The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness Into the Helping Professions

Now in its third edition, The Art and Science of Mindfulness offers a deeper understanding of the concept of mindfulness and explores its potential as a core clinical skill and a way to increase the well-being of both clients and clinicians. Mindfulness helps us to see clearly so that we can make choices grounded in reality and respond to life with wisdom. However, seeing clearly is difficult because the lens through which we view the world is blurred by our parents, teachers, relationships, and society, and they influence our perceptions on conscious and subconscious levels. Practicing mindfulness helps us remove the filters, biases, and preconceived ideas that shape our perceptions and cloud our consciousness. At the deepest level, mindfulness is about freedom: freedom from reflexive patterns, freedom from reactivity, and, ultimately, freedom from suffering. This book navigates how mindful awareness is fundamental to the therapy process, and shows how mindful practice can help therapists and clients cultivate and connect with this deeper awareness. It also aims to present mindfulness as: an important dimension of clinical training with unique contributions toward fostering attention, empathy, presence, and awareness of our own biases and assumptions an empirically supported clinical intervention effective across a wide range of populations a means of fostering self-reflection and self-care for clinicians a way to expand the profession's focus on pathology to include positive growth and development New to this edition is a comprehensive overview of the evidence supporting the neurochemical basis of intention, attention, and attitude; a discussion of implicit bias and how it interferes with connecting mindfully with clients; a discussion of new mindfulness-based interventions and ways to apply mindfulness in therapy, and more.