Current theorizing, emerging from the behavioral tradition and drawing on Eastern meditative practices, has led to the investigation of the role of mindfulness in the treatment of a variety of syndromes. Explicit in these therapies is the focus on a particular kind of relationship to one's inner experience, characterized by an awareness of thoughts and feelings as passing mental events - termed here, experiential awareness (EA). It is argued that this kind of awareness has also been implicitly targeted in many other forms of psychotherapy and is thus in need of further inquiry. The first steps in this process were to define the construct and its relationship to other psychological phenomena. It was hypothesized that trait EA would be associated with greater overall psychological well-being and lower levels of psychological symptoms as well as with lower levels of negative affect in response to a laboratory based stress induction. This project was composed of two separate but related studies, the second of which built upon the first. Study 1 involved the development of the Experiential Awareness Measure (ExAM). The ExAM was found to be an internally consistent measure, which was normally distributed in the present sample. It showed good convergent and divergent validity, though lower than expected test-retest reliability. Study 2 examined a subset of Study 1 participants in a laboratory setting. The Measure of Awareness and Coping - Revised (MACAM-R), was adapted from a related interview and was used as a behavioral measure of EA. Participants' responses to a frustrating mathematics task, and to describing events from their lives that elicited a variety of emotions were coded for EA. The behavioral trait measure was not significantly associated with the questionnaire measure, with any of the convergent or divergent measures, nor was it associated with recovery following the stressful math task, either as a trait or state measure. The ExAM, however, showed good predictive validity: predicting faster recovery to baseline following a stressful event. In sum, the present results suggest good preliminary evidence for the usefulness of the construct of EA. Limitations of the present research and future directions are discussed.