How Mind-Body Practice Works—Integration or Separation?

In this Opinion piece, we take mindfulness as an example of mind-body practice to explore the question of how mind-body practice works based on recent neuroimaging evidence. Mind-body practice encompasses a family of complex practices such as mindfulness meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga, andQi Gong. Of these practices, mindfulness meditation has received themost attention in the field of psychology and neuroscience over the past two decades. In our recent review, we summarize that mindfulness meditation includes three components that interact closely to constitute a process of enhanced self-regulation: enhanced attention control, improved emotion regulation and altered self-awareness. We also pointed out many people use the term “mindfulness,” but often refer to completely different things or ideas (Tang et al., 2015). In the following sections, we provide examples to briefly clarify the fundamental understanding of the mindfulness concept and how mind-body practice works.