Abstract
Mindfulness Therapy has become part of the stable of psychotherapy since the 1980s when Jon
Kabat-Zinn established Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as an effective therapeutic
intervention. That programme melded roots from Buddhist Psychology with Western Cognitive
Science and Group Therapy. Some terms were deliberately loosely defined at that time, including
mindfulness itself. So how is recent research into mindfulness, including cross-disciplinary research
with biological neuroscience and other scientific disciplines and the recent cultural popularity of
mindfulness, impacting on mindfulness therapy and its clinical delivery? What of recent critiquing of
those loose definitions around mindfulness and its research base? This paper explores how
mindfulness therapy has been challenged and developed over the last 35 years by biological science
and research. This paper discusses cross-disciplinary research involving mindfulness, the inherent
difficulties of such cross-disciplinary conversations, how this research is shaping the manner in which
therapy that uses aspects of mindfulness is evolving, including highlighting some of the risks and
opportunities that may not be widely acknowledged to date.
