Is it Ethically Wrong to Integrate Mindfulness into Public Health?

The article by Oman courageously deals with the promises and problems of integrating mindfulness meditation into public health. Here, I would like to expand on what he considers critical points, namely the adaptation on mindfulness into local cultural and religious contexts. In addition, I will focus on one important omission concerning the significant individual variations in meditation effects for which there is now robust evidence. I conclude by offering a counter-analogy to that of mindfulness as a gym to the mind: the ethical danger of turning mindfulness into an agricultural monoculture, like that of soya plantations in the Amazon, which wipes out the native biodiversity of other contemplative practices. To counter this monocultural model, I suggest that contemplative science would gain considerably, both ethically and scientifically, by developing a systematic study of other meditation practices, which overall remain under-researched and, often, unacknowledged.