The Eastern Philosophy to Western Wellness Trend Pipeline

I peer at my too-bright phone screen, knowing I should be asleep – depression insomnia at an all-time high. 

A young woman with perfect glowing skin in a perfectly manicured modern living room tells me that I just need to change my “self-concept” to achieve my goals and become “the woman of my dreams”. 

If I just change my identity to “a person who eats healthy”, I will have no problem turning down the office breakroom doughnut or the ultra-processed food-filled girl’s night. I’m just not the kind of person who eats that stuff. 

“Your mentality creates your reality.” 

Well I guess my mentality created a reality where my job is a dead end, my skin is a mess, the earth is rapidly heating, I’ll never get out from under my student loans, and I’ll never lose the last ten pounds I gained after moving in with my partner. 

I close the app and roll over.

The next day, sitting in meditation a realization floated across the open sky of my mind. 

What she was explaining were repackaged Tibetan Buddhist concepts 

Tibet has long captured Western imaginations. It’s two miles high, tucked away in the snowy Himalayas, and was hard to reach until modernity. Oracles in trances whirl in elaborate headdresses, monasteries perch on mountaintops, the lay people live seemingly atavistic lives herding yaks or working the land. However, Padmasambhava, the man who brought Buddhism to the region in the 8th century, had a prophecy:

“When the iron bird flies, when horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the world, and the Dharma will come to the land of the red man.” 

Big D dharma refers to Buddhism, and “the red man” is popularly thought to refer to Native Americans, and the scattering of the Tibetan people seems to foretell the Chinese invasion in the 1950s and the large number of Tibetan refugees who fled. 

Some of those who fled made their way to the US to found monasteries, meditation centers, and Buddhist colleges. 

Any time two cultures come into meaningful contact with each other there will be hybridization, like when a mule is produced by a donkey and a horse. The mule is neither donkey nor horse – it is something else entirely.

 It’s relatively easy to spot these hybridities in food and language. Creole or pidgin are a mixture of the colonizer’s language with the native tongue to produce words new to both languages. Korean “Army Base Stew”, for example, uses ingredients left over at American Army bases like SPAM and American cheese alongside traditional Korean ingredients. 

We saw this with Hinduism and the transformation of yoga from exercises that prepared the body for sitting meditation to a mode of exercise and billion-dollar industry, as well as the proliferation of a flattened idea of karma and nirvana in popular culture (Credit Karma, Carvana, Reddit Karma, Taylor Swift’s “Karma”). 

What we have here is a proliferation of Tibetan Buddhist thought into the American mainstream, where the religious and cultural practices of visualization have become hybridized with modern American culture. 

There are two major features of Tibetan Buddhism that I see have trickled into New Age manifestation practices. 

The idea of a “mindset shift” or a “self-concept shift”

One of the first steps for receiving the career, money, material item, partner or body shape you desire is a mindset or self-concept shift. 

Typically, you are instructed to spend time everyday visualizing yourself doing the things your ideal version of yourself would do and to believe that your identity is now that of a person who does that thing. 

Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes a similar sort of visualization, and it’s a practice that sets it apart from other Buddhist sects.

Mediators train their minds to visualize in minute detail these vast palaces of various celestial buddhas, visual mandalas, the compassion in their heart spreading out to the rest of the world, the negative karma of the earth entering their lungs like smoke and the purified karma leaving from their mouths like steam, themselves as celestial beings. 

Detachment, letting go, surrendering to the universe

You must wish for something, visualize yourself having it, and then “turn it over to a power higher than yourself”. 

This is mirrored in Buddhism more broadly, where “clinging” or “attachment” is the cause of suffering. Sometimes this concept refers to “craving” but generally we can think of it as desire – the desire for what other people have, the desire to hold on to what we already have, wanting something different than what we currently have. 

What’s also interesting is that there are many flavors of manifestation – those that agnostically call upon you to connect to “Source Energy”, and those that atheistically call upon you to connect to yourself as the higher power. 

I became obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism as a depressed teenager. 

 I hoarded books about Tibetan Buddhism, the history of the country, meditation techniques. 

Then, my junior year of high school, I had an experience during meditation that blew my world apart.

It’s called belly breathing, where instead of your chest rising and falling you breathe only so your stomach moves. I was laying in my bed, focusing on only moving my stomach while I breathed. 

I felt an immense sense of stillness overcome me, and slowly I became aware of the sense that at that exact moment, there were billions of beings on earth going about their lives. African women collecting water and walking home with the jugs perched on their heads, Japanese office workers on the train going to work, foxes in the woods looking for prey, rats in the sewers sniffing out garbage. And along with this realization, was a subtle, impossibly slow sense of rotation. I was feeling the earth turning. 

From that moment on, I was hooked.

I haven’t always been the most consistent meditator. However, I have infused a lot of the teachings into my outlook on life and feel that they’ve helped me navigate the ups and downs inherent to existence. Here’s three: 

1. Understanding that “Life is Suffering” makes it easier to be happy 

The first of the four core beliefs in Buddhism is that the world is imperfect, difficult, flawed. These include ordinary difficulties like emotional pain, birth, aging, death, illness that are inevitable parts of life, as well as difficulties from changing circumstance and the difficulties caused by “the flawed nature of conditional existence” – the fact that our bodies, our minds our spirits are never fixed and ever changing. 

It makes the deep, simmering well of sadness inside me feels more like feature of the human condition and less like something that is wrong with me. 

Sara E. Lewis, an anthropologist who studies Tibetan refugee communities, found that understanding of the world as difficult and painful was central to why Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India exhibited unexpectedly low rates of mental illnesses like depression or post-traumatic stress disorder after facing torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese.

2. The act of meditation has seemingly endless benefits. 

I typically sit down and meditate for five to ten minutes before bed and try to be mindful throughout my day. The sitting meditation helps me to fall asleep faster, improves my sleep quality, improves my concentration (especially when I’ve been spending too much time watching YouTube), improves my mood the next day, and makes me less reactive to stressful situations. Meditation gives me the ability to put space between stimulus and response, which helps me be less impulsive, start fewer arguments with my partner, not react to interpersonal conflict.  

Tibetan Buddhism also promotes mindfulness meditation, which for me looks like taking a moment to appreciate the sky or a tree, to experience what my body is feeling in this moment – my legs on a chair, my feet on the ground, reminding myself to relax my shoulders. This practice specifically helps me appreciate that there is something beautiful and wonderful about this life and this earth even when it really doesn’t feel like it. Mindfulness is also a good skill to have when getting overwhelmed with negative emotion, as grounding yourself can stop the emotional spiral and discharge that stress. 

3. Buddhists have spent centuries perfecting and teaching meditation techniques

Typically, meditation has enjoyed a health halo – it’s non-invasive, it’s free, it’s evidence based – however recently, more attention is being paid to the negative effects of intensive meditation on those predisposed towards mental health issues. 

Tibetan Buddhists have long known of these negative outcomes and have ways to deal with them should they arise.

Loong is a meditator’s disease that comes from traditional Tibetan medicine and is the result of a disruption of the energetic flows in the bodies (similar to prana or chi). Symptoms range from emotional complaints like sudden anger and/or crying, nervousness to physical maladies like backache, headache, chest pain, insomnia. 

While the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has ways of treating and preventing this condition, the secular meditator who is practicing meditation without grounding it in culture or history does not have the tools to deal with loong when it appears. 

Going to the experts when it comes to meditation seems like a no-brainer for anyone who has a mental health history and wants to use me
ditation to alleviate symptoms. 

There are also numerous techniques to aid a person during meditation. Meditation is a skill that has to be developed. The typical person’s mind does not easily slip into meditative states, so you have to practice flexing that muscle to get good at it. Not every trick or technique is going to work for every person, but Tibetan Buddhist traditions have centuries of tried and tested meditation techniques for every type of meditator to make meditation more accessible and easier. Meditation is not sitting down and “thinking of nothing”, nor is it “not thinking”. You have to give your mind a job – watching the breath, watching thoughts, counting mantras. Going straight to the source gives you access to how to implement those techniques successfully.

 Seeing Eastern philosophy become flattened into a Western wellness trend isn’t a new phenomenon – we’ve seen it with acupuncture, gua sha, yoga, ayahuasca (not Eastern but sure fits the bill), Tai Chi, and so on. 

If you’re interested in incorporating ancient traditions and knowledge into your life, please go the source as much as possible. Don’t watch Kendall Jenner’s gua sha tutorial, watch one from a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner. Don’t learn yoga from an influencer, learn it from a classically trained yogi. I would rather have visualization explained to me in broken English by a Lama with years of training in the source material, than some a random influencer with a fake microphone who is teaching a watered-down facsimile.