What is the relationship between mindfulness and meta-awareness?

Dan’l Webster
Aug 27, 2017 · 1 min read

There’s an updated version of this post at https://mosesnotes.com/what-is-the-relationship-between-mindfulness-and-meta-awareness/ in which I give takes from:

  • Richard Davidson, founder of UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of MBSR and mindfulness pioneer
  • John Yates (Culadasa), neuroscientist and author of The Mind Illuminated

The following are the definitions given by Richard Davidson and others in a 2015 review of meditation practices.

Meta-awareness: Heightened awareness of the processes of consciousness, including the processes of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. Along with the regulation of the scope and stability of attention, the cultivation of meta-awareness is an important objective in attentional styles of meditation practice. It is also strengthened indirectly in the constructive and deconstructive families.

Mindfulness: A term that is defined differently in Buddhist and contemporary contexts, but which often refers to a self-regulated attentional stance oriented toward present-moment experience that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. In some traditional Buddhist contexts, mindfulness is equivalent to the psychological process that we refer to here as meta-awareness.

See https://mosesnotes.com/what-is-the-relationship-between-mindfulness-and-meta-awareness for more.

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