Mindfulness

What Is Mindfulness?

Becoming mindful is about bearing witness, orienting to our inner, felt experience without judgment—it is about developing a detachment from our feelings and thoughts while maintaining awareness of them. In mindfulness, we practice letting go of our agendas. We're not trying to achieve anything. Instead we slow down, calmly exploring and discovering whatever is. This is experiential understanding instead of cognitive understanding.

"Understanding" an issue or dynamic at play in our lives doesn't always lead us to transforming our experience of it. This is often where talk-therapy can be a dead-end endeavor. "I understand how I got here, I'm still miserable, now what?"

That is where pre-cognitive explorations are effective. These are explorations of the felt sense of things, attending to the feelings in the middle of our body, from inside, instead of to the thoughts in our mind. From here a client can experience a felt shift, a change in the concrete way that the body knows the problem. This takes us far beyond coming to a new cognitive understanding of things.

Once we have developed our experiential understanding of some block or some challenge, then "right action" may emerge. "Right action" is a Buddhist concept describing the effective next step in a given circumstance that is put forth from one's center. Current thought in neurobiology puts it this way: "Connections in the brain shape the way you think, but the flip side is true, too, the way you think can change your brain. Neural firing changes neural connections—if you pay attention." (Daniel Siegel quoted in Psychotherapy Networker, Sept/Oct 2004.) This attention is Mindfulness.

In developing our skills of mindfulness, we develop an inner witness. That witness has enough distance and perspective to observe what is going on inside of us yet not get caught up in it. The witness is curious, friendly, and gentle. The witness doesn't know what might be discovered, but welcomes and appreciates what is there. The witness is compassionate and detached. I use several techniques to engender this development including focusing, EMDR, and relaxation, as well as visualization exercises.

As the witness is nurtured, allowed time and space, insights will emerge, new roads will be forged, and unconscious attachments will be discovered. We then become aware of potential for organizing ourselves in more realistic and nourishing ways. Then, we can begin to explore new ways of being…

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