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I argue that current theoretical understandings of mindfulness as an attention regulation strategy for psychological stress reduction and enhanced adaptation to society may produce de-ethicised therapeutic applications. I show how understandings of mindfulness in early Buddhism, psychotherapy and clinical psychology have changed over time. Current understandings of mindfulness as a skill or technique of bringing non-judgmental awareness (or bare attention) to present moment experience are historically recent and differ from early Buddhist understandings in at least one crucial respect: definitions of mindfulness as attentional control or metacognitive awareness lack an emphasis on deep ethical reflection. As such, we need to re-ethicise our conceptual understanding of mindfulness by remembering early Buddhist texts, where mindfulness involves the cultivation of an ethically sensitive style of remembering, which has largely been lost in contemporary definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enthusiasm for both mindfulness-oriented psychotherapy and narrative approaches has emerged in recent times. While various methods of Buddhist-inspired mindfulness bring a direct experiential awareness of the moment-to-moment transitory nature of lived experience, a relational and dialogical narrative approach highlights the significance of history and socio-cultural discourses in the composing of our lives. As both pay careful attention to the idea of self, therapeutic work in this paper will illustrate the importance of attending to the confluence of the narrative sense of self and the notion of non-self from the Buddhist tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]