Thanks for your comment. I appreciate your readership and feedback. Occasionally, I do write some reflective and provocative posts, which can be more “urban” than “mindfulness”, technically speaking. If you’re interested in more “pure mindfulness” activities, please review our downloads, other posts here, and my writings on PsychologyToday.com. We have instructions and reflections for urban-based mindfulness practices all over our site.

I should mention also that we will continue to make judgments as we bring mindfulness into urban living. It’s simply part of being in the world. Thus, the intention is not to become devoid of judgments, but rather hold them with more emotional equanimity. For example, we can decide–in a judgmental way–that the subway is “too crowded,” but it doesn’t have to ruin our day or even the present moment. Mindfulness can help us notice such critical thoughts, and correspondingly give us the space to be different in that moment.

If mindfulness is about non-judgmental accepting, isn’t declaring something “good” a judgment? And the tone of this seems to assume bad is the default until proven otherwise, what with the grumpy set up and all.

Often your posts start out with this same grumpy set up and the rest feels like your own struggle to disprove or distract yourself from this negative assumption. Maybe you’re trying to make the contrast more obvious, but I think the dramatization takes away from the message.

“Collectively, we seemed tired, defeated, and worn out”. You may be projecting here.

Of course this comment is not terribly non-judgmental in itself, but lucky for me; I am not trying to run a blog on mindfulness.