Mindfulness practices aim to help us be less blindly caught up in our stuff. By reminding us of the opportunity to intercede, they get our foot in the door to train our mental habits more intentionally.
Will they undo the fact that we are profane, mortal apes with error-prone meat-sack minds, emotions, and prejudices? No. They do not change facts on the ground. They only might allow us to relate to our situation more flexibly.
Different meditation traditions have been devised to address different aspects of how people can typically get caught up.
Some meditations (which I associate with vipassana) are more intellectual in nature, concerned with how we tend to fixate on concepts, constructs, and conclusions as essentially real. Because they are taken as "just true", we expend effort and emotion maintaining them, sometimes to the point of fighting to impose them on our world and ourselves. These techniques guide steady attention towards aspects of our first-hand experience that confront and subvert our own certainty.
Some other meditations (which I associate with samadhi) are more somatic in nature, concerned with how we often inhabit our bodies and our situation with unease, without knowing it. By reflex we go about trying to address the unease by applying our problem-solving minds to our situation, regardless of whether something is wrong. These techniques guide steady attention towards the willfulness of the unease, and invite us to relax out of it.
And so on. We are each caught up in diverse and unique ways; each meditation tradition arose from identifying and addressing common themes in this process. As one gets experience with it, one learns that the different ways of being caught up aren't even truly separate. The great meditation practices may have their sweet spots, but they often end up helping much more broadly.
They all have a commonality: the idea that our hangups persist so long as we are ignorant around their origins, and therefore they offer a means to direct our attention right to the place in our minds where, as a cognitive action, we can
just
stop.
That cessation can be among the most powerful of experiences we have in our lives, if our hangups have heavily burdened us. It can feel like a liberation from bondage, or like waking up from a dream; suddenly there is a lightness to things.
It is easy to assign significance to that depth and make it its own object of worship. But seeking this experience, and in so doing resisting hangups, is itself another hangup—let the buyer beware both the risk and the paradox.
But in any sober assessment, nothing is different about the world. These moments in fact pass; it is our nature as profane apes to then get hung up all over again. If anything at all has happened, we have been reminded to address our current situation with fresh eyes.
A larger scope of mindfulness posits not a destination that is ever achieved, but rather a practice, resembling the maintenance of a garden. It consists of noticing by whatever means how we are adding to our suffering by being caught up, and how we can let go, and then starting over.
Over time, by means of keeping a practice, we can find ourselves being mindful even when we were not intending to practice. The distinction between sitting and living slackens. The old hangups are still there, and they still get to us, but their power over us often unravels on its own, reducing them to a chatter. We find more opportunity to engage in life freshly, freely, spontaneously. We still get caught up again and again, and we grow more comfortable with starting over again and again. Thereby we learn compassion for our own process, and by extension for others'.
This is the real, deeper fruit of mindfulness: the garden's soil grows rich, and life manifests a comfortable space for joy to emerge, without the urgent need for release. The story has no definite end (or ends), being absorbed into the carrying on with life, same as it ever was, or not.