Mindfulness: Method and Process

For a procedure to enter into the armamentarium of empirical clinical psychology, two things seem to be currently required: the technology has to be reasonably well defined, and it has to be shown to be useful when applied appropriately. These requirements are important, but ultimately they are not sufficient. There are times when technologies are so powerful that impact alone justifies their standing, but within the more normal range the progress of the field demands that technologies enter into one or more scientific accounts of psychopathology and its alleviation, and that there be some evidence for the importance of the processes and principles specified in such an account in the favorable outcomes obtained. Empirical clinical psychology has greatly underemphasized these last steps, but the long-term folly of this approach is becoming increasingly evident. Without scientifically understood processes and principles, data on technologies gather into an ever-expanding pile with no means for simplification. Lists of empirically based treatments can easily include multiple variants of the same pro-