As I travel my path to mindfulness through meditation, yoga and group therapy, I plan on dragging you all along. Fair warning. Our first session last night offered an introduction into what the group facilitator calls "the mindfulness practice." She says:
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy teaches us that we can choose how we relate to painful and pleasant thoughts, images, and mood states. This has the power to increase or decrease the degree of suffering we experience. The next eight weeks are an opportunity for you to investigate your experience of depression and/or anxiety as well as other aspects of your life in this light and to see if, in fact, it is true. Through daily practices of relating to yourself and your experience mindfully, you will develop skills that allow you to see clearly what is occurring, to recognize that you have choices regarding how you relate to it and to practice making choices from a place of wisdom and compassion rather than from habit and self-criticism. It is an opportunity for you to become an expert on your experience and to develop some skills in being in your life, including with the unpleasant and painful, in a different way. You don't know what is going to happen as you learn to pay this kind of attention to yourself and to cultivate these skills. It will take effort on your part and a willingness to stay with it even when it is difficult and to see how it unfolds. Engaging in this process is an act of courage.
There are two parts to the practice: the formal practice and the informal practice. This week, the formal practice is a daily body scan, which involves lying or sitting comfortably alone in a quiet room and listening to a CD that gives instructions that require participants to focus on the sensations of each body part one at a time, briefly acknowledging and gently pushing away any extraneous thoughts that drift into the mind and distract from the scan. The informal practice this week asks that we eat at least one meal or snack a day "mindfully." That is, to shut off the TV and music, to set aside any distractions, and to thoughtfully and deliberately eat, examining the food and thinking about what you see, the colors and shapes and textures, breathing in and making conscious note of what you smell and how your body reacts, taking the first bite and letting it rest on your tongue, roam your mouth, press against your teeth. It's a time to make observations that might normally get lost during the rush to get to the next point in your day.
The practice steps require about an hour a day in commitment. Then there are weekly suggested readings in the book The Mindful Way Through Depression by Williams, Teasdale, Segal and Kabat-Zinn.
I'd welcome my readers to get a hold of the book and read along, too. This week, chapters 1&5. If you're intrigued and find yourself interested in participating in a similar course, poke around your local psychiatry clinics, hospitals, and yoga studios to find offerings in your area.
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: On purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. -- Jon Kabat-Zinn
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