EMPIRICAL MINDFULNESS: TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE AND MENTAL HEALTH IN THE SCIENCE AND RELIGION DIALOGUE

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) offers a framework for understanding mindfulness that may help science and religion researchers study mental health. In TCM, heart Qi manages the body's connection to time and space; when the ability to be present is disrupted, heart Qi becomes blocked, leading to mental illness or neurological disorders. Mindfulness is seen as a nonphysical phenomenon (Qi) that directly affects physical systems, producing empirical data that can be tracked and treated through TCM. This perspective provides a new paradigm for investigating mindfulness and the brain, addressing the mind/body problem that makes quantifying mindfulness's physical effects difficult.

Study at a glance

Abstract

As science and religion researchers begin to engage questions of mental health, mindfulness may prove to be a fruitful area of investigation. However, quantifying the physical effects of mindfulness on the brain is difficult because mindfulness deals with the problem of mental and physical interaction or, the mind/body problem. One system of understanding which may aid science and religion scholars in the pursuit of mindfulness is traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Within TCM, heart Qi manages the body's present connection to time and space. If the “being in the moment” is disrupted, then the heart Qi is blocked and mental illness or various neurological disorders occur. Succinctly, within TCM, mindfulness is understood as a nonphysical phenomenon (Qi) which directly affects physical systems, resulting in empirical data. This is tracked and treated through the TCM understanding of Qi. The TCM view of Qi in mental health may therefore provide a helpful new paradigm to investigations concerning mindfulness and the human brain.