Observations on the Relationship between Resilience and Mindfulness

In the last three decades, mindfulness and resilience have received extensive scholarly attention. Research has burgeoned and they have both become “buzz words” in the social sciences and mental health fields. That said, they are often presented as unrelated qualities, skills, or states, and few studies and texts have examined their linkages and/or how they complement each other. Masten’s (2001, 2009) seminal papers and subsequent book (2014) that presented resilience as “ordinary magic” have had large impacts on resilience scholarship, bringing forth that resilience is much more of a common human occurrence and proclivity than previously considered. In this paper, we explore the potential for mindfulness to be a potentially overlooked and ubiquitous protective factor in the development and maintenance of resilience. To achieve this, we propose that mindfulness is fundamental to resilience by investigating linkages between mindfulness and resilience yet to be thoroughly explored in the literature, and discuss how mindfulness is logically connected to resilience. Likewise, we suggest that the complementary interplay between mindfulness and resilience is readily applicable and highly germane, as mindfulness may beget resilience and vice versa.