The 7 Attitudes of Mindfulness: A Therapist's Complete Guide to the MBSR Foundation

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How to actually practice non-judging, patience, beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go—with insights from 20+ years in the therapy room.

In the world of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), there are seven attitudes that form the foundation of the entire practice. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of MBSR, didn't choose these attitudes arbitrarily—they are the internal postures that make meditation actually work.

Most guides will give you a dictionary definition of each attitude. I want to give you something more useful: what these attitudes look like when they're missing, what shifts when they're present, and how I've watched them transform my clients' lives over twenty years of clinical practice.

These attitudes aren't items to check off a list. They are ways of being that you cultivate over time—and they extend far beyond the meditation cushion into your relationships, your work, and your relationship with yourself.

Quick Navigation: The 7 Attitudes

1. Non-Judging: The Antidote to Inner Criticism
2. Patience: The Wisdom of Allowing
3. Beginner's Mind: Seeing Fresh
4. Trust: Coming Home to Yourself
5. Non-Striving: The Paradox That Heals
6. Acceptance: The Ground of Change
7. Letting Go: The Art of Release

1. Non-Judging: The Antidote to Inner Criticism

Non-judging is the practice of observing your experience without labeling it as good or bad, right or wrong. It sounds simple. It is not.

We are judgment machines. Within milliseconds of any experience, the mind categorizes: I like this, I don't like that. This is going well, that was a mistake. I'm doing this right, I'm doing this wrong.

In mindfulness, we practice noticing these judgments without adding a second layer of judgment on top of them. You notice you're judging yourself for being anxious, and instead of then judging yourself for judging, you simply observe: Ah, judging is happening.

This creates space. And in that space, something remarkable happens—the grip loosens.

How to practice non-judging at work: When you notice yourself mentally criticizing a colleague (or yourself), pause. Label it silently: judging. Then return your attention to what's actually happening, without the editorial.

From the Therapy Room

I work with many high-achieving professionals who appear successful on the outside but feel like frauds on the inside. The common thread? A relentless inner critic that judges every thought, every decision, every interaction. When we begin practicing non-judging—simply noticing "there's a judgment" without believing the judgment—something shifts. One client told me, "It's like I finally have some distance from the voice that's been running my life." That distance is everything.

2. Patience: The Wisdom of Allowing

Patience is the understanding that things unfold in their own time, and that some things cannot be rushed.

I'll be honest: this is my edge. I am not naturally patient. I want results now—or preferably yesterday. A wise teacher once told me that patience is always a good practice. I was trying to skip steps, to finish the race before completing the course as it was designed. He was right. There was no benefit to forcing it. I needed to wait. It paid off.

In a world of instant gratification, patience is countercultural. We want the relationship to feel easy immediately. We want the career breakthrough now. We want the anxiety to disappear after one meditation session.

But wisdom grows slowly. Healing takes time. Rushing the process often delays it.

How to practice patience in daily life: The next time you're stuck in traffic or waiting in line, notice the urge to be somewhere other than where you are. Then practice being exactly where you are, breath by breath. Not because you have to, but as a choice to cultivate this capacity.

From the Therapy Room

I often see clients who want to "fix" their anxiety as quickly as possible. The irony is that this urgency—this impatience with their own healing—is itself a form of anxiety. When we slow down and practice patience with the process, we're actually training the nervous system that it's safe to not be in emergency mode. The healing often accelerates precisely when we stop demanding that it hurry up.

3. Beginner's Mind: Seeing Fresh

Beginner's mind is the willingness to see things as if for the first time, without the filter of what you already "know."

Watch a young child encounter an everyday object—a cardboard box, a puddle, a beetle. They study it. They touch it. They're fascinated. They haven't yet learned to dismiss things as ordinary.

We lose this. By adulthood, we think we know what a conversation with our partner will be like, what our commute will feel like, what our own minds will do. We stop actually experiencing and start running on autopilot.

Beginner's mind is the antidote. It means approaching your own life with curiosity rather than assumption. Tasting your food instead of thinking about how it will taste. Listening to someone without already formulating your response.

How to practice beginner's mind in relationships: The next time you're with someone you know well, pretend you're meeting them for the first time. What do you notice? What might you have stopped seeing?

From the Therapy Room

Couples who have been together for years often stop seeing each other. They see their mental image of who their partner is—an image often frozen from years ago, layered with accumulated grievances. When I invite them to practice beginner's mind—to look at their partner as if they've never met—something cracks open. "I forgot how funny she actually is," one husband told me. The person hadn't changed. His way of seeing had.

4. Trust: Coming Home to Yourself

Trust, in the context of mindfulness, means trusting yourself—your own intuition, your own authority, your own felt sense of what is right for you.

We all have some form of inner guidance we can call on. But many of us have learned to override it. We choose careers based on what our parents wanted. We stay in relationships because we "should." We abandon our own knowing in favor of external validation.

I've been guilty of this. I chose my college based on what other people thought, not what I actually felt was right for me. When you live this way long enough, you lose access to the signal entirely. You don't even know what you want anymore because you've been so busy performing what you think you're supposed to want.

Mindfulness practice rebuilds this trust. By paying attention to your own experience moment by moment, you reconnect with the inner compass that was always there.

Mindfulness attitudes for anxiety: Trust is particularly important for anxiety, which often involves a fundamental distrust of your own ability to handle what life brings. Practicing trust doesn't mean pretending everything will be fine—it means cultivating confidence that you can meet whatever arises.

From the Therapy Room

I often see clients who chose careers based on what their parents wanted, and they are deeply distressed by that decision—not because the career is objectively wrong, but because they are not living in their own truth. The body knows. It speaks through fatigue, through restlessness, through a persistent sense of emptiness despite external success. Learning to trust those signals—to take them seriously—is often where the real work begins. This is also central to somatic release work: trusting what the body is trying to communicate.

5. Non-Striving: The Paradox That Heals

Non-striving might be the most counterintuitive of all the attitudes, especially for high achievers. It means practicing without trying to get anywhere.

Wait—isn't the point of meditation to reduce stress? To feel better? To achieve some kind of calm?

Yes and no. The paradox is that the more you try to achieve calm, the more you interfere with the natural process that would produce it. It's like trying to fall asleep—the effort itself keeps you awake.

In mindfulness, we shift from "doing mode" to "being mode." We are not working toward a specific outcome. We are simply observing what is, allowing everything to be as it already is. By not grasping for pleasant states or pushing away unpleasant ones, we create the conditions for genuine ease to arise.

How to practice non-striving at work: Notice when you're meditating (or working, or parenting) with a hidden agenda—trying to make something happen, trying to prove something, trying to feel a certain way. Then experiment with releasing the goal and simply being present with what is.

From the Therapy Room

This attitude is crucial for the anxious overachievers I work with. They approach meditation like another performance—something to be good at, to optimize, to check off the list. When I tell them that the goal is to not have a goal, it often produces a kind of cognitive short-circuit. But that's exactly the point. Non-striving interrupts the achievement machinery that has been running their nervous systems ragged. The relief often comes precisely when they stop reaching for it.

6. Acceptance: The Ground of Change

Acceptance is the willingness to see things as they actually are in the present moment.

This is frequently misunderstood. Acceptance does not mean approval. It does not mean resignation. It does not mean you are "okay" with injustice or pain or situations that need to change.

Acceptance means acknowledging reality as it is, right now, before deciding what to do about it.

If you're in debt, acceptance means looking at the actual number instead of avoiding it. If your marriage is struggling, acceptance means acknowledging the struggle instead of pretending everything is fine. If you're grieving, acceptance means letting yourself grieve rather than rushing to "move on."

Paradoxically, acceptance is what makes change possible. You cannot transform what you refuse to see.

MBSR 7 attitudes guide: In the full eight-week MBSR program, acceptance is practiced formally through body scan meditation, where you practice accepting whatever sensations are present without needing to change them. This builds the capacity to accept increasingly difficult experiences with equanimity.

From the Therapy Room

"I don't have to like my divorce, but I can choose to accept it as a learning opportunity." I've said versions of this to many clients, and I've said it to myself. Acceptance doesn't mean the pain disappears—it means you stop adding suffering on top of pain. You stop fighting reality, which only exhausts you. One client put it perfectly: "I realized I was using all my energy to resist what had already happened. When I finally accepted it, I had energy left over to actually rebuild."

7. Letting Go: The Art of Release

Letting go is the practice of non-attachment—of not clinging to experiences, thoughts, or outcomes.

The mind is a grasping machine. It latches onto pleasant experiences and tries to hold them. It pushes away unpleasant experiences and tries to escape them. It clings to stories about who we are, what happened to us, what we deserve.

Letting go doesn't mean suppressing or denying. It means holding things lightly. Allowing experiences to arise, to be felt fully, and then to pass—without clutching.

In meditation, you practice this constantly. A thought arises, you notice it, and you let it go—returning to the breath. An emotion surfaces, you feel it, and you let it move through without building a story around it.

This is the foundation of freedom. Not controlling your experience, but releasing your grip on it.

Letting go and somatic release: In my experience, letting go is not just a mental process—it's a physical one. When you truly let go of something you've been holding, the body releases too. Shoulders drop. The breath deepens. Something unlocks. This is why somatic practices are such a powerful complement to mindfulness—they help the body participate in the letting go.

From the Therapy Room

Letting go is often the hardest attitude for my clients—and honestly, for me. We hold onto grudges, onto identities, onto the way we think things should have been. But I've watched profound shifts happen when someone finally releases. A client who had been holding onto anger at a parent for thirty years described the moment of letting go as "like putting down a backpack I forgot I was carrying." The energy that had been bound up in holding became available for living.

How the 7 Attitudes Work Together

These seven attitudes are not separate skills to master one by one. They are interconnected facets of a single way of being.

Non-judging supports beginner's mind—when you stop evaluating, you can actually see. Trust enables letting go—when you trust yourself to handle what comes, you don't need to cling. Acceptance creates the ground for patience—when you accept where you are, you can wait without fighting.

In formal mindfulness practice, you don't try to "do" all seven attitudes at once. You simply practice paying attention, and these qualities naturally develop. They are the fruit of consistent practice, not techniques to force.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 7 attitudes of mindfulness?

The 7 attitudes of mindfulness, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn as part of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), are: Non-judging, Patience, Beginner's Mind, Trust, Non-striving, Acceptance, and Letting Go. These attitudes form the foundation for effective mindfulness practice.

Why is non-striving important in mindfulness?

Non-striving is the attitude of not trying to achieve a specific result during practice. This is important because the effort to "get somewhere" often creates the very tension mindfulness aims to release. By practicing without a goal, we allow the natural settling of the mind and body to occur.

How do I practice these attitudes if I'm a beginner?

Start with one attitude at a time. Notice when its opposite is present—when you're judging, rushing, assuming, distrusting, striving, resisting, or clinging. Simply noticing is the practice. Over time, the attitudes strengthen through recognition and gentle redirection.

Can mindfulness attitudes help with anxiety?

Yes. Many anxiety patterns involve the opposites of these attitudes: judging yourself harshly, impatience with your own healing, distrust of your ability to cope, and striving to control outcomes. Practicing the seven attitudes directly addresses these patterns and helps calm the nervous system.

What's the difference between acceptance and resignation?

Acceptance is acknowledging reality as it currently is. Resignation is giving up on the possibility of change. Acceptance actually enables wiser action because you're responding to what's actually happening rather than fighting reality. You can fully accept a situation and still work to change it.

Begin Your Practice

If these attitudes resonate with you, consider exploring them more deeply through a formal Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. In eight weeks, you'll learn to embody these attitudes through guided meditation, body awareness practices, and gentle movement—building a foundation that extends into every area of your life.

The attitudes aren't something you achieve once and then have forever. They are capacities you cultivate, day by day, moment by moment. And the cultivation itself is the path.

James O'Neill, LCPC, is a Johns Hopkins-trained therapist and certified MBSR instructor with over 20 years of clinical experience. He works with high-achieving professionals who appear successful on the outside but feel stuck on the inside. Learn more at journeymindfulness.com.