文档介绍：In P. Lehrer, . Woolfolk & . Sime. (2007). Principles and Practice of Stress Management. 3rd
Edition. New York: Guilford Press.
Mindfulness Meditation
JEAN L. KRISTELLER
Mindfulness meditation is one of the two traditionally identified forms of meditative
practice, along with concentrative meditation (Goleman, 1988). Mindfulness meditation,
also referred to as "insight meditation" or "Vipassana practice," is playing an increas-
ingly large role in defining how meditation can contribute to therapeutic growth and per-
sonal development. Although all meditation techniques cultivate the ability to focus and
manage attention, mindfulness meditation primarily cultivates an ability to bring a
nonjudgmental sustained awareness to the object of attention rather than cultivating fo-
cused awareness of a single object, such as a word or mantra, as occurs in concentrative
meditation (see Carrington, Chapter 14, this volume). Virtually all meditative approaches
combine elements of both concentrative and mindfulness practice, but for therapeutic
purposes, there are important differences in technique and application. In mindfulness
meditation, attention is purposefully kept broader, utilizing a more open and fluid focus
but without engaging analytical thought or analysis. Mindfulness meditation may utilize
any object of attention-whether an emotion, the breath, a physical feeling, an image, or
an external object-such that there is more flexibility in the object of awareness than
there is in concentrative meditation and such that the object may shift from moment to
moment.
HISTORY OF MINDFULNESS MEDITATION:
FROM TRADI'TIONAL PRACTICE TO CONTENIPORARY THEORIES
Although the therapeutic use of mindfulness meditation is often associated with the
Mindfulness-~asedStress Reduction group program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn
(Kabat- inn, 1990, 2005) or a variant of it, there is a substantial and growing clinical lit-
erature on int