I speak of mindfulness on this blog, yet you might wonder what it is, exactly. The article below describes in basic terms what is and is not mindful behavior. Something to remember, as well, is that it is a habit, and it takes time to learn. If you try to increase mindfulness and don’t do it as often as you’d like, remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect. I myself am not as mindful as I would like to be; it’s a continuous process of awakening.

From the Psychotherapy Networker’s Clinician’s Digest:

Cultivating Buddhist-like mindfulness might help some clients as much as trying to explore their past or change their behavior. In last April’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Kirk Warren Brown and Richard Ryan present several studies showing that mindfulness — a calm, nonjudgmental, focused awareness of the present — is associated with such classic therapy goals as high personal autonomy and lower internal conflict and stress. They also find that many people, even without mindfulness training, already possess enough mindfulness to make a difference in their lives, suggesting that it’s a capacity within reach of many more people.

Several of their studies test the reliability of their Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). Using a six-point scale, people answer such items as whether they tend to walk quickly to their destinations without paying attention to their experiences along the way; find themselves listening with “Cone ear” while doing something else; snack without being aware of eating; or find themselves preoccupied with the future or past.

In one study, Brown and Ryan found that people who scored higher on the MAAS had fewer discrepancies between how they thought they felt and how they actually felt, a sign of less conflict. In another, 160 people, when randomly paged several times a day, made log-book entries. They described what they were doing when paged and rated how engaged they were, how they felt, and why they were doing that particular activity — whether because of outside requests or demands, to look good to others, to feel better about themselves, to do something they truly valued, or to do something because it was fun or interesting. People with more mindfulness felt pleasure more frequently and intensely, felt bad less often and less intensely, and felt more autonomous about their daily activities.

Brown and Ryan also explored mindfulness with 41 cancer patients who took eight, weekly, 90-minute group training sessions. Increased mindfulness over the course of the training yielded fewer mood disturbances and less stress.

Brown and Ryan’s studies suggest that if the goal of therapy is to move from discontent to contentment, perhaps therapists and clients need to cultivate the capacity to just stand still.