When I entered graduate school in psychology in 2009, mindfulness still made some older psychologists nervous.
I remember clinicians saying things like, “We were taught that this is religion,” with a kind of caginess around the whole subject. Most of my instructors and practicum placements were psychodynamic. I was drawn instead to DBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, which were generally grouped among the emerging “third wave” cognitive behavioral therapies. They gave me a way to think about mindfulness that felt psychologically rigorous without stripping it of the qualities that had interested me in the first place: presence, awareness, acceptance, the possibility of changing one’s relationship to one’s own mind.
I was already inclined toward experiential approaches before graduate school. One of the psychotherapists who wrote a recommendation for my application ran self-actualization groups connected with the Esalen world. So when I encountered ACT, I was immediately interested. A couple of years into graduate school, I couldn’t even find an ACT expert to sit on the panel for my oral exams. It was still that relatively unusual within the psychology circles I had access to.
In 2010, I attended an ACT BootCamp in Berkeley with Steven Hayes, one of ACT’s founders. I remember it as an immersive experience and an important one for me. Later that year I went to the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies convention in San Francisco. What I remember most clearly now is the atmosphere. ACT, DBT, mindfulness-based approaches and other newer forms of CBT were all circulating together. There was an excitement around bringing practices of attention and acceptance into clinical psychology without requiring people to adopt a religious framework.
It is strange to remember that period now, when the term “mindfulness” has become so ubiquitous that it can turn up on a corporate wellness app or the side of a tea box.
DBT had already been doing this work for years. In 2011, Marsha Linehan publicly disclosed the severe psychiatric suffering and institutionalization she had experienced as a young woman, experiences that informed the eventual development of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Her disclosure meant a great deal to me. Psychology had long maintained a peculiar relationship to the wounded healer. We acknowledged, theoretically, that suffering might lead someone toward a healing profession, while professional culture often demanded that the healer appear to have transcended ordinary human vulnerability.
Linehan had developed one of the most important treatments for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at a time when those patients were profoundly stigmatized, including by clinicians themselves. It makes sense to me that revealing her own history would have carried risks earlier in her career. When she finally did speak publicly about it, DBT already had decades of clinical and empirical legitimacy behind it.
Hayes has also spoken openly about the panic attacks he experienced as a young professor and their relationship to the ideas that eventually became ACT. I have always appreciated these origin stories. They locate psychological theory inside actual human experience rather than pretending it arrived through detached intellectual contemplation.
In 2022, I was commissioned to write two ACT books for Rockridge Press/Callisto Publishing, an ACT journal and an anxiety workbook. So by the time I returned later that same year to an ACT-centered conference in San Francisco, I had therefore been thinking about and using the model for more than a decade. I wasn’t encountering it as an outsider or as a graduate student who had just discovered something exciting. I had taught it, written about it and incorporated it into my clinical work.
Yet something felt different this time. A disturbance in the Force, so to speak.
At first I blamed the phones.
The earlier gathering existed in my memory almost as a mindfulness reality field. I remember the quality of attention in the room, the experiential exercises, the sense that the subject being discussed was also somehow being practiced. In 2022, like nearly every gathering by then, people were frequently looking at screens. Of course they were. Our collective attentional environment had changed enormously in twelve years.
But as I paid closer attention, I realized that phones didn’t explain all of what I was noticing.
There seemed to be much less actual mindfulness happening. Presentations discussed ACT, behavioral principles and research, but I kept waiting for people to invite us into silence, sensation, breath or direct experience. I deliberately sought out a workshop that promised to explore ACT’s experiential dimensions of mindfulness. Yet when we broke into small groups to engage in that exploration firsthand, the presenter specifically instructed us not to ask about the body. I found this astonishing.
For me, the body is one of the royal roads into mindfulness and other endogenous altered states of consciousness. Breath, sensation, tension, temperature, movement, the simple fact of having a body in a room at this particular moment: these are among the easiest ways to leave abstraction and return to immediate experience. I remember thinking how strange it was to find myself at a conference devoted to a mindfulness-based therapy while feeling increasingly far away from mindfulness.
ACT has always been a behavioral therapy. I understood that then and understand it now. Relational Frame Theory and contextual behavioral science helped give ACT an extraordinary empirical foundation. The researchers did exactly what researchers are supposed to do: test ideas, refine them, operationalize them, generate evidence. That work helped ACT move from the margins into mainstream clinical psychology.
And I began wondering whether the success itself had changed something.
A living idea has to become structured if it is going to travel. It acquires terminology, protocols, research programs, training programs, professional organizations, credentialing, internal debates. People build careers around it. Eventually there are conferences full of people whose professional identities are connected to maintaining, studying, teaching and extending the model.
None of that is inherently bad. It may even be necessary. But structures have their own gravity.
I sometimes think of Dharma, or Truth with a capital T if you prefer, as a river. You can dip a cup into the river and drink from it. Another person can dip a cup somewhere else and come up with slightly different water: different minerals, bits of leaf, sediment, light reflected from another angle. Both cups came from the river.
Then human beings do what we do. We begin studying the cup.
We label it. We describe its dimensions. We argue about which cup most accurately represents the river. We build institutions devoted to preserving the cup. Eventually ice forms over parts of the river, and someone points to the frozen surface and says: This is the Dharma.
Meanwhile, underneath all of it, the water is still moving.
That is how I have come to think about therapeutic orientations. DBT and ACT drew extraordinarily useful forms of mind training from Buddhist philosophy and translated them into secular clinical methods. They created containers through which people could encounter ideas about acceptance, suffering, attachment, attention and present-moment awareness without becoming Buddhist.
But any approach can become orthodox, including one organized around psychological flexibility.
The same thing happens far outside psychotherapy. It happens with political philosophies, relationship structures, spiritual traditions, artistic movements and communities organized around liberation from older rules. A framework developed to increase freedom can eventually acquire rules about what freedom is supposed to look like. Consensual non-monogamy can become as doctrinaire as monogamy. A therapeutic modality built around openness to experience can become attached to its own theoretical language.
At that 2022 conference, Hayes gave a talk that I still remember as surprisingly agitated. At different points he spoke forcefully about racism and about emerging psychedelic treatments. I remember him describing someone saying they had communicated with the psychedelic plant, and him reacting to the idea as absurd. I don’t know what was happening internally for him, and I don’t want to invent an explanation. What struck me was the dissonance. I had come back expecting the atmosphere I remembered and instead found myself listening to the founder of a therapy centered on acceptance and psychological flexibility sounding deeply alarmed about some of the directions appearing around him.
I found myself wondering whether founders can ever fully control what happens to something once it becomes successful.
Maybe nobody can.
Success generates attention, and attention changes the conditions under which creation occurs. Once thousands of people are watching, citing, teaching, critiquing and building upon your work, every movement carries more weight. What began as an exploration becomes something other people have invested in. People want consistency. They expect you to remain recognizable.
I have been thinking about this lately in relation to my own writing.
By conventional measures, I do not have an enormous audience. There is a part of contemporary culture that immediately interprets this as a problem to solve. More followers, more subscribers, more views, more reach. Visibility itself has somehow become synonymous with success.
Increasingly, I wonder whether relative anonymity is also a gift.
There is tremendous freedom in creating something while relatively few people are watching. You can contradict yourself. You can follow an idea somewhere strange. You can discover six months later that you were wrong. You can abandon something without issuing a statement explaining your evolution to an audience.
You can remain in a feedback loop with the universe itself.
I think of generativity increasingly as a kind of inner parts work. Something emerges, another part responds, the world offers some unexpected reflection, and the work changes. There is room for mutation. An audience eventually enters that process too, but perhaps there is value in allowing something to develop for a while before the gaze becomes too strong.
It makes me think differently about artists whose first novel, album or body of work appears after years of relative obscurity and is followed by the notorious difficulty of the second act. The first work may have developed in conversation primarily with the artist’s own obsessions. The next one is created under observation, accompanied by expectations about what this person now is.
I don’t want to romanticize obscurity. I write because I want ideas to travel. I wrote books because I wanted them to be useful. I teach things because I want other people to take them somewhere I cannot.
Still, I have begun to appreciate this period of my life in which I can make things without very many people telling me what they are supposed to become.
I have often had the experience of looking toward something that seemed culturally peripheral and watching the culture move in that direction years later. Nerd culture, feminism, queerness, alternative relationship structures: none of these occupy the same cultural position they did when I was younger. The horizon keeps moving.
So I keep coming back to a thought that is becoming less frustrating and more comforting to me: perhaps I am creating partly for the future rather than for now.
The present is always still becoming itself.
I keep looking toward the horizon, making whatever I can see from here, while reminding myself that the map is never the territory, the therapy is never the consciousness it points toward, and the cup is never the river.