The Role of Embodied Cognition in Understanding Mindfulness in Third-Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapies

Third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has misconstrued mindfulness interventions as cognitive restructuring and behavioral modification because it fails to engage with mindfulness's embodied dimensions. When the mind-body relationship is understood through embodied cognition, mindfulness's process of change becomes clearer. Mindfulness, as a skillful mode of embodied social cognition, cultivates operative intentionality by attending to the lived body and internal representations, allowing intervention in the mind-body system's complex feedback structure to influence cycles of organismic self-regulation. Mindfulness-based exposure therapies are understood not cognitively or behaviorally but through insights from the practitioner's orientation toward internal representations and how these habituated patterns transform their pre-reflective enactment of self and world perception.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Due to a lack of engagement with the embodied dimensions of mindfulness, third-wave CBT has misleadingly construed mindfulness interventions as cognitive restructuring and behavioural modification agents. When the relationship between the mind and body is understood according to the model of embodied cognition, however, mindfulness’s process of change can be better articulated. We propose a novel understanding of the ‘decentring’ skills fostered through mindfulness via non-conceptual attention to the processes underlying cognition. Mindfulness, understood as a skilful mode of embodied social cognition, cultivates operative intentionality whereby attention to the lived body, and one’s internal representations, allows one to intervene in the complex feedback structure of the mind???body system, influencing cycles of organismic self-regulation. Mindfulness-based exposure therapies, on this model, are understood not cognitively or behaviourally, but through insights generated via the practitioner’s orientation towards internal representations, and how these habituated patterns of representation generate transformations in their exteroceptive, pre-reflective enactment of both self and world perception.