A new 8-week follow-on mindfulness course focused on awareness of feeling tone (vedanā) was tested in an open trial with 83 participants, 78 of whom had previously completed a mindfulness-based program. After the course, participants showed reduced depression, stress, and anxiety and increased well-being and mindfulness, with 38% meeting criteria for reliable change in anxiety and depression. About three-quarters reported unpleasant experiences related to mindfulness practice, but none reported harm. Five participants showed reliable deterioration in depression or anxiety, though most of them described benefits in anonymous feedback. The findings suggest added value from a follow-on course exploring feeling tone for people with prior mindfulness experience.
About two-thirds of schoolteachers and university students who took an 8-week mindfulness course reported unpleasant experiences linked to the practice, though most rated these as not at all or only somewhat upsetting, and some found them beneficial. The proportion reporting harm from the course ranged from 3 to 7%, and the proportion showing reliable deterioration on symptom questionnaires ranged from 2 to 7%. These groups largely did not overlap, indicating that harm may not be detected by standard symptom measures. The findings suggest mindfulness teachers should prepare participants for possible difficulties and assess harm explicitly.
Mindfulness is most often measured with self-report questionnaires, which have reasonable psychometric properties and contribute to understanding mindfulness and its effects on health and wellbeing. Measuring mindfulness as a multidimensional construct reveals that present-moment awareness can be unhelpful unless paired with a nonjudgmental, nonreactive stance; nonjudgment and nonreactivity may be only weakly related to present-moment awareness in people without meditation experience. Differences between psychological and Buddhist conceptions of mindfulness are inevitable and not necessarily problematic.