Introduction to the Special Issue on Mindfulness: Measurement, Methods, Mechanisms, & Mental Health

The term mindfulness refers to an accessible and increasingly popular set of mind-body training practices and skills that can be used to enhance health, wellness, and psychological functioning in a low-cost, nonpharmacological manner. Mind-fulness practices originated in Buddhist contemplative traditions more than 2500 years ago, but in just the past 35 years they have undergone a process of adaptation and seculariza-tion that has resulted in their widespread adoption by Western popular culture. In the 21st century, mindfulness has become a focus of intense scienti fi c interest and multidisciplinary investigation, engaging researchers in public health, social work, and education, with an increasingly strong emphasis within psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatric medicine. From this work, there is now a growing database of fi ndings documenting bene fi cial and reliable effects of mindfulness on a range of health outcomes and clinical disorders ranging from anxiety and depression to addiction, chronic pain, insomnia, and others (1). However, despite this abundance of research, both the biology and brain mechanisms of action associated with mindfulness practices, training, and interventions are just beginning to be understood. In this Special Issue (SI) of Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science (BP:GOS), we show-case some of the cutting-edge research in this area, utilizing state-of-the-art methodologies to investigate mindfulness effects in terms of both basic biological mechanisms and their impact on mental health – relevant domains. The BP:GOS SI came about as an outcome product of M 4 , the Mindfulness Mechanisms and Methods Meeting, which was a small-group conference and subsequent workshop that we (TSB and SWL) co-organized at Washington University, St. Louis, in October 2023. The goal of M 4 was to bring together leading cognitive neuroscientists and contemplative neuro-scientists focused on mindfulness research, along with expert mindfulness practitioners interested in partnering with neuro-scientists. The conference sessions and themes were organized