A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

One of the wonderful things about holidays is their often explicit reminders to express gratitude in one way or another. I’m writing this blog on Memorial Day, which is a time to express gratitude for our soldiers who have given their lives with the intention of creating and maintaining security and freedom.  In line with Mondays Mindful Quotes, Meister Eckhart said,

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.”

We often take our freedoms for granted. Take this moment to consider your freedoms in this world. Do you have freedom of speech, the right to vote, and the freedom to practice personal religion?

What other freedoms do you have that you might be taking for granted?

Gratitude has been shown to do wonders for mental health, so go ahead and reflect on or write below what you are grateful for in respect to the freedoms have in this country or the country you are in?

Here are a couple more posts on gratitude if you’re interested:

• 5 Steps to Gratitude and Lovingkindness: Mondays Mindful Quote with Hafiz
• Neuroplasticity, Gratitude and Your Mental Health

Go ahead and write below what you’re grateful for. Your interactions below provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

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

Earlier this month I brought Dr. Ron Siegel author of the new book, The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems, on to talk to us about Mindfulness as a path to work with stress, anxiety, and Depression. Ronald D. Siegel, Psy.D. is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School where he has taught for the past 25 years, a Board and Faculty member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, and a long-term student of mindfulness meditation.  Dr. Siegel is also co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and coauthor of Back Sense: A Revolutionary Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain. He maintains a private clinical practice in Lincoln, Massachusetts and teaches internationally about mindfulness and psychotherapy and mind-body treatment.

Today, Dr. Siegel talks to us about how he uses mindfulness in his own psychotherapy practice, ways we can work with procrastination, and some advice he has for those who are suffering.

Elisha: In your own psychotherapy practice, how do you choose to integrate meditation or mindfulness into psychotherapy?

Ron: Therapists often ask me this question. It all depends on the needs of the person with whom I’m working. Mindfulness practices are designed to give us insight into how our minds create suffering so that we can then free ourselves from this suffering. Decades of personal mindfulness practice, together with having had the privilege of exploring these matters with experienced meditation teachers and professional colleagues, has given me a glimpse into some of the patterns that create this suffering.

Two that I’ve already mentioned are the tendency to try to avoid painful experiences (experiential avoidance) and the tendency to get lost in and believe our thoughts. Others include our tendency to resist life’s inevitable changes, our tendency to become preoccupied with trying to buttress our self-esteem, and our tendency to disconnect from others—to feel isolated and not notice our natural commonalities and interconnectedness.

So when I’m sitting with a client or patient, I’m always thinking, “how are they becoming trapped in suffering” and looking for ways to interrupt these patterns. For many people, learning formal mindfulness meditation may be helpful. In this case I’m happy to teach them some mindfulness practices in our sessions together. But for others who I don’t think would be interested in exploring these, I look instead for other ways to illuminate the patterns that are causing them suffering.

These can involve a full range of psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral or family systems explorations. As I often tell therapists who I am helping to train, mindfulness practices are not in and of themselves a complete psychotherapy, but instead can be a useful part of treatment. When I do teach practices in sessions, I try to tailor them to my client or patients’ cultural background. So I’ll present these practices in more “spiritual” language for folks who are drawn to this view of the world, and in more “scientific” language for others.

Elisha: One of the chapters you have in your book is around breaking bad habits. One major bad habit that people work with is procrastination. Can you tell us a mindfulness solution for breaking this bad habit?

Ron: Procrastination is an interesting type of experiential avoidance. Most of us don’t procrastinate when it comes to eating ice cream, but we may well procrastinate when it comes to doing our taxes or writing an article. What’s the difference? I suspect that most of the time anxiety plays a role. We’re afraid that turning to the task at hand will either bring up bad feelings (“Oh my God, I can’t believe how much I owe!”) or prove to be difficult (“I just can’t think of anything to write”). So when we procrastinate we are trying to avoid an unpleasant experience.

Mindfulness practices help us to approach unpleasant experiences. Therefore, in addition to establishing a regular mindfulness practice to get into the habit of non-avoidance, I’d suggest becoming curious about the feelings associated with procrastination. “What am I feeling in my body right now?” “What images come to mind when I imagine starting the project?” Mindfulness involves being curious about everything—investigating our experience in each moment. I suspect that doing this with procrastination will help to illuminate some pain that we’re trying to avoid. Seeing it clearly can help us to face this discomfort and in thereby get our task done.

Elisha: If you were sitting across the table from someone who was emotionally struggling in life right now, what advice would you give them?

Ron: That’s a pretty broad question. It would really depend upon what they’re struggling with. One reason I wrote The Mindfulness Solution is that mindfulness practice has been taken up by many mental health professionals as a one-size-fits-all remedy. And while in general cultivating mindfulness is useful for most of us, we each need to approach this differently depending upon our circumstances.

For example, some mindfulness practices help us to establish a sense of stability and safety in our life. These can be very helpful when we’re feeling readily overwhelmed, when our world feels unstable, when we’re in transition. Other practices help us to move toward, or uncover, difficult thoughts and feelings that we may be blocking out of our awareness. These are most useful when our life is more stable and we feel ready to tackle patterns or feelings that have been causing us distress.

Helping people to find the direction that they need to move in is something of an art—and an imperfect one at that. So the first thing I’d do is try to get to know the person across from me, to listen as carefully as I could to their experience. Once, through back and forth conversation, I felt as though I understood their situation, I’d try to identify with them what is causing their suffering. Only once we had a shared understanding of this would I venture into the realm of advice, and even then cautiously. People are so complicated, and we therapists are ourselves so limited in our understanding of what we ourselves, no less other people, need, that advice is always risky. In general I find it more useful to explore patients’ experience with them, putting our minds and hearts together to look for ways out of the patterns that are perpetuating their suffering.

Thank you so much again Ron.

To the readers: Please share your thoughts, stories 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

With so much to do in a day, it’s important to accept the fact that for most of us, our in baskets will never be empty. I picked up a book a while ago called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (not a bad title) by David Allen. While it was not explicitly focused on mindfulness as a means to get things done, it seemed to have that flavor.

One thing he wrote about that I absolutely resonated with and that I write about at times is that unless a task has somewhere it can be put in the mind, it’s going to continually swim around in there leading to greater stress, overwhelm, distraction, and procrastination. In other words, a golden rule is that the mind needs to know there is a plan to get a task done or revisit it. The mind can then calm down a bit more and focus on the task at hand.

Here are 3 things I’ve learned from my own life and the book that have helped me be more effective:

1. Do one thing at a time –  Choose one thing to focus on whether that’s your email, making calls, working on an important project or washing, listening to a loved one, or washing the dishes. Make this the focus and choose a period of time you will engage. Just like many of the writings I have done here, when the mind gets distracted (e.g., television, unimportant emails, surfing the web), notice the distraction, let it be and gently guide your attention back to what you’re intending to focus on in that moment.
2. Stick to a 2-Minute Rule – This mainly applies to emails, but could apply to other things as well. The idea here is that if it takes under two minutes then just go ahead and get it done. If it’s going to take more than 2 minutes then this leads us into tip #3.
3. Set Reminders – When tasks come up and they are going to take more than 2 minutes, they need a place holder. So set a reminder in your calendar and carve out a time to get this done. If it is something general that you don’t have to get done, but you want to be reminded of it anyway, set a general reminder to consider this later.

When the mind feels like tasks have a place and time, things start to settle down and it makes it easier to focus on what is most important. This helps us be more effective and efficient with most things we need to get done.

Part of the beauty of this all is that you can also be practicing mindfulness at the same time. The idea of being present with what you’re doing and working with the wandering mind. When your mind or behavior wanders, rather than buying into the self blame game, see if you can just treat it as a distraction, and realize that that is just the way the mind works. Compassionately guide yourself back to the task at hand.

Slowly but surely things may start to feel lighter and you may start to feel better about yourself.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories 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

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 Shantideva:

 “All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy.”

Somewhere along the way many of us develop this notion that the goal above all else in life is for us, individually, to be happy. We begin to focus on ourselves to the exclusion of others. One major problem in depression is this painful self-focus as the ruminations just go on and on. And if our goal is to be happy, but others get hurt or ignored in the process, I promise there will be no happiness.

The fact is, we are not islands.

Albert Einstein said it well in a letter published in the New York Post (1972):

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

I like the piece where he says, “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.” We walk around as delusional people at times not recognizing the interconnectedness of things. The energy we give off at home, in public, or in the office absolutely has an effect on the people around us for better or worse.

So let’s get practical and start creating change today.

Here’s an informal practice from A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook:

“Human beings are social animals, and the sweetness of relationships with others and the larger world—indeed, the universe—can nourish our lives. As you deepen your connections, you’ll find increasing delight in this interplay of giving and receiving. It may even become mysterious as to who is actually giving and who is receiving.

 There are many things you can do to foster connection. Try sincerely asking a family member, friend, or anyone at all how he or she is doing, and listen deeply to what the other person says. Everyone loves to be heard and understood—to “feel felt.” Or practice random acts of kindness toward anyone, including strangers. You might volunteer to help a child, an elderly person, or anyone in need. You can offer time and energy to an organization that’s helping make the world a better place, or simply enjoy a pet, grow a garden, or pick up litter. Feel the sweetness of connecting with the world and its beings without wanting or expecting anything from them.”

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. How do you relate to this topic, what do you do? Your interaction below provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

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