Attention practices are widely offered as a response to a broad range of difficulties. Being clear about what they train, and what lies outside that, serves both the practice and the people using it.
What the practices actually train
The observable skill is the ability to notice where attention has gone and to return it, repeatedly, without an accompanying commentary about having failed.
A second skill is discrimination: distinguishing a physical sensation from the interpretation attached to it, or a mood from the reasons the mind supplies for it.
Both are genuine capacities that develop with repetition, and both are narrow. Neither is a general solution to difficulty, and the traditions describing them do not present them as one.
Situations that need changing, not observing
Some distress is an accurate response to circumstances, and an unsafe household, an exploitative job or an unpayable debt is not resolved by relating to it differently.
Practices of acceptance can become harmful where they are used to make an unacceptable situation tolerable rather than to support the effort of changing it.
Teachers in several traditions address this explicitly, and ethical conduct and right livelihood appear in the source frameworks alongside attention for related reasons.
Conditions that require professional care
Serious psychological difficulty needs assessment and treatment from qualified clinicians, and an attention practice is not a substitute for that at any level of experience.
Intensive practice can also be destabilising for some people, which is why established traditions screen participants and why responsible secular programmes have adopted similar procedures.
Someone who becomes more distressed through practice should stop and seek qualified advice rather than treating the difficulty as a stage to be pushed through.
Institutional problems presented as individual ones
Programmes are sometimes introduced into organisations where the reported difficulty is workload, staffing or management, and where the practice is offered instead of addressing those.
Participants generally notice, and the resulting resentment is directed at the practice rather than at the decision to deploy it in place of something structural.
The criticism here is about use rather than content, since the same course offered without that substitution attracts far less of it.
Why the limits make the practice clearer
A practice that promises less is easier to evaluate, and a person who knows what they are training can tell whether it is happening.
Overstated claims also invite disappointment, and a practitioner who expected relief from everything is likely to conclude that the practice failed rather than that the claim did.
Stated narrowly, attention training is a modest and durable skill, which is roughly how the traditions that developed it have always described it.