The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

juice at breakfast), rather than succumbing to a mindless routine. This monitoring

task served to remind them of the choices implicit even in the most mindless routine

activities, and increased their perceived control accordingly. Even in the most “mun-

dane” acts of daily living, there is a vast space of possibilities, and if we simply open our minds and the minds of others to these possibilities, we truly may help ourselves

to live a fuller, richer, healthier life.

As such, the mindfulness of Langer implies not only a form of attentiveness, but

perhaps also a philosophical worldview in relation to the overall function of attentive-

ness that clashes with mechanistic worldviews. The other two worldviews Pepper talks

about are organicism and contextualism. There is nowhere in Langer’s writings any

suggestion that mindfulness practice results in any organic growth of higher levels of

integration and complexity (central to organicism), or that mindfulness itself implies

a focus on the historical event and the goals of the analyst in analyzing these events

(pragmatism). Having said that, certain classes of discrimination can emerge from a

formist approach to the analysis of mindfulness, specifically, in light of the higher order concept of discrimination, and these classes may generate interesting avenues of investigation for future mindfulness research.

Specifically, in my recent thinking on mindfulness, I consider it potentially useful to

think about the act of drawing novel distinctions by reference to the skill level of the person (novice versus expert), the application they choose to focus on (i.e., a focus on present experience, current problems, or future possibilities), the state of the person

engaged in the act (i.e., either playful or serious state, or paratelic versus telic; cf. Apter, 2007), and the scope of their life domain focus (i.e., narrow or broad).

Expertise

Much like Austin (2000) outlines, there may be levels of expertise associated with

meditation practice, and similarly there may be levels of expertise amongst scientists

Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

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who adopt the formist strategy of noticing similarities and differences and formulat-

ing causal laws bridging one set of characterized particulars to another. Furthermore,

although Langer bemoans the tendency of medical doctors to classify people based

on the symptoms they present with, expert medical doctors who also exercise mind-

fulness may notice novel features of a persons’ medical condition that help them to

make the best possible diagnosis and advise on the best possible course of therapy.

As such, the novice–expert distinction may enrich mindfulness research by seeking to

identify the various domains in which expertise in mindfulness can be beneficial and

functional.

Application

A focus on the different applications of mindfulness also implies the need for fur-

ther scientific scrutiny of the types of situations where mindfulness might be useful.

Ellen Langer has led the vanguard in this regard. However, the bulk of applications

of mindfulness in a therapeutic context have focused on helping patients to cultivate

better present-moment awareness of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experience. In

the context of chronic pain, it may also be useful to extend the application of mind-

fulness to social experience, as we did in our recent study (see below). Also, while

Ellen Langer has focused considerable attention on the application of

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