A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

Loss is an unavoidable fact of life that we all experience, and it can come in all forms from job loss, divorce, unemployment, relocation, and of course, the most obvious, the death of someone we love. The truth is, for most of us, we’d love nothing more than to forget about the word “death” and to move on with life, turning the other cheek. The problem is, when we lose sight of the experience of loss, we also lose sight of the preciousness of the moment and of life.

In a previous blog post here, psychotherapist and author Susan Berger, Ed.D., LICSW, talked about her own struggles with loss at a very young age. She said:

“I was reminded about my own mortality, and my sense of urgency to experience life as much as possible and make a difference in the world.”

When we look toward the bandaged wound, as Rumi says, we can pause and take a moment to look at the deeper questions in life and it is here where we find a sense of purpose and meaning.

Ron Pies, MD, talked about how the deaths of 50 passengers on continental flight 3407 “put everything in perspective.” It seems that we need death to pop us into the present moment sometimes to remind us of what is most important in life.

Or maybe we just need to be reminded of death as may be happening as you read these words of this post. In his book Grieving Mindfully, Sameet Kumar Ph.D. shows us that through the process of grief, we can find our eyes open to life.

I want to invite you to take a moment right now (just 1 minute) and consider what and who is most important in your life. Is there something that has been on your mind that you’ve wanted to express to that person, but just haven’t found the time or the motivation?

Author Stephen Levine sums it up with a single question: “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say and why are you waiting?”

We may not need death to remind us of what is most important after all.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Who did this question remind you of? Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

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

There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by Rumi:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

A couple weeks ago I wrote the post Moving Past Avoidance: Monday’s Mindful Quote with Helen Keller, which talks about being able to move toward the things in life we are avoiding as a potential path toward creating real change.

I think we’d be pretty hard pressed to find someone on this planet who at the core didn’t want to be loved. But Rumi’s words point us in the direction of not looking outside of ourselves for love, but within to the barriers for love. Why? Because I imagine he believes that love is all around us if we are open to it.

Whether you believe this or not, for most (if not all) of us, we have built up barriers to love because we have been hurt by love’s departure or absence in the past. Maybe we were just babies when we first felt the disconnection and made an unconscious pact to not feel that pain again. Or maybe it was emotional or physical abuse that led to the distrust of love. Could it have been the loss of a significant relationship in your life that you swore you would never love that much again because the fall is too traumatic?

We can take this a step further. What stops us on a day-to-day basis from relating to ourselves with love?

Maybe there are thoughts of worthlessness or deficiency? Perhaps there are feelings of shame that drive the unconscious or conscious thoughts that we’re simply not worthy of love, even our own. Self-judgments run rampant here.

It’s just so clear how hateful and violent we can be with ourselves. This negative self-talk is a huge barrier we built against experiencing the love. In fact, going up in our heads is probably the number one barrier we build against feeling emotions in general.

This week, do a little experiment with yourself. Make a conscious effort to see how you talk to yourself. How often are you kind? How often are you self-judging? Is there a way you can be more compassionate with the way you talk to yourself?

Make a mental note these events in your mind.

As always, please share “your thoughts,” stories, 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

I am happy to introduce you to Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D. to help us out with the integration of mindfulness into pregnancy, birth, and early parenting. Cassandra is a licensed clinical psychologist, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (www.noetic.org) , codirector of the Mind Body Medicine Research Group at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, CA, and co-president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology. Her research has focused on mindfulness-based approaches to cultivating emotional balance, the involvement of emotion regulation in addiction and recovery, and the factors, experiences, and practices involved in psychospiritual transformation.  She has published several academic articles and spoken at academic conferences worldwide.

She is also author of the wonderful book, Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year (New Harbinger/Noetic Books, 2009) and co-author of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (New Harbinger/Noetic Books, 2008).

Today Cassandra talks to us about the importance of navigating roller coaster of new parenting with a mindful approach and gives us some tips on how to do so.

Elisha: The journey of pregnancy, childbirth and early parenting can seem like a roller coaster at times for new parents. How can we integrate mindful parenting to help us through this time? 

Cassandra: That really is an apt metaphor because pregnancy, childbirth, early parenting, and for many, even conception can be such a roller coaster – ups, downs, highs, lows, scary parts, exhilarating parts, relief. It really is an intensified microcosm of the life journey. Mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat Zinn quotes Zorba the Greek – calling life “the full catastrophe”! Perhaps no time is this more true than during the birthing year and the year or so afterward.

Mindful parenting is a way of riding this roller coaster with your eyes open, your mind clear, your body relaxed, and your spirit and heart involved – rather than clutching on for dear life, clenching shut, and not really enjoying the ride at all. In some ways, it’s about riding it for all it’s worth.

Mindfulness practice helps us deal with stressful moments by keeping us breathing, awake, aware, and able to meet each moment as it arises with an understanding, first of all, that all moments are temporary. Everything arises and passes away, and something new comes to take its place. Just seeing that, letting go, and riding the wave, say of your baby crying in the middle of the night, or difficulties with your partner, or difficulty with breastfeeding – or any of the whole host of things that can happen – can really help.

Then meeting experiences just as they are rather than resisting them or struggling against them (I hate it, I don’t want it to be this way, this shouldn’t be happening this way) – coming in to each moment with a stance of acceptance – meaning that you meet it as it is, not that you necessarily decide to like it, allows you to use all that energy you might otherwise have spent trying to make it different instead finding ways to deal with the situation as it is. You start finding solutions and making choices that are in alignment with your goals and values as a person and as a parent, rather than reacting automatically or habitually.

Spiritual wisdom, and now scientific research, shows that paradoxically, attempts to avoid or suppress your experiences – even when they are upsetting, like anxiety or anger – prolong them. Instead, meeting your own anxiousness or anger, say during a toddler temper tantrum in a supermarket, accepting that “this is what is happening right now – my baby is throwing a fit and I am getting anxious and angry” and breathing right into that for a few moments, centering your awareness in the present moment and in your body, amazingly helps you respond in ways that are adaptive for you and your family.

On that note, centering your awareness in the present moment may be one of the ways that mindfulness is most helpful in pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenting. As I said in my book, Mindful Motherhood, “Being present forms the foundation for mindful motherhood. It’s the key to being a mindful mom. If being nonjudgmental, accepting, curious, and compas­sionate, and observing your experience and letting it be as it is without struggling against it are some of the rooms that make up the house of mindful motherhood, being in the present moment is the foundation of the house.” Why is this? I talk about it as making your attention less like a pinball machine, and more like a searchlight. In a pinball machine, you don’t have much choice about which direction the pinball goes-it just bounces around from place to place depending on what it bangs into. Our attention can be like that, bouncing from place to place, rolling into the future projecting about what is going to happen, or ruminating about the past and what happened there. We even have whole emotional reactions to what we imagine about the future and the past, totally unrelated to what is happening right now, in the present moment. Our attention can also be drawn by whatever is most compelling, and because of how we are wired, this is often what is most negative, what is not working, what doesn’t fit, or what is potentially threatening or fear-inducing. That’s just how our minds work – partly because it’s been useful for survival.

But when directed with intention, attention is like a searchlight. Wherever you point your searchlight becomes illuminated, and you can see what is there. When your attention, your searchlight, is not pointed at some­thing, it is difficult to see clearly what is there. So, when your attention is not trained onto the present moment, it’s hard to perceive the current situation accurately. And, in general, the more your attention and awareness is on the present moment, the more you can be responsive, awake, and creative as a person and as a mom. Babies love people who are right there in the moment with them. It makes them feel safe, loved, and attended to. For that matter, so do partners, loved ones, colleagues, and in fact when we learn to center our attention in the present moment, even we end up feeling safer, loved, and attended to. Present-moment awareness in parenting makes it easier to do everything – from feeding the baby, to soothing their crying, to dealing with in-laws, and it helps us see all the aspects of each situation – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The focus of mindful awareness practice is to cultivate the capacity to be aware and present with whatever is happening. It is to stabilize your attention so that you can be the one who is directing the searchlight of your attention, rather than being the pinball, having your attention bounce toward whatever is most compelling at the moment.

Mindful awareness happens in the present moment. In fact, when you really think about it, everything that you can do anything about happens in the present moment. I am sitting with my baby having lunch with a friend and her baby. I am nursing my baby and reading this book. I am walking on the StairMaster, five months pregnant. In some ways, the only relevant place for your attention to be is right now, in this present moment. Motherhood happens now, and now, and now. As much as we spend our time focusing on the past or planning or rehearsing for the future, the only moment in which you have any power is right now.

When you are present, you can see when your baby starts to get distressed, sometimes before it turns into a full-on wail. When the baby is wailing, you can still be present with her, rooted in the present moment in your body with your breath­ing. You can see your baby’s expressions and can better respond to what you sense your baby needs.

Elisha: If you were sitting across the table from two soon-to-be parents, what advice would you give them about what to expect and skillful ways to relate to their child as new parents? 

Cassandra: This is really going to be one of the major rides of your life. You can expect to be tired, exhausted even. You can expect to have your lifestyle, and your relationship to one another change. Your bodies will change (even yours dad!), your identities, the very way you see yourselves will change. And, as a good friend told me at my baby shower, your heart and capacity for love will stretch wider than you ever thought it could.

I would say that cultivating mindful awareness is a wonderful foundation for great parenting. Mindful awareness is a skill that can be learned, like playing the piano or learning a new language, and as such it takes practice. There are lots of opportunities now to learn mindfulness – at a local meditation center, through taking a mindfulness-based stress reduction class, and increasingly mindful parenting classes are popping up everywhere. The focus here is on being aware of your experiences as parents as they arise, meeting them as they are, learning to center your attention in the present-moment – on what actually is happening right now, rather than your stories about it, or what it means. It’s about learning to approach all of your experiences, as much as possible with openness, curiosity, and compassion.  It’s about learning to ride the waves of parenting rather than resisting them and getting battered about in the process.

But mindfulness is more than just a skill, it is also an approach to life, an approach to parenting, that is already something you know how to do. You just need to spend more time in that part of you that is naturally mindful and aware and get more familiar with it. It’s spending more time in the part of you that is resting in your awareness of what is happening, rather than being completely caught up your thoughts about it. Spending more time in the part of you that is here, right now, in this moment, in your body, rather than thinking, doing, achieving, accomplishing – which we all spend so much time doing. In some ways, it’s spending more time just “being” with your family, rather than “doing.”

And above all, cultivate compassion for yourself, each other, your loved ones, and your little one. You will make mistakes, fall into reactions that are not in alignment with your highest ideals as a parent or a partner, and lose your mind from time to time. That too, is a part of life and of parenting. If you are partnered, make time for one another without the baby, so that you can stay connected at a deep level. Give yourself and each other the benefit of the doubt, intentionally be kind to yourself and each other, and take time for the renewal and self-care you need to stay sane. This too, is an important part of mindful parenting.

Thank you so much Cassandra!

To the readers: As always, please share your thoughts, questions and stories below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

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

There is no question about it, the interest in Mindfulness-Based Interventions to work with people experiencing a variety of “disorders” and also in healthy individuals is growing at a rapid pace. There has been research with psychological issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar, addiction, eating disorders, ADHD, OCD, Parenting and others. There has also been plenty of research with medical diagnoses such as Chronic Pain, HIV/AIDS, Cancer, Sleep disorders, heart disease, epilepsy and others.

The most well-known of these are Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and a growing interest in Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) for addictive relapse.

In her book  The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions, Shauna Shapiro shows a variety of research with mindfulness-based interventions and says,

As it stands, there is solid evidence that mindfulness-based treatments can be successfully applied to the treatment of symptoms of anxiety and depression, whether MBSR, MBCT or ACT is applied. Mixed-modality intensive treatments like DBT that incorporate mindfulness training are also useful for treating more complex personality disorders, which often include substance abuse and self-harming behaviors. 

Yet, it’s amazing that there has been this must positive research in only 30 years, most of it coming in the last 10 years. This is an exciting time in the field of mindfulness as a modality for medical and psychological distress.

The research is clearly pointing out that mindfulness as an approach has been and can continue to be translated into the mainstream and is indeed helpful as an intervention.

In a previous interview with Shauna, I asked her what she felt was the most exciting research out there in connection with mindfulness and she said:

Neuroplasticity. I believe this single word gives people hope; hope that change is possible. For example, we used to think that we all had a “happiness set point” much like with weight, and that no matter what our circumstances, we would always end up back at baseline. Good scientific evidence substantiates this theory, for example, people who win the lotto or those who are in a terrible accident and become paralyzed, after an initial spike in the expected direction, return to their baseline levels of happiness. Thus it was concluded that we had a happiness set point that was not very moveable. This is great news if you are born happy, however if you aren’t, it leaves you feeling pretty hopeless…And yet the new research in neuroplasticity demonstrates that we can change our level of happiness because we can modify both the activity and structure of our brain through meditation training. Recent research shows that meditation practice increases activity in areas of the brain associated with positive emotion, and shows structural changes in the brain due to long term meditation practice. This new research is quite hopeful, suggesting that although happiness may not change due to external circumstances, changing our internal circumstances, through mindfulness training, can change our level of happiness.

How do you get started with mindfulness? You can click on this link to start a short practice right now. Enjoy!

Much more to come in this field…stay tuned. As always, please share your thoughts, stories 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

A while back I wrote the post 10 Quotes for a Mindful Day and followed up with 10 (More) Quotes for a Mindful Day. Since then I began an increasingly popular tradition called Mondays Mindful Quote where every Monday I post a quote that I think has some relevance to Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and then explore the quote.

Here is a new list I’m calling 10 Quotes for a Mindful Day Part III. I will write future posts that explore some of these quotes and how they are relevant to our daily lives. If you already have ideas on how they are relevant to you, please share your thoughts below (you can even do so anonymously if you like) as we can all learn from this living wisdom. Enjoy!

• “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
  ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
• “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
  ~ Pema Chödrön
• “Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.”
  ~ Louis L’Amour
• “There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”
  ~ Storm Jameson
• “When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.”
  ~ Tara Brach
• “We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.”
  ~Charlotte Joko Beck
• “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable. This is true.”
  ~Thomas Merton.
• “There is sitting meditation. There is walking meditation. Why not listening and speaking meditation? Isn’t it sensible that one could practice mindfulness in relationship and so get better at it?”
  ~Gregroy Kramer
• “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

What are some quotes that move you?

Please share your thoughts, stories, quotes, and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

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