The Roots and Routes of Mindfulness

Abstract

A Review of Mindfulness in Positive Psychology: The Science of Meditation and Wellbeing by Itai Ivtzan and Tim Lomas (Eds.) New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. 348 pp. Mindfulness in Positive Psychology: The Science of Meditation and Wellbeing is one of the most recent book-length publications originating from the prolific team of positive psychologists based at the University of East London. Over the past decade, the group associated with the London-based Masters in Applied Positive Psychology has maintained a relentless output of authored and edited volumes, which now amounts to a small library of leading texts in the field. With various collaborators, they have sought not only to disseminate positive psychology through introductory textbooks (Hefferon & Boniwell, 2011; Lomas, Hefferon & Ivtzan, 2014) but also to challenge and reshape the field in various directions, such as its need to acknowledge embodiment (Hefferon, 2013), embrace the darker side of existence (Ivtzan, Lomas, Hefferon & Worth, 2015), and its tendency to cling acritically to some of its major theories (Brown, Lomas, & Eiroa-Orosa, in press).