When is the last time you administered a Rorschach?

[Jake0006]

What? Mindfulness is the absence of projection and reticee to access beliefs? Do you have a source for this?

Wouldn't mindfulness be the lack of attachment to projections, not their absence? One would notice that projections, cognitive distortions, and other cognitions are occurring just as they would other sensory impressions, like sights, sounds, pain, etc.

Hayes and Plumb (2007) wrote an article called " Mindfulness from the Bottom Up: Providing an Inductive Framework for Understanding Mindfulness Processes and their Application to Human Suffering." In it, they discuss a relational frame theory. The basic gist is that Western mindset is very driven to draw connections and meaning from our lives, and that this is linked to our valuation in output, and also our need to understand our surroundings well. This is a mindset pretty incongruent with mindfulness. Mindfulness is presence and engagement. The increase in drawing meaning and connections makes us less present, and the less present we are, the less engaged in our lives and the less happy. This is corroborated also by Killingsworth's experiment measuring how present people were, and the correlation of happiness. It was an interesting study, and it did show some correlation. So, the more associations were drawing in our relating to our environment, the more we lose in our judgments of it, and this is the bit where projections are relevant, and typically tied into the person's beliefs.

Most research approaches are top-down, looking at aggregates, such as non-attachment, and then reconstituting mindfulness from its aggregates. The authors argue that approaching mindfulness from the bottom-up has its utility. Certainly, it seems that often when researchers look at mindfulness through its aggregates, it doesn't seem that the whole of mindfulness is represented in the end product, that some things seem missing. Non-attachment is helpful, but the person would also benefit from having less "monkey mind," as my tibetan monk friend puts it. He says that Westerners tend to have their mind overrun with thoughts, there not really wherever they are, always somewhere else. The judgments and valuations, projections and beliefs are what draw us from the moment, away from being present.

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[Pragma]

Grad school. At the time I tried to see the merits but in hindsight it was an enormous waste of time.