Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard, is also the mother of the psychological concept of mindfulness. There was a great profile last Sunday of her work in the Boston Globe Magazine.
The article …
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Very interesting article – I just happened to stumble on to this site this a.m. – I’ll be back, good information. Stephanie
“The psychological concept of mindfulness is so simple, you might believe you’re missing something — that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to life itself.”
Well, not so simple. Because some of the things we might be mindful of are not “nice” thoughts or feelings or memories. It takes a lot of effort to try to become mindful of those too, and think about what they mean.
I understand that you’re trying to say that mindfulness was introduced into *Western* psychology in 1989, but I think it’s dismissive of Eastern psychology and religion to imply that mindfulness was somehow invented in 1989 by a Harvard professor. Both Buddhist and Hindu forms of meditation have long relied on various concepts of mindfulness.
As Langer makes clear in her 1989 book, Mindfulness, the Eastern philosophy and the Western psychological concept share little in common outside of the same name. It’s unfortunate they share the same name, as I think it lends confusion to understanding what Langer’s psychological mindfulness is all about. It’s primarily about embracing creativity and doing away with your existing categorization of information, being more flexible in your thoughts and creating new categories on-the-fly.
While there are some similarities to the two, Langer’s mindfulness is in some ways directly contradictory to some of the theses of the Eastern philosophy.
I think Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work in intoduced this term to western psychology before 1989.
I very much would challenge title of “mother of mindfulness” being given to Langer. As much as she deserves a lot of attention for her work, she is no mother of mindfulness.
To even try and make a claim that mindfulness of today shares “little in common” with Vipassana and eastern traditions of mindfulness is pretty ridiculous and as a MBSR student, I don’t know any mindfulness teacher that would make the claims Grohol makes here. The connection shares far more than a name and some of the most seminal studies on mindfulness have been done on Vipassana meditators and they show that both modern mindfulness practices and eastern meditators show growth and activity in the same areas of the brain’s medial pre-frontal cortex.
Come on, this claim is just ridiculous and incredulous for a site like this.
Claiming Ellen Langer to be , “the mother of mindfulness” is the mother of all howlers!!!!Get a life ,amigo.It has been around for thousands of years in India and in Far East. There are people like Jon kabat-zinn , Goleman & other meditators who introduced and clarified it to Western academic community and poupular culture. Even in America,she can’t claim to be pioneer in mindfulness, but maybe a early entry advantage among white accademic women doing research into technical construction or definiton of the observed phenomenon of mindfulness.
Your therapist has the capacity to recommend options, creative concepts as well as lifestyle adaptations for the sufferer, the seeds that become securely planted.
Interesting coincidence that this website generated, as a top of the page ad, the drug “Concerta” considering the content of this article. If “Mother” implies in this instance, “Creator,” as it seems to, obviously this label isn’t perfect or accurate using this connotation. However, it IS just a label, and more important is illuminating the important work of Ellen Langer. And, as a general question to ponder, I wonder what ends we might reach by “challenging” such a title, and whether this process is destructive rather than constructive.