While incredibly helpful as a guide, misunderstanding or over-applying the Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness can create real problems. Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader, explores how we can hold a balanced, healthy view of these nine core principles.
Mindfulness teachers and programs often point to what Jon Kabat-Zinn called the Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness: qualities like non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, gratitude, and generosity.
While incredibly useful, these attitudes were never meant as commandments. They were meant as reminders, helpful reference points to support mindful awareness and compassionate living. But as mindfulness has been repackaged for the workplace, apps, and secular programs, something has gotten lost in translation.
Instead of flexible guidance, the Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness have, for many, become rigid ideals. What starts as an invitation to live more mindfully can ultimately distort practice, leading to confusion, passivity, and even harm.
Here’s the hard truth: misunderstanding or over-applying the Nine Attitudes can create real problems—problems I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve seen it happen firsthand. At Mindful Leader, we teach these attitudes in our MBSR and Certified Workplace Mindfulness Facilitator CWMF programs. And yet, here’s the hard truth: misunderstanding or over-applying them can create real problems—problems I’ve experienced myself.
Towards a Balanced Application of the Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness
When I first encountered the Nine Attitudes, they made perfect sense on paper. But living and leading by them left me tied in knots. Should I always be patient, even when urgency matters? Should I never judge, even when judgment is necessary? What was meant to help me navigate life started doing the opposite.
That experience helped shape Open MBSR, a framework I developed to reimagine mindfulness education for real life: practical, nuanced, and free from dogma. One key shift is learning to hold each mindfulness attitude dialectically, not just understanding its intention, but recognizing its limits and natural counterbalance.
Before I explain what that looks like in practice, let’s take a closer look at where these attitudes can go wrong, and how we might approach them differently.
When Good Intentions Aren’t Enough: Misinterpreting the Nine Attitudes
Intention: Observing thoughts and experiences without labeling them good or bad.
Observing thoughts and experiences without labeling them good or bad. Misapplication: Dismissing critical thought; accepting harmful behavior without healthy self-protection.
Dismissing critical thought; accepting harmful behavior without healthy self-protection. Example: Staying in a toxic job or relationship far longer than is healthy, believing “patience” will fix things.
Beginner’s Mind
Intention: Meeting each moment with openness and curiosity.
Meeting each moment with openness and curiosity. Example: Discarding valuable skills in the name of a “fresh perspective,” making things harder than necessary.
Trust
Intention: Trusting your intuition and feelings.
Trusting your intuition and feelings. Example: Making impulsive life decisions because “it felt right,” leading to regret.
Intention: Letting go of fixating on outcomes.
Letting go of fixating on outcomes. Example: Ignoring a serious health issue because “I should just accept it.”
Letting Go
Intention: Releasing attachment.
Releasing attachment. Example: Suppressing anger instead of processing it.
Gratitude
Intention: Cultivating appreciation.
Cultivating appreciation. Example: Over-focusing on “small joys” while ignoring major life dissatisfaction.
Generosity
Intention: Giving from a place of kindness.
Giving from a place of kindness. Example: Always putting others first until personal health and stability suffer.
A New Approach: Dialectical Thinking and the Balance of Opposites
In Open MBSR, we use a dialectical approach, holding two seemingly opposite ideas at once to find a more balanced, practical balanced path.
This shows up clearly in Taoist philosophy through the concept of Yin and Yang. If people just grasped what these attitudes really mean, the misapplications wouldn’t happen.
When a teaching is consistently misunderstood, when practitioners across different backgrounds fall into the same predictable traps, it may be time to examine how we’re teaching rather than blaming students.
This troubled me. When a teaching is consistently misunderstood, when practitioners across different backgrounds fall into the same predictable traps, it may be time to examine how we’re teaching rather than blaming students.
The patterns we’ve explored aren’t random. When “non-judging” is consistently interpreted as abandoning critical thinking, when “acceptance” repeatedly becomes passive resignation, and when “letting go” predictably turns into emotional avoidance, these are systemic teaching issues, not individual comprehension failures.
We’ve been presenting these Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness in isolation, stripped from their original Buddhist context that provided natural balance and guidance. Something is broken in how we’re teaching these attitudes, and we have the opportunity to fix it.
That’s why I wrote Open MBSR: Reimagining the Future of Mindfulness. It’s not just about fixing how we teach the Nine Attitudes; it’s about redesigning the entire system to be open, practical, and built for today’s world.
This isn’t a minor tweak to existing programs. The Nine Attitudes can do harm when misapplied, but add dialectical thinking and they become something truly transformative, authentic, and practical.
A version of this article was first published March 5, 2024,
