Mindfulness is considered an enhanced attention to and awareness of current experience or present reality (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Bishop et al. (2004) proposed two basic components of mindfulness: attentional awareness and perspective shifting (decentering). Attentional awareness involves maintaining focus on present experience by regulating attention and inhibiting elaborative processing. The decentering component involves the understanding that thoughts, feelings, and reactions are transitory mental states (Bishop et al., 2004; Brown et al., 2007; Teasdale et al., 1995). Empirical research supports the role of mindfulness in wellbeing. Mindfulness has been associated with lower negative affect, higher positive affect, higher levels of vitality, and self-actualization (Brown & Ryan., 2003; Carlson & Brown, 2005, cited in Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). …show more content…
Mindfulness shares common definitional terminology with the construct of authenticity. As conceptualized by Goldman & Kernis (2004), authenticity is comprised of four components, including: awareness of one’s self-aspects, unbiased processing of evaluative information, behaviour that is aligned with one’s true self, and a relational orientation with close others. In recent research (Kernis, Lakey, Heppner & Davis, 2005), mindfulness positively correlated with these components of authenticity and with total authenticity. Like mindfulness, authenticity has also been linked to numerous aspects of positive psychological functioning, including greater self-actualizing tendencies and vitality, as well as lower psychological distress and physical symptoms (Heppner,