Positive Psychological States in the Arc from Mindfulness to Self-Transcendence: Extensions of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory and Applications to Addiction and Chronic Pain Treatment

The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) describes how mindfulness promotes health and resilience through positive emotion regulation. This review extends the MMT to show that mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by triggering upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring is key for inducing absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying the object's salience and imbuing perception with affective meaning. New evidence indicates that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing, producing therapeutic effects on addictive behavior, such as opioid misuse, and chronic pain syndromes.

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Abstract

The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) is a temporally-dynamic process model of mindful positive emotion regulation that elucidates downstream cognitive-affective mechanisms by which mindfulness promotes health and resilience. Here we review and extend the MMT to explicate how mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by evoking upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring is highlighted as a key means of inducing absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying the salience of the object while imbuing sensory-perceptual field with affective meaning. Finally, this article provides new evidence that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states of awareness through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing and thereby produce therapeutic effects on addictive behavior (e.g., opioid misuse) and chronic pain syndromes.