Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness Read Online Free PDF

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    of mindfulness and its clinical applications who have not contributed to this
    volume. Their contributions as individuals and groups to the overall conver-
    sation, inquiry, and forward momentum of the field are immense. No doubt
    many will study these presentations in some detail, perhaps agreeing with
    or arguing with particular formulations or findings, recommending the hand-
    book to their students, and possibly here or there making particularly cre-
    ative use of some of the nuggets lying within to stimulate their own thinking.
    So while a handbook such of this cannot in the end be all-inclusive, it can
    nonetheless serve as a catalyst within the entire field (and, dare I say, sangha
    of clinicians and investigators and practitioners, hopefully overlapping in the
    majority of people?) in pausing in the way I have just suggested, reflecting
    on where things are now in their fullness and their incompleteness, and then
    participating in both the inner and the outer conversations (through, respec-
    tively, silence for the former, and speech, deep listening, and writing for the
    latter), asking the deep questions and trusting our deepest intuitions about
    what is called for now, given the scope of the conditions, challenges, and
    promises inherent in psychology and psychotherapy, medicine and health
    care, neuroscience and phenomenology, and indeed, in the world – domains
    in which we are all agents of creativity, wonder, and caring.
    The welcome advent of this volume [2] is diagnostic of a remarkable phe-
    nomenon that has been unfolding in both medicine and psychology over the
    past five years or so, and promises to continue long into the future in ways
    that may be profoundly transformative of both disciplines and of our under-
    standing, in both scientific and poetic terms, of what it means to be human,
    and of our intrinsic capacity to embody the full potential of our species –
    to which we have accorded the name homo sapiens sapiens – for wakeful-
    ness, clarity, and wisdom. This intrinsically self-reflective nomenclature and
    the implicit promise or potential it carries brings to mind the rejoinder of
    Gandhi when asked by a reporter what he thought of Western Civilization,
    to wit: “I think it would be a very good idea [3]. ” The same might be said of our species’ name.
    For homo sapiens sapiens really means the species that knows and knows
    that it knows , from the Latin verb sapere (to taste or to know). To know

    Foreword
    xxvii
    invokes awareness and meta-awareness, certainly one of the core mysteri-
    ous elements, along with language, cognition, compassion, and music that
    together constitute the final common pathway, one might say, of what it
    means to be fully human. I prefer awareness and meta-awareness to cog-
    nition and meta-cognition , as the latter formulation unavoidably privileges
    conceptualization. Any direct first-person introspective examination of the
    human repertoire from the perspective of experience itself requires a much
    larger container, one that distinguishes between thinking and awareness, and
    differentiates wisdom from knowledge and information; one that includes a
    capacity to embody what is known in ways that round out and complete
    the full potential of that human repertoire. One might say that the fate of
    the earth and of the species itself hangs in the balance. The challenge may
    come down to whether or not, and to what degree we can embody and enact
    the qualities that this appellation is pointing to. Mindfulness may be the key
    to this awakening to the full potential of our nature as human beings, both
    individually and as a species.
    If one charts the number of scientific papers over the past twenty-five
    years or so with the word mindfulness in the title, one sees the phenomenon
    depicted in Fig. 1 [4].
    Fig. 1. Number of publications with the word “mindfulness” in the title by year since
    1982.
    It is immediately apparent that the field is growing