Forbes, April 2026
These days, every leader committed to excellence and effectiveness has some version of a mindfulness practice. They meditate before work. They use the Calm app on red-eyes. They cite the research and encourage colleagues to find their own nervous-system regulating practices. And many of them still describe feeling scattered, overwhelmed, burned out, and oddly hollow. All of these practices must be doing something, but it’s not quite the right thing, or at least not enough of it.
Liz Bucar, PhD, a religion professor at Northeastern University and author of Beyond Wellness, has a theory about why. The version of mindfulness most of us are practicing has been carefully, deliberately, and strategically emptied of the very elements that made it work in the first place.
