"Mindfulness, Science, Buddhism & Bullsh*t"? with Mo Edjlali
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You know you should meditate. But you don't have the time. Or you're no good at it. So you occasionally subscribe to a meditation app, you listen to podcast episodes about mindfulness, you nod along sagely about the importance of living in the Now, and you get back to your busy life. It doesn't stick.
That's been Josh's story for decades. So when he heard that the founder of one of the world's leading centres for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction has written a book criticising how meditation is marketed and packaged and practised, Josh's ears pricked up.
Have meditation apps, Buddhist mantras, and “good vibes” influencers turned mindfulness into a self-help circus?
Mo Edjlali is a former tech entrepreneur and the founder of Mindful Leader. His new book, Open MBSR: Reimagining the Future of Mindfulness, takes aim at elitism, pseudo-spirituality, and quick fixes.
Mo joins Josh to troubleshoot what isn't working about modern meditation... and to help you grasp the secular, scientific basis for mastering your attention.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gide, humans. |
| 0:04.3 | Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. |
| 0:07.3 | If you're anything like me, when you think about mindfulness meditation, you have your |
| 0:13.1 | own uncomfortable conversation in your head, which goes something like, oh, mindfulness, I should |
| 0:18.4 | do that. |
| 0:18.7 | I'd like to be more mindful. |
| 0:19.8 | I'd like to be more attentive to the grass and the flowers and the trees and the butterflies and rather than so caught up in the torrent of my own thoughts. But every time I try to meditate, there are so many thoughts going on. It's just so boring. Well, how do you find the time anyway to meditate in this crazy world? I'm not very good at it. I'm not the type of person who's suited to meditation, but I really ought to. Maybe I should. Maybe I should do a class. Maybe I should get an app. |
| 0:38.3 | Practitioners of mindfulness, of course, will tell you that that kind of chatter, |
| 0:42.6 | the internal uncomfortable conversations, are precisely what a mindful brain is capable of |
| 0:48.6 | mastering, that mindfulness is a transformative practice for cultivating awareness. |
| 0:55.1 | So when I heard about today's guest having written a new book that was critical of the |
| 0:59.3 | woo-woo in mindfulness, my ears perked up. |
| 1:03.2 | Mo Edge Lali is the founder and CEO of Mindful Leader, which is a global organization that |
| 1:08.1 | focuses on bringing mindfulness-based stress reduction into workplaces |
| 1:12.3 | and communities. MBSR is the most scientific and secular and non-woo-wooey of the incarnations |
| 1:21.6 | of mindfulness. And Mo's new book is called OpenMBSR, reimagining the future of mindfulness, which takes a swipe |
| 1:29.6 | at some of the entanglement that the movement has in Buddhist origins, in woo-woo, in fantasy, |
| 1:35.8 | in quasi-spirituality. He criticizes the rigid sort of one-dimensional thinking that some of the |
| 1:41.3 | movement has and how it's dominated by elitist power structures |
| 1:44.5 | and quick fix apps. He wants to get back to the nuts and bolts. He's an engineer originally. |
| 1:50.1 | He was a technology entrepreneur. And so he wants to get back to the nuts and bolts of what |
| 1:54.4 | actually works. Now, rather than just read the book, I thought it would be good research |
... |
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