A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

If you’ve been following The Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog, you’ve read and interacted around the psychology and neuroscience of mindfulness in relation to stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, trauma, and so much more. Today, I have the honor of interviewing, Megan Cowan, Co-founder and Executive Director of Mindful Schools bringing mindfulness to children. Megan will be speaking at the upcoming Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth at UCSD February 4-5 2012. 

Today Megan talks to us about why mindfulness help children and give us some tips to begin working with our kids at school and at home.

Elisha: A couple years ago the video below came out via ABC News with some amazing responses captured by the children who were touched by Mindful Schools. Looking at this video, what is it about what you do that leads to these results?

Megan: Mindfulness, or bringing attention to ones experience, can be very empowering. Mindfulness strengthens self-awareness, the ability to recognize how you are feeling or what you are thinking in any given moment. When you have this ability, you are in a much more empowered place of choice. You can choose how to respond to anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, excitement, etc. rather than reacting automatically.

Oddly, this capacity of self-awareness is not generally cultivated in people. We don’t put an emphasis on this being an important tool in our culture today. But, it is relatively simple and the ability is so natural that children often immediately understand how to use mindfulness and begin applying it to their experiences.

The children in the video mentioned being happier, calmer, and better able to deal with difficulty. This is because they have created some space between their thoughts/emotions and how they typically respond to them. They have accessed the place of impulse or reactivity inside themselves and cultivated a spaciousness around their experience, allowing them to respond differently, or view their experience with more balance.

Elisha: Give us a couple key practices that we can start using now with our kids to help them integrate more calm, ease and focus.

Megan: When we teach young people mindfulness, we are teaching them in two ways: directly and indirectly. The key thing that adults, parents, educators, mentors, etc. will want to remember about integrating mindfulness into their work with kids is that their own personal embodiment and understanding of mindfulness will be the most powerful teacher to young people.  As a parent or educator, the way you respond to your own stress, impatience, disappointment, etc. is teaching just as much (if not more) as what you tell your children/students to do. The more you establish your own mindfulness practice, the more you will be able to impart, both through your presence and through your words.

Keeping that in mind, there are some simple mindfulness applications anyone can introduce to the young people they work with. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

• Set aside a few minutes everyday with your child or students
• Establish an environment that is quiet if possible
• Encourage children to let their bodies become still, relaxed and quiet
• Invite children to close their eyes if that is comfortable for them
• Ring a bell and instruct children to listen to the entire sound from beginning to end, raising their hand when the sound has faded completely (alternatively, you can simply listen to the sounds around you for a minute or so)
• Have children bring both hands to their lap or belly
• Take a few breaths together, guiding children by saying “breathing in, breathing out”, and then allow some time for them to do this silently
• You can do this for 1-3 minutes or more, depending on how the children respond to it

Keep things short and simple. More curriculum ideas can be found at trainings with Mindful Schools, or other similar organizations, or at conferences like the upcoming Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth at UCSD. 

Elisha: If you were sitting across the table from a parent or teacher who was struggling with a highly rambunctious child, what advice would you give them?

Megan: I was sitting in a café this morning and a mother was there with her three-year-old son. She was quietly eating while he fluctuated between sitting quietly alongside her, and bursting out in random tears or mild tantrums. She remained the same throughout!  Sometimes she spoke quietly to him, but there was no sense of speaking in order to get him to stop. He eventually settled into a routine of his own and things were peaceful until they left.

There’s no one right answer to what to do with a highly rambunctious child, but there is something mindful about neutrally allowing the child to have their process without you trying to change or control it. This, again, is where your personal mindfulness practice informs how to handle difficulty. Because when the child is rambunctious, who is really having the difficulty?

Remember, mindfulness is not about being calm. Calm is just a common natural side effect. Mindfulness is about learning how to become more aware of our entire spectrum of experience. It’s easy to forget this when you see a classroom of still, calm, quiet children doing mindfulness, or when you have a sweet mindful moment before bed with your child, and it’s natural to want to recreate this, especially when you are feeling chaotic.

Understanding that, if you want to help the child utilize mindfulness, you can inquire about their experience. If you have already introduced them to mindfulness, you can ask if there is anything they’ve learned in mindfulness that might be useful at that moment. Or you can essentially be mindful for them by saying “wow, you sure have a lot of energy right now.” You can also ask them where in their body they feel all that excitement or energy. Ask them if it is in their belly, their chest, their feet, etc. This helps focus their mind, even if only momentarily. It helps them check into their actual physical experience and begin to navigate it with more awareness. It also puts them in more control of their experience, rather than you having to manage it.

Thank you so much for your wisdom on this Megan. May your work go on to touch the lives of many parents and children and in the process, be a source of positive change to our society.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

The experience of gratitude has now been well researched and documented as something that is good for our health and well-being. But more importantly, with any of experience gratitude, we experience health and well-being and that has to be the most important indicator to generate this in our daily lives.

Perhaps it’s because when we feel grateful, it immediately creates this experience of connection. If we’re grateful for something that has to do with ourselves, we’re connecting to something internally (health, body working, joy), if it has to do with something outside of ourselves, we’re connecting to something externally (e.g. nature, people, higher power).

At a recent TEDx Conference in San Francisco, Blacklight Films founder, Louie Schwartzberg shows us how if we pause and pay attention, gratitude will naturally arise. Watch this:

I guess the first thing I’m grateful for is the technology to slow time down like this so I can see life unfolding in this way. But when I come to think about it, bringing mindfulness to the various areas of life allows me to slow time down. Maybe I don’t have 24 hours to sit in front of a flower and watch it unfold, but I am able to tune into many parts of life that I wasn’t noticing before because I was so caught up in the stories of my mind.

What is something today that you can choose to intentionally attend to and watch the experience unfold?

• Maybe it’s taking a moment to lie down and just watch the clouds floating by in the sky.
• Maybe it’s choosing to just attend to the sensations of the water flowing on your skin in the shower.
• Maybe it’s bringing your full attention to someone and listening.

Or maybe it’s recognizing that like all things we aren’t permanent and for the first time in a long time we start paying attention to our lives unfolding.

Let us know what you choose to pay attention to today.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

There’s a funny cartoon out there of some cows in a pasture eating grass. One cow’s head is lifted up with a sense of horror on his face and the caption reads “Hey wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” If I asked you, have you ever been sitting at a meal with someone or even by yourself and been halfway through the meal without having tasted the food? In my experience, the odds are likely that you’ll be nodding your head up and down. Our heads are often simply somewhere else, worrying about where we need to be, watching television, or engrossed in conversation.

This unawareness is the seed for making poor food choices, not to mention missing out on enjoying the food. This unawareness can also drive people to overeat as a way to cope with unacknowledged feelings and emotions. You may be in search of a “quick fix” that consists of caffeinated beverages and highly refined foods that burn very quickly and spike up the metabolism.  Many people have learned to comfort and sedate themselves with food.  Sadly our “super-size” culture not only supports these tactics but also capitalizes on it.

Since preparing and eating food is such an essential component of our lives, why not bring mindful awareness to this?

I had a client who suffered from stomach pains, always complaining of a sensitive stomach. I told him that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, has a system where he suggests chewing the food 30 times before swallowing (you don’t to count after you practice a few times). When he tried this he began noticing that his stomach didn’t hurt quite as much anymore because his food was broken down so much prior to hitting his stomach.

I had another client that suffered from a food addiction and would often be found going to the bakery daily, buying a cake, and eating it that night. We practiced mindful eating with a raisin in session to experience the concept of slightly slowing down with the eating and beginning to bring all the senses to the food. She took time seeing it, touching it, smelling it, hearing it, and tasting it.

She considered all the hard work it took by many people (including her own for having the resources to pay for a session to do this) to get this simple raisin in front of her today. In time, along with other work we did, she was able to slow down her eating and begin to eat in smaller portions with a greater sense of appreciation for her food. Another client I did this practice with said, “I’ve been downing raisins my whole life in handfuls, one after the other. And it wasn’t until now that I realized, I don’t even like raisins.” We both had a good laugh.

Go ahead and try this out for yourself. Whether you’re eating a snack or a meal, try to slightly slow down your eating, bring your senses to the food as if you were noticing this food for the very first time. Consider all the work that it took by so many to get it there today (including you). Whatever you do, don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself!

Soon you’re brain will start catching on, interrupting the auto-pilot of eating and naturally bringing you into a state of clarity, where there’s the possibility and freedom to choose to engage with greater mindfulness. This moment of clarity is what I call The Now Effect. The beautiful thing is that it’s a skill that can be trained to become a part of your everyday life.

And please share your comments and questions below, your additions here provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

I see it every day. We all hold grudges against other people who we feel have hurt or offended us in some way or another. We even hold these grudges for people who aren’t even alive anymore. We do this with the false idea that somehow we are making them suffer by being hurt and angry with them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being angry with someone, but it is how we express this anger that makes all the difference on us and our relationships . What is a grudge anyway? May it is harboring ill feelings toward another in the need to settle a score. Let’s try a little experiment.

Think of someone in your life right now (maybe not the most extreme person) who you are absolutely holding a grudge against right now. There is no way you are willing to forgive this person right now for their actions. Picture that person and hold onto that unwillingness to forgive. Now, just observe what emotions are there; Anger, resentment, sadness?  Also notice how you are holding your body right now, is it tense anywhere or feeling heavy? Now bring awareness to your thoughts; are they hateful and spiteful thoughts?

Most people who I do this with find this to be an uncomfortable experiment that elicits feelings of tension, anger, and thoughts of ill will toward the other person. This is not conjuring these feelings out of nowhere; this is just bringing to light what is already within stirring around. There is a common misperception that forgiveness means condoning the act of the other person. Forgiveness simply means releasing this cycle of torture that continues to reside inside.

Forgiving does not mean forgetting or condoning! Forgiveness is for the person who was perpetrated, not the perpetrator. It is saying, “I have already been offended against, I am going to let go of this so I don’t continue to be burdened by it.” You have already been tortured once, why continue letting this torture you by holding onto it with the erroneous belief that holding onto it is somehow hurting the other person. The practice of forgiveness has been shown to reduce stress, anger, and depression and support many aspects of well-being and happiness.

Like many things, this is easier said than done depending on the person and level of offense. In his book, Forgive for Good, Fred Luskin, Ph.D. lays out 9 steps to forgiving for you!

1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK.  Then, tell a trusted couple of people about your experience.
2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better.  Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.
3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or condoning of their action.  What you are after is to find peace.  Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”
4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes – or ten years -ago.  Forgiveness helps to heal those hurt feelings.
5. At the moment you feel upset practice a simple stress management technique to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.
6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you.  Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health or how you or other people must behave.  Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, peace and prosperity and work hard to get them.
7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you.  Instead of mentally replaying your hurt seek out new ways to get what you want.
8. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge.  Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you.  Forgiveness is about personal power.
9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.

As always please share your thoughts and questions below. Your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

Here’s what I’m thinking about when starting this next year of 2012:

“May we all recognize in this New Year that the moments of our lives are rare and precious. Open to them, Bask in them, We are alive.”

The reality is we often hold things that are rare in our world to be precious. These rare things are held to have a high value, weather it’s gold, an unbroken sand dollar on a beach, or the short time that a baby is a baby before growing up.

If you peel the lens back for a moment you can see that our lives in this very same way. We’re a blip in time in relation to the life of this planet we stand on and this Universe we live in.  All the moments of our lives are rare and precious and it’s incredibly skillful to bring that awareness back to our lives.

What happens when we start seeing our time on this planet as rare and precious?

The small stuff that make up the majority of our sticky worries tend to slide off us, our minds open up to what really matters. we begin to notice more compassion for ourselves and others and we begin to play. We gain a sense of humility and perhaps begin to recognize that what is most important is who you love and how you love them.

Try taking this quote into the New Year and see what happens.

May this New Year be filled with a sense of the preciousness and value of your life and the lives of all people,

Elisha Goldstein

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com