Mindful meta-awareness: sustained and non-propositional

• Published in: Current opinion in psychology Vol. 28; pp. 307 - 311
• Main Authors: Dunne, John D, Thompson, Evan, Schooler, Jonathan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2019
• ISSN: 2352-250X; 2352-2518; 2352-250X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.003

•Meta-awareness plays a key role in the ongoing monitoring of attention and affect in mindfulness-style practices.•While meta-awareness is often characterized as intermittent and propositional, it must operate differently in mindfulness and related contexts.•Drawing on Buddhist theories and recent work on metacognition, a sustained, non-propositional version of meta-awareness is proposed. Meta-awareness appears to be essential to nearly all forms of mindfulness practice, and it plays a key role in processes that are central to therapeutic effects of mindfulness training, including decentering — shifting one’s experiential perspective onto an experience itself — and dereification or metacognitive insight — experiencing thoughts as mental events, and not as the things that they seem to represent. Important advances in the conceptualization of meta-awareness in mindfulness have recently been made, yet more clarity is required in order to characterize the type of meta-awareness implicated in the ongoing monitoring of attention and affect, even while attention itself is focused on an explicit object of awareness such as the breath. To enhance research on this form of meta-awareness cultivated in at least some styles of mindfulness, a construct of sustained, non-propositional meta-awareness is proposed.