The experience and benefits of mindfulness are framed in terms of action identification principles (Vallacher and Wegner in Handbook of Theories in Social Psychology. Sage, London, pp. 327–348, 2012). This theory holds that mental life is characterized by the emergence of progressively higher-level (superordinate, abstract) perspectives on one’s experience, complemented by a tendency to disassemble existing higher-level perspectives into lower-level representations (action details, concrete perceptual features, sensations)—which in turn sets the stage for the emergence of new higher-level perspectives. This repeated assembly and disassembly of higher-level mental states allows for new and personally meaningful insights into one’s ongoing experience. Settings conductive to mindfulness optimize this process by focusing a person’s attention on the fine-grained texture of the present moment that is normally sealed off from awareness. From this lower-level focus, the person is primed to draw novel distinctions and emerge with new ways of thinking about his or her experience, in line with Langer’s depiction of mindfulness and its benefits.