Contemplative science comes of age: Looking backward and forward 20 years after Baer (2003).

A lot has happened in the 20 years since Baer (2003) published the first meta-analysis of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice.The year 2003 was a time before the iPhone, before Facebook, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, and certainly before advances in artificial intelligence brought algorithmdelivered content to our digital devices and large language models could mimic human interaction disturbingly well.Yet, Baer's meta-analysis examined the effects of MBIs on the same clinical challenges that plague us today: depression, anxiety, stress, pain.In 2003, self-compassion was only just emerging as a term in the scientific lexicon and experimental work studying interventions based on loving-kindness and compassion meditation (LKCM) was still almost a decade away (Neff, 2023).