of the clinical research on mindfulness identified five major mechanisms underlying positive change: relaxation, acceptance, affect tolerance, behavior change, and meta-cognitive awareness/insight. A more recent wave of neuroscientific research correlates these psychological effects with specific brain changes (Lutz et al., 2007). Taken together, a

and conscious self-healing. Over the past forty years research in mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have demonstrated reductions in a wide variety of clinical issues and syndromes including chronic pain, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, self-injurious behavior, and addictions. Additionally, immune function, concentration,

have historically been used to describe a discipline of reflection considered central to introspective learning, especially the meditative learning practiced by lay and professional people in Western religious institutions and traditions. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, has evolved as a healing method of reflection and introspective learning,

Aligned with this new direction, breakthroughs in our understanding of the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, and brainstem have revealed the human brain to be much more geared to social cognition, social

The shift began when the first research studies of meditation, notably transcendental meditation (TM), inspired the groundbreaking clinical paradigms of the 1970s and 1980s: Herb Benson’s relaxation response and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) (Beary & Benson, 1974; Kabat-Zinn, 1982).

According to tradition, present-centered awareness trained repeatedly over time through mindfulness practice produces several distinct mental qualities: relaxation, concentration, balanced sensitivity, mental clarity, and pliancy. In addition, mindfulness affords two key skills—recognition and choice. These skills are not well documented, but are

Awareness of physical sensations involves an attunement to one’s sensory feeling tone, specifically noting if the experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. By coupling an attitude of inquisitiveness, patience, and acceptance with this mindful observing of whatever is encountered, one learns to override habitual reactive tendencies of clinging

control; it is represented by the Vajrayana Buddhism of Tibet, Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia, the schools encountered by the West through the Tibetan refugee community that fled to India in 1959 (Loizzo, 2012).

The Buddha referred to this skill of disengaging from reactivity as “removing the second arrow.” Some measure of pain and stress is unavoidable in the life cycle (the first arrow), yet our reactivity towards “life as it is” creates a layer of self-imposed suffering that only compounds ordinary challenges.