Abstract
Mindfulness is popular, and popularity can provide challenges as well as opportunities. An important challenge that is emerging from the enormous popularity of mindfulness is that in its path to popularity it could be losing as well as gaining something of value. It could even be contended that what mindfulness is popularly seen and practiced as is not necessarily what it really is. Modern mindfulness and its relationship with Positive Psychology has emerged from ancient principles and practices that were set within life wisdom traditions including Buddhism. This deep connection with something deeper and more enduring than a modern psychological technique, or a fad, is not as popularly well known as mindfulness is. Mindfulness as practiced within ancient life wisdom traditions wasn’t a quick mind fix or even a slow one, it was a life practice within a life wisdom system—enabling full awareness of reality as it is, now, and full acceptance of this reality. This wasn’t a method for imagining waterfalls or otherwise attempting to improve on reality as it is, whatever it is, and this wasn’t presented within a positive psychological paradigm that can inspire an unrealistic belief in the power of positivity. This chapter will explore what mindfulness really was and is and how real mindfulness can be far more life helpful than its distortions are, even though extracting mindfulness from its enduring context and presenting it as a new and independent panacea has made it enormously popular. A key aim of this chapter is to help develop or return understanding of what real mindfulness is, how this is different from what most people think it is, and how it can be fully benefitted from—practically as well as theoretically.
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McKenzie, S.P. (2022). Real Mindfulness. In: Reality Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97170-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97170-0_6
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