Mindfulness, by any other name…: trials and tribulations of sati in western psychology and science

Abstract

The Buddhist construct of mindfulness is a central element of mindfulness-based interventions and derives from a systematic phenomenological programme developed over several millennia to investigate subjective experience. Enthusiasm for ‘mindfulness’ in Western psychological and other science has resulted in proliferation of definitions, operationalizations and self-report inventories that purport to measure mindful awareness as a trait. This paper addresses a number of seemingly intractable issues regarding current attempts to characterize mindfulness and also highlights a number of vulnerabilities in this domain that may lead to denaturing, distortion, dilution or reification of Buddhist constructs related to mindfulness. Enriching positivist Western psychological paradigms with a detailed and complex Buddhist phenomenology of the mind may require greater study and long-term direct practice of insight meditation than is currently common among psychologists and other scientists. Pursuit of such an approach would seem a necessary precondition for attempts to characterize and quantify mindfulness.

Notes

1. Disclosure: the first author (P. Grossman) is co-author of the FMI.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Grossman

Paul Grossman, Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, Division of Internal Medicine, University of Basel Hospital, Hebelstrasse 2, CH3041 Basel, Switzerland. [email protected]

Nicholas T. Van Dam

Nicholas T. Van Dam, Department of Psychology, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA. [email protected]