Mindfulness is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, supported by increasingly rigorous scientific research, and driven in part by a longing for new practices that might help us to better apprehend and solve the challenges that threaten our health.

This week a landmark British report will lay out recommendations for the provision of mindfulness across many public policy areas. Mindful Nation UK, based on evidence presented to an all-party group of the UK parliament, carries enormous promise for health policy in Britain and the wider world.

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The World Health Organisation has warned that mental ill-health will be the biggest burden of disease in developed countries by 2030. We urgently need new approaches to tackling this epidemic, and crucially more research to determine the efficacy of mindfulness as a prevention strategy. Already, mindfulness training has been shown to reduce the risk of relapse of recurrent depression by one third. A recent meta-analysis of 209 studies concluded that mindfulness-based interventions showed “large and clinically significant effects” in treating anxiety and depression – effects, crucially, that were maintained through follow-up. These are promising findings for a condition for which there are still only limited treatments. The need to both deepen our understanding of how mindfulness might effect these positive outcomes, as well as to learn how it might help other conditions is expressed by a call for more investment in high calibre research.

Mindfulness is often misunderstood – so let us be clear about what we are encouraging.

In essence, mindfulness – being about attention, awareness, relationality, and caring – is a universal human capacity akin to our capacity for language acquisition. It is a way of being in wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly, with oneself and with others. Thus there is an intrinsic social dimension to its cultivation as well. It usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.

These include our experience of the present moment, our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and above all, our tacit and constraining assumptions and our highly conditioned habits of mind and behaviour, both as individuals and in society at large.

It is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it

While the most systematic and comprehensive articulation of mindfulness stems from the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is not a catechism, an ideology, a belief system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion, or a philosophy. It is best described as “a way of being”. There are many different ways to cultivate it wisely and effectively through practice. Basically when we are talking about mindfulness, we are talking about awareness – pure awareness. It is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it.

It is also “bigger” than thinking, because any thought can be held in awareness, and thus looked at, known, and understood. Awareness in its purest form thus has the potential to add value and new degrees of freedom to living life fully and wisely and thus, to making wiser and healthier, more compassionate and altruistic choices.

In the past 40 years mindfulness in various forms has found its way into the mainstream of medicine, health care, and psychology, where it has been broadly applied and continues to be extensively studied through clinical research and neuroscience. More recently it has also entered the mainstream of education, business, the legal profession, government, military training (in the USA), the criminal justice system, and more. The findings of Mindful Nation UK suggest that mindfulness has the capacity to address some of the larger challenges and opportunities to be found in the domains of health, education, the workplace, and the criminal justice system, by tapping into interior resources we all possess but that are mostly underdeveloped.

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Many challenges lie ahead. As critics are correct to point out, a real understanding of the subtlety of mindfulness is required if it is to be taught effectively: it can never be a quick fix. Some have expressed concerns that a sort of superficial “McMindfulness” is taking over which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential. While this is far from the norm in my experience, these voices argue that for certain opportunistic elements, mindfulness has become a business that can only disappoint the vulnerable consumers who look to it as a panacea.

To address this, funding is necessary to bring a high-quality evidence base into step with widespread popularity, to establish and disseminate best practice and train teachers, and to identify and properly support those most in need of mindfulness in accessing appropriate programmes. Governments and public bodies have a crucial role to play in improving access to the best evidence-based courses, supporting the development of teacher training and continuing to raise the bar for high-quality research.

The Mindfulness all-party parliamentary group and its Mindful Nation UK inquiry has heard evidence from leading scientists, practitioners, commissioners of services and policymakers, and makes rigorous, cost-effective suggestions for developing the potential of mindfulness. As such, the UK may be taken as a model by legislators and experts to establish similar programmes of inquiry in other countries.

If the unique genesis of the Mindful Nation UK report as a cross-party collaborative effort is recognised, and its forward-looking recommendations for further research and implementation acted on by government and other agencies, there is no question in my mind that the repercussions and ramifications of this report in the UK will be profoundly beneficial. Indeed, they will be addressing some of the most pressing problems of society at their very root – at the level of the human mind and heart.