Ask HN: What exactly is a mindfulness meditation?

It was explained to me as the opposite of CBT. It's being aware of what you're feeling and acknowledging it. That can be physical sensations or it can be emotions.

Yes, it is all bullshit.

But to a lot of people it's meaningful bullshit. Your mileage may vary.

Deep in Covid lock down we had a virtual off-site for a load of the management. They hired (hired!) some mindfulness expert to come and do a session over zoom. "Just think about all of your frustrations, all of your interruptions, all of those things that take away your attention and just let them evaporate away". 10 minutes later my toddler burst in the door and zoom-bombed the meeting (I had left my.mic unmuted) screaming something about Peppa pig. Turns out you can't mindfulness your way out of looking after your kids while trying to work.

TL;Dr - if you can just ignore your problems and frustrations and not have any consequences from doing so, then they are probably not real problems you need to worry about anyway

In the case of mindfulness,"mindfulness meditation" is just a tool to train being mindful. So basically you train being in a mindful state and cultivate the trait of mindfulness. When training mindfulness via meditation, we often use the breath as an anchor, because it is easy to focus on. You could also just focus on a pebble in front of you for example.

The concept of mindfulness has been known in eastern cultures with contemplative traditions and particularly in Buddhism for at least 2500 years. Fostering the ability to be mindful is sometimes also referred to as "the heart of Buddhist meditation".

The interest in the concept has only really sparked in the western world in the second half of the 20th century. During the 1960s and 1970s, the concept was introduced to the western world because of inter-cultural exchanges due to Buddhist monks being forced to leave Tibet and choosing to emigrate to western countries.

One of the early enthusiasts, who saw the potential of mindfulness in a medical context is Jon Kabat-Zinn. He initially studied mindfulness to find an alternative method in treating patients with the primary application being intended as a treatment for chronic pain disorders and stress in clinical populations

There is no general agreement on how to characterise mindfulness and no singular, clear definition of mindfulness but rather a plethora of constructs and operationalisations are used throughout the available research, which is why there is so much confusion around what it is.

Kabat-Zinn suggests mindfulness is "cultivating our ability to pay attention in the present moment as we suspend our judging, or at least, as we become aware of how much judging is usually going on within us", which is a widely used conceptualisation.

Another interesting model is the Two-Component Model by Bishop et al. 2004

According to Bishop, mindfulness consists of the components, Self- Regulation of Attention and Orientation to Experience and is a psychological process developed through practice. Bishop et al. hypothesise that mindfulness is more of a state than a trait, arguing it can only subsist, while an individual focuses their attention on the present.

Self-regulation of attention is described as a metacognitive skill. Bishop et al. postulate it is comprised of three elements:

- vigilance, which describes the ability to maintain attention over a more extended period, - attention switching, the ability to deliberately change the focus of attention, - and inhibition of elaborative processing, which is the ability to suppress cognitions.

Orientation of experience is described as a quality of awareness, in which a person is open, curious and non-judgemental towards what they are experiencing in the present moment.