introduction
History, Misconceptions, Sustainability Professionals, and Five Facets
11
five facets
Although conceptually mindfulness seems simple, the beginning stages of practice may be deceptively complex. This publication breaks down mindfulness into different components or facets to understand the meaning of mindfulness and what it looks like to practice. A paper by Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, and Toney examined whether the top five mindfulness questionnaires were correlated with each other, with meditation experience, and other measures of mindfulness. The results established that the available mindfulness questionnaires are internally consistent and, to a large extent, correlated with each other. After the analysis, the five questionnaires were administered to 613 undergraduate students and the five facets of mindfulness were extracted from the psychometric properties to create a consolidated mindfulness framework. The authors concluded that mindfulness is best evaluated using five
criteria: non-reactivity, observing,
acting with awareness, describing and labeling with words, and non-judging of experience. The five facet mindfulness framework is the organizational foundation for this mindfulness publication. Although these facets are described separately throughout this piece, they are highly interconnected in practice. Think of mindfulness facets like a soccer ball, it is a variation of pentagons and hexagons that are needed to make up the ball as a whole. For example, when you consistently practice full body awareness, you are building capacity in self-awareness and observation which are vital elements to grasp the other four facets of mindfulness. We combined two of the facets (non-judgmentalism and describing and labeling with words) into one section of the publication because of their high dependency on one another.