Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

are).
4. L stands for love (being kind, compassionate, and empathetic to others and to yourself). 38
Jon Kabat-Zinn, on the other hand, recommends seven specific attitudes that are necessary for
mindfulness:
1. Nonjudging: observing without categorizing or evaluating.
2. Patience: accepting and tolerating the fact that things happen in their own time.
3. Beginner’s-Mind: seeing everything as if for the very first time.
4. Trust: believing in ourselves, our experiences, and our feelings.
5. Non-striving: being in the moment without specific goals.
6. Acceptance: seeing things as they are without judgment.
7. Letting Go: allowing things to be as they are and getting bogged down by things we cannot
change.
Neither Siegel’s COAL nor Kabat-Zinn’s seven attitudes is an exhaustive list of attitudes that can be
important to mindfulness. Still, they give you a representative idea of the types of attitudes that can impact
mindfulness. Ultimately, “the attitude that we bring to the practice of mindfulness will to a large extent
determine its long-term value. This is why consciously cultivating certain attitudes can be very helpful…
Keeping particular attitudes in mind is actually part of the training itself.” 39
From a social scientific point-of-view, one of the most influential researchers in the field of mindfulness
has been Ruth Baer. Baer’s most significant contribution to the field has been her Five Facet Mindfulness
Questionnaire, which you can take on her website. Dr. Baer’s research concluded that there are five
different facets of mindfulness: observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging of inner
experience, and nonreactivity to inner experience (Figure1.8). 40
The first facet of mindfulness is , or “noticing or attending to a variety of internal or
external phenomena (e.g., bodily sensations, cognitions, emotions, sounds).” 41 When one is engaged in
mindfulness, one of the basic goals is to be aware of what is going on inside yourself and in the external
environment. Admittedly, staying in the moment and observing can be difficult, because our minds are
always trying to shift to new topics and ideas (again that darn monkey brain).
The second facet of mindfulness is , or “putting into words observations of inner experiences
of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and emotions.” 42 The goal of describing is to stay in the
moment by being detail focused on what is occurring. We should note that having a strong vocabulary
does make describing what is occurring much easier.
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Interpersonal Communication