Happier franchise
(complete with a book, podcast and app) and Mumford teaching
the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers mindfulness (ultimately
leading both teams to multiple world championships), Beemer
might’ve had something special here.

Instead, the picture intends on cramming in as many vignettes

illustrating the full extent of the nationwide movement regarding
mindfulness that can possibly fit into its 100-minute running
time, resulting in a glib and repetitive informercial that pulls off
the tricky feat of simultaneously feeling too short and
interminable. The main title card doesn’t even turn up until the
11-minute mark, since the four “Chapter One” segments are
followed by a second prologue about the movement itself that
sounds as if it were narrated by Tilda Swinton’s lucid dream-
peddling representative in “Vanilla Sky.” Rather than give us an
intimate understanding of the frustrations voiced by people like
Salzberg as they work to turn their self-judgement into
compassion, the film is filled wall-to-wall with smiling extras
dubbed “bliss faces” by the editors of a print magazine
entitled Mindful. They tell Beemer that they are against the use of
such sickly imagery—the kind we’re used to seeing on drug
commercials to distract us from the horrifying list of side effects—
since it dilutes the grit and pain that is also experienced on one’s
journey toward inner enlightenment. If only the filmmakers had
gotten the memo.

For a documentary espousing how meditation can expand the

capacity of one’s imagination, “The Mindfulness Movement”
demonstrates an egregious lack of creativity. Louis Schwartzberg’s
“Fantastic Fungi” found ingenious ways of visualizing the
exhilaration felt by its subjects when under the influence of
medicinal mushrooms, whereas Beemer’s method for showing
how meditation rewires and restructures the brain is to film
bleary diagrams on a subject’s computer screen. It’s as if the
director and his team forgot that watching a film can be an
enormously enriching form of meditation, and that it is their job
to center our focus long enough to make each moment breathe
and resonate. Not only is the film structured as a constant series
of disruptions, complete with stress-inducing news footage, every
scene is intruded upon by an insulting score that never wastes a
chance to tell us how to feel, or in some cases, what we’re seeing
(a segment on the Mindful Warrior Project aiding veterans with
PTSD is accompanied by a generically militaristic drum beat).
After a while, I started feeling like Peter Graves in “Airplane!”
when he found himself demonstrating the various signs of food
poisoning as they’re listed by Leslie Nielsen. With every successive
sequence warning about the symptoms of avoiding meditation—
restlessness, agitation, a wandering mind, etc.—I became so
restless, agitated and distracted that I simply wanted to close my
eyes. Then the film instructed me to do precisely that during two
minute-long meditation demos, which was a welcome reprieve,
though it proved even harder to keep my eyes open after that.