Mindfulness has come onto the scene in western medicine over the last twenty or so years, largely due to the pioneering pain-management work of Jon Kabat-Zinn from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The programme he developed is called Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Along with other mindfulness and acceptance-based therapies, the most prominent being Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy(ACT, pronounced act), and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), it constitutes the Third Wave of Behavioural Therapy. The Second Wave of Behavioural Therapy is Cognitive Therapy or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and the First Wave is Behaviourist Psychotherapy (BP) or Behaviourism.
In the 2000s there was a drive to understand the mechanisms of mindfulness. A number of papers on mindfulness appeared in psychology journals, and there was a general appeal for a coherent theory on mindfulness. The journal Clinical Psychology:Science and Practice devoted a large part of one of its 2004 issues to mindfulness. Yet, as of 2008 a clear explanation of mindfulness has yet to be developed.
Mindfulness in Psychology
With the work I had been doing on understanding mindfulness I thought I could input some ideas towartds a coherent theory of mindfulness which I hasd been working on anyway, so in January 2008 I submitted an abstract to read a paper at a conference in Rome, which was accepted.