If you meditate for the sole purpose of calming down and staying in the present moment, that is all well and good, except that this is only the first half of the ultimate benefit of meditation - and it is a state that many corporate mindfulness and many wellness services try to keep us in.
Buddhist philosophy recognises two modes of meditation: Samantha and Vipassana. The former, Samantha, aims to attain stillness in the mind by focusing on a single object of concentration, typically the breath. However, this is to prepare us for the latter mode, Vipassana, in which we begin formulating insights about the mind, conscience, and all of the phenomena that does and does not make existence. Siddhartha did not sit under a tree and realise enlightenment through merely the means of chillaxing, but rather through deep insight that set the spiritual foundation for his buddhahood.
When stillness is attained in meditation, the mind surrenders into this 'hypnotised' state where it becomes susceptible to alteration. What this means is that we can begin altering our habits and therefore hacking our minds into attaining whichever mental states we desire through insight and the will. It means that we can properly question the routines and thought patterns our conscience loops around and break down habitual cycles, therefore liberating our minds from the controlling power of our thoughts and emotions - we are now the ones who get to choose which thoughts to react towards.
Calm leads to insight. It seems like such a simple procedure, yet maybe it doesn't feel so apparent in a societal context? That's because corporations are shit-scared of people questioning the systems at their office or the pleasure-cycle of consuming products or having actual empathy towards the rest of humanity, so mindfulness programmes are deployed to keep them at their work desks and to not consider making a change in their behaviour, no matter how toxic the work ethic gets, and to instead 'be in the moment'. Corporate mindfulness exploits the state of Samantha by pulling all stops there, and thus producing groups of zombified individuals, or worse, those who are trained to have no emotional attachment in their duties in the government/military and feel nothing when harming innocents and partaking in a patriot cult.
What I'm getting at here is that you are truly in control of yourself and your own mind. You can liberate yourself and bring great transformation to your health and wellbeing without selling your soul away to others. Don't just meditate to get calm (That is still a great benefit at the end of the day), but to make yourself a better person, and to make a genuinely better society by being honest and transformative. You have so much potential and I love you very much for that. Uninstall Headspace if that goober is making your wellness worse by seeping into your schedule and making sure you get that subscription.
