Mindfulness requires a quality of attention paid to the experience in progress, without filter, without judgment, without waiting and applies perfectly to the practice of meditation. Perceptions, emotions, cognitive phenomena must be observed with care if not evaluated. To achieve this, it is important to get rid of our obsession with always judging, controlling or directing our experiences of the present moment. In other words, mindfulness would be ” non-judgmental observation of the continuous flow of internal and external stimuli as they arise ».

The practice of mindfulness leads the individual to realize that it is rare that we are fully absorbed in an activity in which we are engaged, such as driving a car or having a meal. We are on the contrary always thinking of something else and do several things at the same time. 

A group of researchers proposed a definition of mindfulness following the observation of a meditation session.

She is based on two components : self-regulation of attention and orientation towards experience. It also involves 3 attentional capacities:

a) sustained attention (ability to maintain attention for a long time on a particular aspect of the experience such as breathing)

b) flexibility (the ability to change one’s attentional focus from one object to another in order to be able to return to the initial object of attention once a thought or image has been identified)

c) the inhibition of secondary processes (ability to inhibit the deeper, ie secondary, development of thoughts, images or sensations).

It was the American doctor and researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn who had the idea, in 1979, to introduce the meditative method known as mindfulness or “full consciousness” to treat the stress and decrease the intensity of pain. He wishes to apply the principles of Dharma and to benefit patients without however making explicit mention of Buddhism. He developed the MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) program based on Korean Zen (Sound), Vipassana meditation and yoga, which became a real success in terms of relief from stress and visceral pain. 

Many effects of mindfulness have been identified:

• Significant improvements in the assessment of pain and psychological symptoms over the longer or shorter term.
• Positive results (reduction in stress level) in patients with, for example, cancer, Psoriasis or multiple sclerosis.
• In the treatment of conditions such as anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, eating disorders, stress linked to diabetes, tinnitus, to help people wishing to quit smoking or women facing perinatal stress.
• In addition to the care to treat certain serious personality disorders characterized by self-damaging behaviors or in the development of attitudes of acceptance and commitment, to prevent relapse into substance abuse or depressive relapses .

Although work is still needed to confirm all of these effects, most have been validated in several psychopathological conditions, with mindfulness acting mainly on cognitive, behavioral and emotional elements. 

Two mechanisms explain the many applications of mindfulness:

• A pre-reflective awareness of emotion, a sort of privileged access path to the experience of being, in relation with the world and with others.
• Openness and acceptance of the experience as it is. This promotes self-observation and would endow individuals with good abilities to distinguish an emotion from a bodily sensation, and to describe the complex nature of different emotional states. 

Modern management methods have, for the most part, abandoned individual competitiveness and goal achievement for mindfulness-based techniques. Whereas time devoted to relaxation and dialogue could improve attention, mood and therefore the results of the employees, managers have introduced “secular meditation” (in their own words) into the workplace. This recovery is akin to a real instrumentalisation insofar as a practice initially intended to free man from his alienation and purely secular objectives has turned into a tool in the service of a materialist and productivist vision of existence. .