Commentary: There is much more to mindfulness than mainstream hype

The method of translating the Buddhist follow of meditation throughout cultural divides remodeled the follow in vital methods.

Trendy meditation typically has totally different targets and priorities than conventional Buddhist meditation. It tends to concentrate on stress discount, psychological well being or concrete advantages in every day life as a substitute of non secular growth, liberation or enlightenment.

A pivotal second on this transformation was the creation of the Mindfulness-Based mostly Stress Discount (MBSR) protocol by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medication on the College of Massachusetts Medical Faculty, in 1979. The stress discount programme launched a standardised manner of instructing meditation to sufferers in order that its well being advantages may very well be extra rigorously measured by scientists.

Analysis on this new type of “medicalised” mindfulness started to assemble steam prior to now 20 years. As of right now, there are over 21,000 analysis articles on mindfulness within the Nationwide Library of Drugs’s on-line database — two and a half instances as many articles as have been printed on yoga, tai chi and reiki mixed.

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE VS MINDFULNESS HYPE

Medical researchers themselves have had a much more measured opinion about the advantages of meditation than the favored press.

For instance, a 2019 meta-analysis, which is a overview of many particular person scientific research, identified that the proof for the advantages of mindfulness and different meditation-based interventions has “vital limitations” and that the analysis has “methodological shortcomings”.

Based mostly on their overview of the scientific literature, the authors warned towards falling prey to “mindfulness hype”. On the optimistic facet, they discovered numerous types of meditation to be roughly akin to the traditional therapies presently used to deal with despair, nervousness, continual ache and substance use.