Embodied Mindfulness: A New Perspective on Recreating Learning Experiences, Attention Training, and Intersubjective Interactions
Pizhūhish/nāmah-i Mabānī-i Ta̒līm va Tarbiyat. April 14, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.22067/fedu.2024.80911.1251 via DOAJ
Summary
Applying mindfulness in education can enhance learning and attention, though its modern interpretation has often been limited to psychological dimensions. This paper critiques the reduction of mindfulness from its holistic origins to a focus on mental health, emphasizing the importance of ethical, spiritual, and social aspects. It argues for an enactive and embodied approach to mindfulness that respects its full range of features, aiming for self-transcendence and improved intersubjective relations.
Study at a glance
| Key finding | Mindfulness in education can improve learning methods and attention but has been reduced to psychological aspects, neglecting its broader ethical and spiritual dimensions. |
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Abstract
Mindfulness is the method of studying attention and discovering experience; it is increasing in educational research in Western universities and demonstrates itself in publications and curricula. Therefore, applying mindfulness in the educational system can improve the methods of learning and attention. This paper first studies modern mindfulness and its results. Then criticizes its challenges & limitations that are affected by theoretical foundations. Originally, mindfulness took a holistic position and was not confined to one aspect. Today, neuroscience, cognitive science, and clinical psychology reduced mindfulness to the psychological dimension. In comparison, it is extended in many aspects like ethical, spiritual, cultural, and social. Although mindfulness achieved brilliant results, it might act as an inner technological control tool that is normalized and internalized. In neurophenomenology, however, the Buddhist origins and ethical-spiritual features would be kept, respected, and accepted results from empirical areas. Neurophenomenology proposes enactive & embodied mindfulness awareness to preserve all mindfulness features. Mindfulness is something more and beyond recovering from mental illnesses. It follows healing in ethical conduct to reach self-transcendence and intersubjectivity relation. Thus, this paper explains embodied mindfulness and considers its educational implications according to the neurophenomenology perspectives.