A Christian Approach to Mental Health, Part 3: Is Mindfulness Unbiblical?

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Dingzeyu Li (freely available via Unsplash)

It’s been a while because…life. But I’ve got a bunch of drafts in progress, so more to come soon. But first, time to finish this little series. And since it’s been so long sin the last one, a tiny recap: in the first part of this three-part series, I discussed why I believe there is tension between psychology and faith. The second part expanded on this, addressing how this tension has led to a particularly strong stigma around mental illness in the Christian community and proposing what an integrated approach to mental health should be. In this third part, I’ll discuss various mindfulness practices, how they apply to mental health, and whether or not they’re biblical and are things Christians can or should practice.

I wrote about mindfulness—what it looks like, what benefits it confers, and even Scripture verses that describe mindfulness—in a previous post, so I won’t go into much depth on the well-being benefits of mindfulness here. Instead, the focus of this post will be more about the spirituality of mindfulness.

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A Christian Approach to Mental Health, Part 2: Faith, Stigma, and Mental Illness

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Marcel Strauß (freely available via Unsplash)

In part 1 of this series, I discussed how the mind and body are inextricably connected, each one affecting the other, and how the mind is the battleground for our great mental and spiritual battles. I concluded by arguing that a proper approach to mental health must be comprehensive (i.e., must acknowledge this reality) and by hinting that a failure to do so, accompanied by a misunderstanding of what faith is, is a likely cause for at least some the stigma surrounding mental health in the Christian community.

In this second part of the series, I’ll lay out a very basic theology of mental illness that addresses the role of faith in healing and the purpose that our struggles serve. I won’t go into a theology of why it happens (perhaps in another post), but long story short, it’s because we live in a broken world.

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