Pitfalls of "Only Mindfulness"

 I glanced over the library books in the Buddhist section, after doing my tutoring session this afternoon. One of the books that stood out for me is a book by Analayo called Mindfully Facing Disease and Death. I look at it and want to take a look at it, wondering what it could be about, and indeed it looks quite fascinating. But when I glance at other books, I feel a sense of troubling discomfort. Most of the books that use "mindfulness" in the title seem pretty thin in premise and in quantity of pages. I think that trying to condense the concept of mindfulness into one hundred pages might not capture what it really is about. And a sense of pain sets into me, a kind of dread. It is as though the books are so light yet are so heavy at the same time. The words in these books weighs a thousand tons each. And why?
   I think that I have become disillusioned with 'only mindfulness', because there are times when mindfulness stripped of the other aspects of Buddhadharma seems too thin to be sustainable. This is because mindfulness in these texts often connects to the notion of 'bare awareness', without the accompanying principles that underpin that awareness. There is also contained in it a view that somehow being mindful will cure all of life's ailments and sufferings, when actually, it's really a kind of beginning or a journey. So when I see these books, I tend to feel that they are not cure-alls, and somehow more is needed to fully map a Buddhist philosophy and how it can benefit others.
   Without a sense of the inner psychodynamics that can beset a person, mindfulness practices could potentially open the doors to revisiting troubling situations. This is why I think it's important to round out one's education, be it through readings in psychology, or sociology, or Buddhism in general. Without a grounded context for one's practice, one can sometimes confuse certain experiences for what they are not, or inadvertently suppress certain forms of suffering or pain. This is because the texts on mindfulness emphasize being present, but there is no context of understanding that we can also be present with our past memories, as they come to surface, and being clear about how they influence our perceptions. In other words, 'present' is not so much a moment in time as it is an attitude of seeing things as they are unfolding with a clear and aware mind, whether it's the things around us or the memories and expectations we harbor.