I read an article recently arguing that we shouldn’t always try to live in the moment — that the cultural obsession with presence, mindfulness apps and all, can crowd out something valuable in memory, anticipation, even rumination. My first reaction was resistance because I have experienced transformative results from mindfulness practice personally, and in my psychotherapy clients. Presence, I believe, is the seat of wisdom. Especially now, in a culture that sells us acquisition and status as an escape from the plain fact of daily suffering, rather than teaching us to meet that suffering with tolerance and, eventually, benefit from it.

Underneath that resistance is something I see often when sitting with clients, and in conversations with friends: a culture that offers acquisition and status as an escape hatch from suffering. Buy the thing, reach the title, secure the status, and the discomfort will supposedly quiet itself. But that escape hatch is empty. It doesn’t lead anywhere, because it was never built to. Buddhist philosophy holds something more honest at its center — that daily suffering is not a malfunction to be engineered away but the very material we’re meant to work with, cultivating tolerance for it until tolerance itself becomes the benefit. Material accumulation promises relief and delivers only postponement.

But sitting with the article longer, I found less daylight between us than I expected. What the author was really pushing back against wasn’t presence itself — it was the commodified version of it. Mindfulness as metric. Stillness as performance. A miracle drug sold in app-store subscriptions. That’s not the same target I have in mind when I talk about presence as wisdom. We may have been aiming at different things while using the same word.

Where it got more interesting to me was rumination.

The article makes a case for what it calls “drumination” — obsessive thinking as sometimes generative, even creative. My own experience, both personally and in the room with clients, tells a different story. Rumination, in the form I encounter most often, doesn’t co-occur with insight. It co-occurs with guilt and shame. It circles. It doesn’t resolve.

There’s a difference between rumination and reflection, and the difference matters clinically. Reflection — what I’d call healthy regret — is concrete. It looks at what happened and asks what might be done differently, held with self-compassion rather than self-attack. Rumination, by contrast, is abstract and evaluative. It asks not “what happened” but “what’s wrong with me.” And that question rarely yields anything but more suffering.

Guilt says: I did a bad thing. It’s repairable, tied to a specific act. Shame says: I am a bad person. It attacks the whole self, and it tends to produce hiding and defensiveness rather than repair. Societal norms — religious and secular both — have handed us a great deal of shame architecture, often without the offramp that used to come with it. We inherited the internalized watcher without the grace that once accompanied the confession.

And here is where the work actually happens, in my experience: self-compassion.

Many of the people I sit with don’t have access to it. Not because they haven’t heard of it — self-compassion is everywhere now, another thing sold to us — but because some part of them genuinely believes that offering themselves gentleness would be the same as excusing themselves, or excusing someone else. That belief runs deep, and it isn’t merely intellectual. It’s protective.

Presence and reflection on the past aren’t actually in competition, not when we’re talking about the versions of each that are rooted in wisdom rather than avoidance. What’s genuinely at odds is presence versus the shame-loop version of rumination, and self-compassion versus the belief that gentleness is indulgence.

The research bears this out, too — self-compassion is associated with greater accountability, not less. Shame tends to trigger avoidance. Compassion keeps us oriented toward the problem, toward the person we want to become, toward repair — instead of toward protecting ourselves from the feeling of being bad in the first place.

None of this is an argument against mindfulness practice itself — quite the opposite. What I want to reclaim is how ordinary and enjoyable it can be. It’s free. It doesn’t require an app, a subscription, or a silent retreat. It can live inside doing laundry, taking a walk, preparing and eating a meal — simply noticing what we’re experiencing as we’re experiencing it, rather than being pulled under by rumination or carried off into avoidance of the future or obsessive planning for it. That kind of noticing, folded into the smallest parts of a day, is closer to what the tradition actually asks of us than anything sold on a screen.

I think the real challenge lies in embracing our journey. Instead of trying to push away the past or seeking a perfect present, it’s about creating a safe space within ourselves. This way, we can let those protective parts of our personality take a break, allowing us to hear and connect with something softer and more authentic.

Leilani Norman, MS, LMFTA, CCTP-II, ECDCS, is a couple and family therapist specializing in later-life transitions, couples work, and complex trauma, and the author of Caring Is Art. 

Resources:
Nhật Hanh, T. Peace is every step: the path of mindfulness in everyday life.
Kristin D. Neff. 2023. Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annual Review Psychology. 74:193-218. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047
Schutte, N., Malouff, J. The Link between Mindfulness and Self-Compassion: A Meta-Analysis. Int J Appl Posit Psychol 10, 34 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-025-00228-y