One day, me and this businessman got into a conversation about ADHD. I was working as a cashier at the time — it was a slow day at the neighborhood Whole Foods, and I was dying for some conversation. So, me and this stranger started shooting the breeze, and somehow Attention Deficit came up. I had it, he had it. He told me, “If you ever want to get off those horrible medications, you should try mindfulness meditation.”
That was the first time I heard about the meditative practice. I didn’t really think about it after that night (would you believe that I forgot?) until about a year later, when I went to my doctor complaining about my mood. I had been stressed, depressed—not my best. So, my doc pulls out a prescription notepad and started scribbling something. He’s a real cool, laid-back type, with a long gray ponytail hanging down his back. Quiet, but very smart and actually quite talkative when the subject is neuroscience.
He tears the note off the pad, slaps it onto the desk, and slides it over to me. It reads: “Mindfulness – Breath Centered Meditation.”
Breath-centered meditation is the practice of focusing all of one’s attention to the sensation of breathing. It is an exercise to practice mindfulness, which Oxford defines as “a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”
APA scholars Davis & Hayes define mindfulness meditation as “those self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being …”
Within the past few decades, mindfulness has become the subject of countless psychological studies with promising claims as to its benefits. Mindfulness meditative practices have been incorporated into treatments for ADHD, anxiety, stress, depression, PTSD, BPD, and drug addiction.
But before it made its way into Western medicine and psychology, mindfulness was an exclusively spiritual practice. The concept first appeared in Buddhist texts approximately 2600 years ago. The Buddha asserts satipatthana as one step on the eight-fold path to enlightenment. Satipatthana literally translates to “to keep your attention inside.” In the foundational text Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha identifies the four facets of mindfulness: mindfulness of body, sensation, consciousness, and natural phenomena. Practicing mindfulness was meant “for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the extinguishing of suffering, for walking on the path of truth…” (Jarukasemthawee et al).
This is something I remember my doctor telling me: ancient Buddhist monks were meditating and embodying mindfulness long before we knew, biologically speaking, why this practice was good for human health and mentality. There’s plenty of reason why they did it. Today, empirical evidence demonstrates that mindfulness, when adopted as a routine practice, may: reduce rumination, reduce stress, boost working memory, improve focus, reduce emotional reactivity, and heighten cognitive flexibility (Davis & Hayes).