About Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the capacity of the human mind to be directly and simultaneously aware of both the content of experience (eg what one can see right now, what one is thinking or feeling right now etc) and the form of that experience (ie directly apprehending all of one’s moment- to-moment experience as a continually arising flux of either external sensory input or internal psychological events such as cognitions or emotions). Mindfulness is not a function of thought – it is a form of awareness which has the property of self-reflexivity ie both the awareness of what is happening and the awareness of being aware. As a mental faculty, mindfulness has been valued within the Buddhist tradition for 2,500 years and its systematic development through a variety of practices including mindfulness meditation remains a central feature of Buddhist practice.
Over the past twenty years, there has been a tremendous surge of interest in mindfulness from within the scientific community attracting attention from diverse groups including neuroscientists, clinicians, empirical psychologists etc. Although there is currently no standard operational definition of mindfulness or how to measure it (Van Dam et al, 2010), the research literature frequently defines mindfulness as moment-to-moment awareness of experience, without judgement (Davis and Hayes, 2011).
Several therapeutic interventions integrating Buddhist mindfulness practice with the western psychological paradigm have been developed for outpatient settings for different populations and disorders and for patients who are not in the acute phase of their illness. For an introduction to the psychotherapeutic application of mindfulness, see Mace 2007. Mindfulness-based programmes include Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Other programmes which use mindfulness techniques to a greater or lesser extent include Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
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