destroy our sense of individual self

"For the secularised mind, meditation fills a spiritual vacuum; it brings the hope of becoming a better, happier individual in a more peaceful world. However, the fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self – who we feel and think we are most of the time – is often overlooked in the science and media stories about it, which focus almost exclusively on the benefits practitioners can expect." 

That this statement appears in an article in the Guardian (newspaper of the UK  liberal bourgeois worldview) is a sign that the widespread understanding of mindfulness/meditation is under scrutiny from from an informed spiritual perspective. The widespread emergence of mindfulness/meditation (and physical yoga) practices in western society over the last 50 years or so (really since The Beatles met the Maharishi at the Hilton Hotel in London one summer evening in 1967) can be seen as an antidote to mass existential anxiety, arising as traditional life modes are superseded by a global materialistic outlook. This anxiety is underpinned by an economic system rooted in atomised individualistic drives, so it's not surprising that meditation is presented from this atomised materialistic perspective, and widely supported by the kind of corporations that drive the economic system, part of the incorporation of people into the underpinning bourgeois materialist lifestyle. 

pic from here