Psychology has evolved as a scientific discipline. It therefore tends to use the language of science to describe its concepts and techniques. So what should be done when a set of concepts and/or techniques comes along that are firmly rooted in a non-scientific understanding of the world and yet capture the imagination of both scientific professionals and the wider public and have a supporting evidence base?
This is exactly the situation faced by mindfulness researchers. As you have learned in the preceding article by Bazin and Kuyken, mindfulness is based on the Buddhist tradition of meditation. It aims, to use Buddhist traditional terms, to encourage enlightenment. Although there is no real equivalent in psychology to ‘enlightenment’, we have been able to demonstrate that mindfulness techniques impact positively on anxiety, stress and depression. The biggest challenge, then, is not to show that mindfulness techniques can be helpful but rather to find a language with which to describe mindfulness within contemporary, scientific psychology. This is currently a work in progress.
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