It provides a framework for catalyzing inner and outer learning about one's own mind and body, one's relationship to the world and one's place in it. This in turn promotes ongoing growth, healthy living and healing over one's life. It also has the virtue of being an approach that continues to deepen with practice over one's life. One can benefit from it at an introductory level during the initial exposure to the intervention and find it equally valuable if not more so at various points in one's life. Mindfulness meditation is a conscious discipline revolving around a particular way of paying attention.
Mindfulness meditation includes two forms of practice, termed formal and informal.
Formal meditation practice refers to making a particular time on a regular basis to devote solely to the cultivation of mindfulness. The cultivation of mindfulness requires a significant degree of concentration, but is not limited to the cultivation of concentration. Concentration here refers to the capacity of the mind to attend to a single object of observation and sustain that attention over an extended period of time. Thus emotional reactivity, and the full range of emotional states available to human beings are as much a valid domain of meditative experience as experiences of calm or relaxation. The cultivation of mindfulness is an arduous challenge in which one learns to face and work with the full range of human emotions and mind states.