mindfulness

UK/ˈmaɪn(d)fʊlnəs/US/ˈmaɪn(d)fʊlnəs/

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — mind sits at #91mostly written

Mindfulness is paying close, unjudging attention to the present moment. Practise mindfulness, a mindfulness course, mindfulness for stress.

It came out of Buddhist practice and was stripped of the religion for use in medicine. The evidence is good for anxiety and mixed for most of the other things it is now sold for.

Definitions of mindfulness

1nounmindfulnessPaying close, unjudging attention to the present moment.B2
“Eight weeks of mindfulness left her sleeping better than any pill had.”

mindfulness is a practice.

Where it comes from

Old English
ġemyndful — of good memory
Middle English
myndeful
English
mindful
English, today
mindfulness

From mindful + -ness. mindful comes from Middle English myndeful, myndefull, from Old English ġemyndful (“of good memory”), equivalent to mind + -ful.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Belief & Ritual, Mental Health & Wellbeing

Practise this word

mindfulness in the wild

Several meta-analyses of clinical studies of mindfulness have demonstrated its mental and physical health benefits.
Meditation
In the popular understanding, mindfulness has developed into a practice of bare awareness to calm the mind.
Satipatthana
The term mindfulness derives from the Pali word sati, a significant element of Buddhist traditions, and it incorporates elements from Theravada, Chan, and Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques.
Mindfulness
Since the 1990s, secular mindfulness meditation has gained a broad popular acceptance in the West.
Mindfulness
Sati, literally "memory" or "retention", commonly translated as mindfulness, "to remember to observe", is an essential part of Buddhist practice.
Sati (Buddhism)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the ġemyndful family

mindful

mindfulness — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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