Mindfulness: Wake Up or Be A Better Person

When we engage in mindfulness or meditation practices, we face a choice:To wake up to our true nature—or to use these tools to reinforce the illusion of separation by trying to become a “better” person.

Much of the mindfulness taught today is centered on self-optimization—being a more productive, more focused version of ourselves. We're encouraged to become our "best selves," but this ideal is often based on cultural conditioning and external expectations. In Western society, where productivity and profit are often treated as life’s purpose, mindfulness is frequently repurposed to help us manage increasingly stressful and overfilled lives—without ever questioning whether the narrative we’re living is true.

Is there anything inherently wrong with being productive, making money, or staying busy? No.

But we each must ask:

At what cost?

And for what purpose?

Mindfulness can also be used as a tool for healing—and this, too, is deeply valid. Many of us were born into chaos, or into a culture that avoids pain and emotion. Mindfulness can help us reconnect with our bodies, regulate our nervous systems, and begin to process what was never welcomed. But even here, there’s a subtle trap: the belief that there is a separate self that must be fixed, healed, or saved.

The deeper purpose of meditation has always been to create the inner conditions for awakening—awakening to the truth of who and what we are. Not a better version of the self, but the dissolving of the illusion of self altogether.

There is no separate “me” living this life. There is only God, or the Self, or Life—call it what you will—expressing itself through every form: plants, animals, microbes, humans, trees. Life doesn’t need us to become better people in order to wake up. It simply waits for us to stop running.

Mindfulness is a tool. A support. A doorway. But it is not the destination.

So do you want to wake up—or keep chasing the dream of a better self?