"If in rush-hour traffic, you can remain perfectly calm; if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy; if you can love everyone around you unconditionally; and if you can always find contentment just where you are"

Dr. Shauna Shapiro clinical psychologist, professor at Santa Clara University and mindfulness expert addresses her crowd at Washington Square's TEDx.

She has an enlightened monotone suggesting she's leading her audience through guided meditation, minutes later she proceeds to do just this. Her hands are upturned beneath her modernist-ethereal chiffon reinterpretation of a poncho, she continues: "then you're probably a dog."

A semi-strangled laugh at the joke's self-awareness; her wellness-based urbanista sociotype. Her talk is speckled with tales of monasteries 'n monks. I'm amazed backpacking through India hasn't been mentioned.

Buzz words like transformation, semantic sparklers from the stage and Shapiro beams as though she's thrust a fleet of butterflies wafting transcendent promise upon her audience. Words which implicitly infer some inferiority of one's current, imperfect normality relative to the enlightened user. 

I still wonder against my better interest and feeding herself the cycle of negativity Shapiro is propositioning mindfulness to resolve, whether this may be my chance to ascend, cross-legged to a higher plan of consciousness with slimmer thighs, largely my mind is in this for the thighs, whilst dressed in gender neutral, monochromatic box cuts.

She suggests I feel myself wiggle my toes and to soften my jaw whilst I involuntarily clench my teeth in an attempt to hold out through the full thirteen minutes. And, typing that, I'm painfully aware of how not dissimilar it reads to attempting to achieve climax through vaginal intercourse.

My problem with hippie hipsters, or hipsters generally, is they are not a celebration of aesthetic and ideological trendiness. They are egoists of parroted behavior who get off on imposing explicit or implicit inferiority at consequence of slapping the spectator with some element of their own superiority. 

Mindfulness has been the hot potato of trending since 2014. The talons sank deep, six years later the word locks shoulders with top knots, yoga and celery juice. Taking a tool which could be of the most impact for those for whom taking a shower has become unbearable, the tube home an oppressive weight, the office a rattled off monologue of self-deprecation and isolates them from it at consequence of intimating and elitist PR. 

In the midst of the quinoa tinted kookiness Shapiro makes some interesting points, my favorite being "what you practice grows stronger" told to her by a monk at the asforthmention monastery. Let's look at this. Not the monk. Forget the monk. Mindfulness.

Our social bubble has a lot of balls to juggle.

Sex, money, body standards, fashion standards, social media, social dynamics, love, shame, corporate hierarchies, corporate spite, news headlines, homelessness, what the hell am I having for dinner? Bread bad. Meat is killing the planet. Does fat still make you fat? I am a failure at life.

It does not take either clinical depression or clinical anxiety. You don't even have to go outside, you could be holding the problem in your palm. 

What you practice grows stronger, or cortical thickening, your brain gets better and better, it physically rewires to be the most efficient at what it does most.

If what you do most is multiple streams of adequacy based self-flagellation on a loop tape concluding that you have in some way failed, you will get better and more efficient at it until one stream of thought is your reflexive stream of thought and a bad spell becomes a mental health condition.

Turn it off. Wait a bit. Try rebooting.

Feeling is a response. If we expose ourselves to an internal monologue terminating in I'm a failure, what's wrong with me? And I wish I wasn't here, we respond. We feel. We may not notice we're "bringing ourselves down" but our brains do and react as intensely as if someone had lacked the soul to say it to our faces. It's a form of psychological torture and we're our own perpetrators.

Mindfulness interrupts our cyclical monologues and allows each thought to be caught like a carousel steed as it emerges from the mind's fog. By calming the mind, focusing on sensation, allowing the thought to come, observe it and let it go to refocus back on something calming in the now. 

Mindfulness retrains the brain inhibiting a negative stream of thought. 

We're all familiar with forgetting, we know our brains are quite good at it i.e. keys. In order to forget we first have to stop re-consolidating. With each semi-selfaware rumination we carve out a neural trench in our mindscape tens of dozens of times a day. To forget we have to stop repeating, reminding and let the sand of forgetting refill the trench. 

Mindfulness interrupts a learned fight or flight response to a thought so practiced it is no longer recognized.

Imagine you're pulled into a meeting and slapped with dismissal. You have an immediate negative reaction. You're hurt. Imagine someone three blocks over, five stories up, you've never met them, you've no face for them, gets sacked. It's not the same smack of emotional toil. The first step in regulating our own negativity is de-volting our panic response to our self-reflections to examine them more reasonably. We give much better advice to others than we do ourselves. 

Finally mindfulness slows the loop-tape down, it allows us to identify the elements of our mental self-mutilation and you can only resolve what you can clearly identify. Breaking a chaotic whirlwind of heated iron filaments down into segments you can see. A problem is best tackled piece by piece. 

Mindfulness allows an alternative behavioral option and internal rationale, with repeat, extensive daily practice. An example of rewiring the brain is learning a new language, you didn't learn Spanish after twenty four hours wandering Barcelona. Rewiring thinking is as labor intensive. 

The uplifting, sentimental ping of mindfulness is recognizing that negativity is not your reality. The brain can be very crude, if you repeat a thought or behavior enough, regardless of how wrong or artificial it feels, it will rewire itself, because your brain believes you. Not to go naughties hipster now but this tags into the law of attraction. I've maxed my word count though, so you can work that one out yourself.