Buddha considered human suffering inevitable and left these teachings about the way to overcome suffering. Buddha's teachings about the healing of pain can be summed up in the Four Noble Truths. In particular, he recommended asceticism through mediation. Satipatthana, which is representative of the Early Buddhism meditation program. Also, Satipatthana is ultimately to the full realization of Four Noble Truths. Mindfulness is the key mechanism of Satipatthana. Mindfulness is a method related to all the positive, negative, and neutral experience and lowers the overall level of sufferings and raises the well-being.
Recently, interest has been increasing in meditation as a form of psychotherapy utilizing mindfulness. Above all, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is currently applied widely in the field of clinical psychology and garnering empirical support. ACT is a type of behavioral therapy that employs acceptance, mindfulness, and cognitive defusion strategies to enhance psychological flexibility and harness behavioral change in the direction of valued goals. ACT is the explicit use of the concept of mindfulness. Not only that, ACT implicitly incorporates other aspects of Early Buddhism. Early Buddhism and ACT both see pain as inevitable and both disconnect one from pain and suffering. Also, in ACT the healing process is very similar to early Buddhism's Four Noble Truths.
There are a number of notable differences between Early Buddhism and ACT as well. In Early Buddhism, mindfulness emphasizes the moral norms as the core mechanism for progressing to a state of enlightenment and liberation. On the contrary, ACT uses the mindfulness with the apparent purpose of recommending the valuable behavior in order to live a life according to its own value.
Early Buddhism espouses the concept of non-self. Obsession with the self is considered as a target to be destroyed. However, ACT emphasizes the experience of an enduring self from the perspective of an observer as an effective clinical tool in psychotherapy.
Despite these differences, there are similarities between Early Buddhism and ACT’s approach to resolving mental problem. Also Early Buddhism and ACT both have the healing value in the part that could present a solution for the problems of human relations beyond the overcoming of the psychological suffering of the individual.