Patrick Kearney

A systematic review of mindfulness intervention for individuals with developmental disabilities: Long-term practice and long lasting effects

Can individuals with developmental disabilities learn mindfulness? If so, with what result? A systematic literature review identified 12 studies that taught mindfulness practice to individuals with mild to severe developmental disabilities, demonstrating that mindfulness intervention could significantly reduce the behavioural and/or psychological problems of this population. The majority of these mindfulness intervention studies were longitudinal, featuring long intervention periods and long lasting intervention effects. This paper analyses the characteristics and objectives of mindfulness interventions, along with their effects, focusing on the adjustments made to intervention content and instruction strategies to meet the specific requirements of individuals with developmental disabilities. The potential for improving mindfulness interventions for people with developmental disabilities is also discussed.

Experience, recursive awareness and understanding in autism spectrum disorders: insights of parents and teachers in Singapore

Provision of an individually responsive education requires a comprehensive understanding of the inner worlds of learners, such as their feelings and thoughts. However, this is difficult to achieve when learners, such as those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and cognitive difficulties, have problems with communication. To address this issue, the current exploratory descriptive study sought the views of 133 Singaporean parents and teachers of school-age learners with ASD and cognitive difficulties regarding the inner experience of their children and students. The findings highlight the variety of abilities and difficulties found in how these learners experience their own mental states and understand those of others. These abilities and difficulties are characterized according to type of mental state and analysed in line with three qualia, those of experience, recursive awareness and understanding. The findings indicate that learners show a greater awareness of their own mental states compared to their ability to understand these same mental states in others. Educational implications are discussed.

Dharma and Diversity

The theory and practice of mindfulness originate in an ancient oriental religion and yet is being appropriated by modern social and psychological sciences. This has created problems in how mindfulness and its theoretical framework can be adapted to contemporary conditions without either importing a new religion or excluding ideas and experience that may be useful to the contemporary application of mindfulness. This chapter addresses these problems through a return to the Buddha’s dharma, before “Buddhism” was invented, treating it as an empirical phenomenology based on a first-person perspective. It examines, in particular, the Buddha’s understanding of sīla (ethics, moral discipline) and its embrace of what we would call the realm of the secular. By taking seriously the Buddha’s understanding of what is required for human flourishing in a this-worldly sense, we may find a way to apply his understanding to the diversity of contemporary life without the need to adopt ideological commitments incompatible with a secular and scientific world view.

Mindfulness and Disability

We begin this chapter with a brief look at the behavioural and psychological issues encountered by people living with developmental disabilities (DD). We follow this with a systematic review of mindfulness interventions for people living with DD, with a particular focus on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID), to establish what has already been accomplished in the application of mindfulness to this population and identify the strengths of current interventions along with the areas of possible improvement. The review covers the objectives, content, method and outcomes of these interventions, with particular attention to the ways in which mindfulness has been taught and practised. The findings of this review show what happens to individuals with DD when they practise mindfulness and what happens to individuals with DD when their family and professional care providers practise mindfulness. Finally, we compare mindfulness interventions with those that address similar behavioural and psychological issues without using mindfulness, in an attempt to establish what gives mindfulness interventions their distinctive character.

A Genealogy of Mindfulness

This chapter traces the genealogy of mindfulness from its origin in the early collections of the Buddha’s teachings to contemporary mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Mindfulness in the early teachings is understood as remembering the present, while in the twentieth-century Nyanaponika Thera presented mindfulness as bare attention. We examine some issues that have arisen from the adaptation of mindfulness from its original context, where it functions within its own sophisticated theoretical framework, to modernity, where its practice takes place within a secular and scientific culture entirely different from its original environment. We attempt to show that the Buddha’s “dharma” is an empirical project that, in its focus on the practical task of easing human suffering, bears a striking resemblance to modern secular MBIs. We then introduce our own approach to the application of mindfulness, in which we apply the Buddha’s original concept of mindfulness to its new secular and scientific context.

Study Two: Mindfulness Intervention for Children

This chapter presents the parent-implemented mindfulness intervention for the six children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and challenging behaviour (stage 2), including its theoretical framework, development, delivery and effects. The aim of this stage of the intervention was to train these children to the point where they could use mindfulness meditation to manage their own problem behaviour. We begin by exploring contemporary educational theories and practices that constitute the theoretical framework for the intervention, those of universal design for learning (UDL), differentiation, self-determination, video modelling and parent-implemented learning. These were employed to meet the range of individuality that characterises ASD. We then explain how we developed five basic mindfulness activities for the children based on mindfulness of body and of sound, and subsequently supplemented these with an additional three activities that entailed mindfulness of mind. We discuss issues that arose in the course of the training, and the ways in which the six mother–child dyads responded to the training. Finally, we analyse the results of the training using statistical analysis.

Study One: Mindfulness Intervention for Mothers

This chapter centres on the mindfulness programme used to train the six mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and challenging behaviour, in order to provide them with their own fluency in mindfulness and to equip them to act as mindfulness teachers for their own children. The intervention was carried out in two consecutive stages, where in stage 1 the authors trained the mothers in mindfulness and in stage 2 the authors assisted the mothers in training their own children in mindfulness. The mindfulness training programme we employed is called inclusive mindfulness (IM), and to contextualise its results, we discuss the rationale behind the development and delivery of the IM programme. In sum, this chapter addresses four issues: (1) the theoretical framework of the IM programme for mothers, (2) development of the IM programme, (3) delivery of the IM programme and (4) the results of learning and practising the IM programme.