Foundations

At the intersection

Therapeutic Mindfulness exists at the intersection of contemplative practice and modern psychological thought.

Buddhist contemplative traditions offer disciplined ways of observing experience, our relationship to it, and a way to free ourselves from its trappings.

Contemporary psychology brings research, clinical knowledge and increasingly refined ways of working with mindfulness, compassion and behaviour.

Mindfulness has become increasingly influential in Western psychology and psychotherapy. Approaches including MBSR, MBCT, DBT, ACT and Compassion-Focused Therapy have incorporated mindfulness, acceptance, compassion and contemplative practice in different ways.

Therapeutic Mindfulness brings these perspectives into conversation through practice while remaining rooted in a much older contemplative tradition.

No Buddhist belief or change of faith is required.

BUDDHIST CONTEMPLATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Buddhist contemplative psychology

One of our important foundations is the Visuddhimagga, a major Theravāda work offering a detailed exploration of meditation, attention and mental life.

Alongside it, we draw from Pāli suttas including the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and Ānāpānasati Sutta, and from the insight practice of Vipassanā.

Together, these traditions offer sophisticated ways of observing how experience arises, changes and becomes patterned — and point towards a way of living with greater harmony within ourselves and in relation to the world around us.

Mark Epstein has played an important role in bringing Buddhist psychology into contemporary psychodynamic discourse, showing how contemplative practice and psychotherapy can illuminate one another while remaining distinct.

THE BRAHMAVIHĀRAS

The Brahmavihāras

For Therapeutic Mindfulness, the Brahmavihāras are not an addition to mindfulness. They are an essential part of it.

Goodwill, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity give contemplative practice a generative dimension: mindfulness does not only help us notice experience, but helps cultivate the qualities with which we meet it.

PSYCHODYNAMIC THOUGHT

Psychodynamic thought

Psychodynamic thinking brings a modern psychological rigour that helps us understand and sharpen what contemplative practice can reveal.

Wilfred Bion is especially important to our thinking about containment, uncertainty and how emotional experience becomes available for thought.

Melanie Klein deepens our understanding of ambivalence, anxiety and the capacity to hold contradictory feelings without reducing experience to simple opposites.

Donald Winnicott contributes ideas of holding, play and the conditions that make genuine exploration possible.

Mary Ainsworth brings a developmental and relational understanding of attachment, security and the conditions that allow exploration.

Together, these perspectives give us language for thinking about how experience develops within relationship and history.

Embodiment, attention and wisdom

Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us that experience is embodied and situated: we encounter the world through a body already embedded in relationship, environment and circumstance.

John Vervaeke adds contemporary ways of thinking about attention, relevance, perspective and wisdom — particularly how we discern what matters within a changing context.

Together, these perspectives help us think about mindfulness not as detached observation, but as a way of participating more consciously in the world we are already part of.

Explore Research & Evidence →