The term mindfulness is all over current media and culture, which has the effect of leading people to believe that it is just a fleeting trend that will disappear as quickly as it arrived. However, the origins of mindfulness go back centuries and have been threaded through all societies, religions, and ways of life. But what does it really mean and how is it actually used in therapy or counseling?
Learning how to increase mindfulness is quite simple actually. And it doesn’t mean that you have to convert to Buddhism or become a meditating hippie or yogi – although you can if you want!
First, why learn mindfulness techniques? Most importantly, they work. Incorporating mindfulness into your life has been proven to reduce depression, increase quality of life and decrease anxiety. Through mindfulness techniques, people have been able to reduce their reliance on medications and have improved their physical health, including reducing symptoms like high blood pressure and recovering more quickly from illness. Mindfulness has shown to reduce negative emotions and amplify positive ones. And in general, people who learn to incorporate mindfulness into their life report a greater sense of happiness and sense of well-being.
Some of the ways that I help people increase mindfulness is to teach them how to pay attention to their emotions. Practicing being present with one’s own emotions both feels great and teaches people a lot about themselves, which tends to improve relationships very quickly. This is trickier than it sounds, because our society has created a lot of rules around when and how people “should” get to feel their feelings, so we often have to clear away some defenses that you’ve learned to use instead of feeling. These defenses tend to be things like intellectualizing about a feeling or rationalizing a feeling away. Being mindful means to take an honest look at your feelings and defenses as they come up, then make a conscious decision about where to take your mind next. Worry more? Think something self-critical? Rationalize your feelings? Or do you want to instead just experience the sensation of them as they come up?
I hope you decide to take an honest look at your feelings, and relish in the confidence and energy it can create in you to be in touch with your true self. Because the more you are able to identify and label your feelings, and experience them more deeply, the easier it becomes to make decisions, do things that are healthy instead of harmful to yourself, feel more sure of yourself, and feel like others also have a clearer sense of who you are. As one of my favorite writers on therapy said, “People who do not know what they feel do not know what they want.”*
*Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques, by Jon Frederickson. Kansas City: Seven Leaves Press, 2013