Teaching mindfulness often seems almost impossible. Here's the basic pitch: if you maintain a non-judging awareness of the flow of thoughts and emotions, they will arise and path smoothly without getting caught up in thinking and self-view. The problem is that if you present this, as one almost always does, in a therapeutic context—as a remedy for the pain of thoughts and feelings—then you're nearly guaranteed to create conditions where that's exceedingly difficult to put into action.