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Mindfulness, a meditative practice associated with reduced anxiety and depression (Khoury et al., 2013), and more effective emotional regulation (Davis & Hayes, 2011), has become increasingly popular, both in popular culture and the health-care world. A strong theoretical case has been made that mindfulness has a place within occupational therapy (Reid, 2011; Elliot, 2011) and that occupational therapists are in a unique position to connect the "being" that mindfulness honours with the "doing" of people's occupations (McCorquodale, 2013). There is, however, a degree of abstraction in the discussion of the theory of mindfulness. How can practitioners actually implement it in practice? A number of challenges are posed to its real-world application. I will address two in this paper: the challenge of integrating mindfulness in a uniquely occupational way and the difficulty of helping clients adhere to a mindfulness routine. I am an occupational therapist who has practiced mindfulness in my personal life for seven years, and I have reflected on my experience within the occupational therapy context to generate the suggestions I share here.
Mindful occupation
The first challenge to consider is how mindfulness can be integrated into practice in an occupational way. Some have argued that mindfulness is important to occupation. Reid (2008) suggests mindfulness can lead to occupational presence, a state of consciousness of being aware of oneself, "engaged in occupation in place" (p. 43), and that this can influence well-being. McCorquodale (2013) highlights the benefits of a mindfulness practice by occupational therapists when used as a way to access intuitive knowledge about their clients. Elliot (2011) notes that mindfulness is itself an occupation. But, what might mindfulness look like in practical terms for a practitioner?
Mindfulness has been defined in many ways in the fields of psychology and occupational science, as well as by Buddhist writers in popular literature. Brown and colleagues (2007) describe it as a mental state of "present-oriented consciousness" (p. 214). The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh describes it as "the capacity to shine the light of awareness onto what's going on here and now" (2011, p. 20). I describe mindfulness simply as the practice of presence, where presence is an awareness of the events in our stream of consciousness, whether they be emerging thoughts, sensing our physical...