"Buddhist teachings remind us that we will never achieve real or lasting satisfaction by adopting a different, better way of thinking or acting. The effort to find happiness in this way may bring relief from the more extreme forms of anxiety to which the personality is subject, but it is nonetheless based on an endlessly replicating fantasy charged by an unquenchable, obsessive thirst that serves only to perpetuate the ego’s compulsive activity and its attendant suffering. This is the very definition of bondage to karma, the engine of a chronic existential disease. The insatiable yearning to analyze and discriminate, judge and choose — and thereby to control or shape the self in the image of its constantly shifting desires — is the elemental force of dukkha in its most basic form. It is the inescapable plight of the self.

This brings us to the central concern of Theravada Buddhism, and to mindfulness meditation as the primary means for stepping away from the whole project of searching for happiness by judging and choosing, rejecting some things while accepting others.

As practiced in the traditional Buddhist context, mindfulness is not a powerful, spiritualized form of psychotherapy, a device for fine-tuning the ego — much less a strategy for achieving “complete and invulnerable self-sufficiency.”

[...] mindfulness is not about becoming a happier, better person. It’s not about “happiness” at all — at least not if “happiness” is understood as the fulfillment of desire. Mindfulness is, rather, about wisdom rooted in insight, renunciation, and unqualified self-surrender."

Are You Looking to Buddhism When You Should Be Looking to Therapy? - C. W. Huntington, Jr - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2018