Mindfulness

The term mindfulness signals a focus on mind rather than behaviour. As explicated in Bhuddism, mindfulness is enhanced attention to, and emotionally detached awareness of, current experience, requiring openness to sensation without judgement. It is not restricted to any object or function. One can be mindful of a flower, of one's breathing or of another's behaviour. Practising mindfulness improves depression and emotional regulation through detachment, changing not thoughts and feelings but the person's relationship to them. We all need to be mindful in our everyday work. The psychiatrist, of both his and his patient's mind; but then he is mentalising.