Mindfulness therapy

Mindfulness therapy

• Awareness of the present

• Attentional focus

• Moment by moment experience paired with acceptance

Mindlessness

• Caught up in thoughts, opinions, interpretations, past, future

• Examples

  • Rushing

  • Clumsiness

  • Inattention to subtle feelings

  • Forgetting someone's name as soon as they tell you

  • future/past thinking

  • Snacking mindlessly

  • Autopilot

What is mindfulness

• Attention on the present moment without judgement or rejection

• Skillll

• Buddhist practice of “sati”

• Awareness versus attention

• Remembering to reorient again and again intentionally

• Nonjudgement 

• Acceptance

  • Precedes change

What’s the point?

• Reduce suffering, increase happiness

  • Improve emotional regulation and positive emotions

  • Decrease psychopathological symptoms 

• Increase control of your mind

  • Detachment from thoughts and reactions (internal and external stimuli)

• Experience reality as it is

  • And engage in it more effectively

  • Essential goodness

How to be mindful

• Formal mindfulness practices

  • Mediations; be open to our current experience

• Informal mindfulness

  • Easier to build into psychotherapy practice

  • Everyday mindfulness through attention to our day to day experiences

    • Breathwork, attention to ambient sounds/posture, labeling feelings

  • Disrupt unhelpful thoughts, feelings, behaviors

Mindfulness skills

• WHAT skills (what we do to be mindful)

  • Observe

  • Describe

  • Participate

• HOW skills (how to use the what skills)

  • Nonjudgmentally

  • One-mindfully / staying focused

  • Effectively 

Mindfulness in therapy

• Common goal; i want to feel better and i want suffering to end

  • Escape from emotional turmoil = freedom?

• Freedom from within the experience itself

  • Coping rather than escaping

• Avoidance adds fear of the thing you’re trying to avoid

• Common element among many therapies