Why Mindfulness?
If you’re not temperamentally inclined to sit still, or if it is something you have never considered, trying meditation and mindfulness might feel scary or overwhelming. Perhaps you came to therapy looking for help with something specific: issues in your relationship with your partner or parent, struggles with motivation, or frustration with some sort of stuckness you are experiencing. You want someone to tell you what to do and how to solve it. You want tips and tricks, strategies, concrete ideas. You want to address it head on, or at least you want someone to tell you it’s not your problem to solve. Maybe on some level you want help finding a way not to feel the way you feel.
So you may wonder: how can this real-life problem be solved by sitting still and trying not to think?
The frustrating reality that therapists sometimes have to find a way to convey to their clients — compassionately! — that a therapist can’t actually solve your problems for you, and they definitely can’t take away your feelings. Please know that we would like to. We are empathetic human beings. We care: it’s part of the job description. We would love to be able to wave a magic wand and give you the solutions to your problems. But that’s not really why you came to therapy, is it?
What we can do is help you learn how to take a break from your habitual ways of seeing yourself so that you can begin to consider different ways of responding to problems as they come up in life. And meditation/ mindfulness is one really good way of doing that.
So. How does it work, you ask?
Mindfulness interrupts your habitual patterns of thinking and gives you the option to not “go down a rabbit hole.” It helps you cut through the stories you tell yourself and see things the way they actually are.
Mindfulness enables you to become aware of your emotional thought patterns, which empowers you to decide whether or not they serve you.
Mindfulness offers direct practice in creating new patterns of thought.
Mindfulness gives you an alternative to self-blame and self-criticism: instead of fighting with yourself about how you should be, or fighting with God/ the Universe about how life should be, mindfulness lets you relax into how things actually are.
So much of our suffering is caused by wishing things could be different than they are. Or wishing that the people in our lives could be different. Or wishing that we could be different. But ironically, much of the time the key to being able to change our situation or reduce our suffering is to accept reality, instead of fighting it. And in order to be able to accept it, we need to be able to see it clearly.
Most forms of meditation or mindfulness practice start with simply that practice: a focused intention to be present, here and now, with whatever is actually happening. What that looks like is usually the instruction to pay attention to the breath or the body. Often we are asked to sit still and pay attention to the breath, or the physical sensations we are experiencing. But mindfulness can (and should!) also be practiced in movement. This is the basis of yoga (before it became a Western workout trend). Walking meditation is also a great form of mindfulness that doesn’t require total stillness, if that’s not your jam.
When you practice mindfulness, you simply focus your attention on whatever is actually happening. The movements of your body, and/or the pattern of your breath. The reason this is the focus is that it is inarguable. Your body is moving. Your breath comes in, your breath goes out, mostly without fail. Which makes it very easy to accept.
So you focus on your breath and body and you practice accepting how it is right now. And then thoughts come in. And at some point, you notice the thoughts. And when you notice them, you can name them, without judgement or criticism. They just are. You just accept that they happen. And then, ever so gently, you let them go, and return your attention to breathing.
Gentleness is key here. For some of us, reacting disapprovingly to or automatically disallowing the critical and judgemental thoughts is the very problem you are trying to solve. You know you are hard on yourself, so when you hear that voice, you get mad at it. “Stop harassing me!” you want to say to it. “Leave me alone!”
But the critical thoughts are real. They are happening. When you fight them, you are practicing non-acceptance. Non-acceptance is denial. It is a defense against uncomfortable feelings. Feelings don’t go away just because we tell them to. Feelings have a purpose, and they need to run their course in your body. The answer to having negative feelings about tendencies you observe in yourself isn’t to banish those feelings. It is to see, accept, and be curious toward them. What are they for?
Your self-criticism and self-blame have a purpose. They are trying to serve you. Mindfulness is the practice of seeing and allowing them, and accepting that they are there, without reacting. The practice is allowing the truth of what is happening. Only when you can allow the feeling to be there, can you decide how to respond to the feeling with care and wisdom.
We all habitually respond to our feelings without wisdom. We do this constantly. It is the human condition. This is not a shameful truth, it is simply fact. But the more often we can experience and accept our feelings simply as they are, and let them come and go without reacting instinctively, the more we can make wise, careful decisions about what to do to take care of ourselves. The goal is to learn to respond with care, instead of reacting without any thought at all.
If this sounds like hard work, you are listening closely. It is work. And for most of us, it is hard. But it is work that will allow you to see why you are struggling and make effective changes to your perception and your actions that actually serve to change your situation.
And that’s what you actually came to therapy for. Right?
