Can the Nine Attitudes of Mindfulness Do Harm?

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.

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

Non-judging

• Intention: Observing thoughts and experiences without labeling them good or bad.
• Misapplication: Dismissing critical thought; accepting harmful behavior without healthy self-protection.
• Example: Excusing repeated disrespect in a relationship under the guise of “not judging.”

Patience

• Intention: Recognizing things unfold in their own time.
• Misapplication: Mistaking patience for endless waiting.
• 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.
• Misapplication: Ignoring hard-won life experience.
• Example: Discarding valuable skills in the name of a “fresh perspective,” making things harder than necessary.

Trust

• Intention: Trusting your intuition and feelings.
• Misapplication: Blind trust in immediate feelings without discernment.
• Example: Making impulsive life decisions because “it felt right,” leading to regret.

Non-striving

• Intention: Letting go of fixating on outcomes.
• Misapplication: Abandoning ambition or direction altogether.
• Example: Neglecting education or career planning, mistaking apathy for peace.

Acceptance

• Intention: Acknowledging reality as it is.
• Misapplication: Resignation or passivity.
• Example: Ignoring a serious health issue because “I should just accept it.”

Letting Go

• Intention: Releasing attachment.
• Misapplication: Avoiding necessary emotional work.
• Example: Suppressing anger instead of processing it.

Gratitude

• Intention: Cultivating appreciation.
• Misapplication: Invalidating genuine distress.
• Example: Over-focusing on “small joys” while ignoring major life dissatisfaction.

Generosity

• Intention: Giving from a place of kindness.
• Misapplication: Giving without boundaries, leading to burnout.
• 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. Yin and Yang represent stillness and activity, receptivity and initiative, opposites that don’t cancel each other out but support and depend on one another.

Mindfulness works the same way. Each attitude needs its counterpart to stay balanced.

How That Looks in Practice

• Non-judging AND Critical Engagement
• Patience AND Proactive Change
• Beginner’s Mind AND Leveraging Experience
• Trust AND Discernment
• Non-striving AND Goal Orientation
• Acceptance AND Advocacy for Change
• Letting Go AND Emotional Engagement
• Gratitude AND Acknowledgment of Challenges
• Generosity AND Boundaries

When we hold these attitudes dialectically, mindfulness becomes something we can actually live…not just something we perform in a meditation room.

What to Do When the Teaching Itself Is the Problem

When I first shared these observations, I encountered pushback. One response stuck with me: the suggestion that these issues stem from people simply not understanding the concepts correctly. 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 a broader context that provides natural balance and guidance—and this frequently creates conditions where practitioners predictably swing toward unhelpful extremes.

Revitalizing How We Think About & Teach the Nine Attitudes

It’s time to take ownership. Something is broken in how we’re teaching these attitudes, and we have the opportunity to fix it. 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