Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University

Poster: "So, What Helped You Develop Your Mindfulness Practice?": Examining First-Person Accounts

Moakley Atrium

Mindfulness training seeks to foster a particular type of awareness. Meditators’ perceptions are vital to understanding Mindfulness-based Interventions. Few studies examine mindfulness practitioners’ own accounts of their subjective processes. Critiques of mindfulness research advocate first-person reports to clarify how mindfulness is learned. A qualitative interview method was employed using in-depth interviews with adults who completed the 8-week MBSR program to understand what aided participants’ learning of mindfulness practices. Interviewees were asked what they recalled as being helpful during the course. These semi-structured dialogues were transcribed then analyzed systematically using turn-by-turn coding. The guiding research question was “What do participants’ describe as most helpful to their cultivation of mindfulness practice?” Codes appearing in at least three participants’ interviews were then clustered into five thematic categories: Relational Support, Interactional Changes, Re-Framing of Judgments, Insights Gained and Busy Life Constraints. These empirically-derived themes enable us to link reported subjective experience with MBSR pedagogy.