A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

Terentius Lucanus was a Roman Senator who brought Terence to Rome as a slave. He took him under his wing and educated him and soon freed him out of his amazement of his abilities. Terence went onto become a famous playwright around 170 BCE. One of his famous quotes was:

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”

How can a man who was once enslaved by other human beings transcend his anger and come up with a quote implying forgiveness and linking the common ground between all people?

It’s not the first time and it certainly hasn’t been the last.

Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , among 30 other books, was ridiculed as a child for being a selective mute for 6 years. Her mother would put her arm around her and say, “I know you’re not stupid or a moron like all the kids say you are. I know that one day you’ll be a great teacher. You’ll travel the world imparting wisdom.”

If you don’t know Maya Angelou, she is an African American woman who is a legend in her own time, a global renaissance woman teaching all around the world. She is also a religious person and in an interview she said that she takes it up as a difficult practice to see that we are children of God no matter what is coming out of our mouths or our actions. She has to see that even the members of the Ku Klux Klan are children of God too.

Note: If the word God triggers you, consider that we are all children of the earth or that we all inherently, deep down want the same thing.

What’s that?  To be safe, secure, loved and feel like we belong.

When we take a moment to think about it, it’s really quite amazing how trapped we become in our fears and perceptions that others are alien to us and dangerous based upon a different color of skin, race, religion, class or sexual preference. What’s more amazing is that there is some justification for a right to harm others based on differences.

If we think about it, we want to hit people and make them suffer because they look different, talk different or believe something different. Really? That’s definitely not what we learned in kindergarten.

Actually, this isn’t really all that amazing. It’s automatic and what’s truly unfortunate is how trapped we are in our minds and how controlled we can be based on erroneous or mistaken beliefs we learn from parents, media or culture.

It’s time to recognize that while our differences make us unique as human beings and are worth honoring, fundamentally we are all woven from the same cloth and are all vulnerable as human beings.

If you want to engage in a practice that will help you move through your automatic bias when you see people that are different than you, practice saying what psychologist Philippe Goldin says, “Just like me.”

So if you notice a judgment or subtle tensing in your body when you see someone of different color, class, religion, or sexual preference or maybe a celebrity, your boss or your neighbor, take a breath and say, “just like me.” Remember that this is a person with vulnerabilities, dreams, and aspirations who also wants to be cared about, understood and belong.

Go ahead bring it into your day.

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

Most of us have issues with either trusting ourselves or another person and yet trust remains the cornerstone of a loving intimate relationship either with ourselves or another. Today it’s my pleasure to bring to you David Richo, Ph.D., M.F.T. who gives us insight in his latest book Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy about how to open ourselves to real love and intimacy. David is a psychotherapist, teacher, workshop leader, and writer. He is also author of the consistently popular book The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them among many other books.

Today David talk to us about how our earliest relationships impact our ability to trust, what is naive trust, how mindfulness can help and some advice on what to do when trust breaks down.

Elisha: How do our earliest relationships impact our ability to trust?

David: The more our parents attuned to us and validated our emotions, the more we gained a capacity to trust ourselves and the world around us. Attunement is a communing; hence, it is reassuring and confirming. Authentic attunement provides us with a holding environment in which we can feel secure and can trust those who love us. Our trust grows not only from being held when we needed it but also from being let go of when we needed that. The parent who truly attunes to us will hold us but only for as long as we want to be held. Later in life that balance will be the hallmark of successful intimacy.

Elisha: In your book you mention that there’s a difference between naïve trust and healthy trust, can you give us some examples?

David: Healthy trust is directed toward someone who:

¨            Shows integrity and lives in accord with standards of fairness and honesty in all his or her dealings.

¨            May operate on the basis of self-interest but never at my expense or the expense of others.

¨            Supports me when I need him or her.

¨            Keeps agreements.

¨            Remains faithful.

¨            Does not lie or have a secret life.

¨            Genuinely cares about me.

¨            Stands by me and up for me.

¨            Is what he or she appears to be; wants to appear just as he or she is, no matter if at times that is unflattering.

¨            Respects boundaries

Trust is naïve when it is directed toward those who have shown themselves to be unreliable, offer a quick fix or profit if we invest, do not keep agreements, seduce us in and then withhold, do not honor our “No” but keep pushing, do not follow through on what they say they will do.

Elisha: What role does mindfulness play in learning to trust?

David: Mindfulness, a central Buddhist practice in meditation and in daily life, means that we keep coming back to the here and now, to pure experience uncluttered by mental chatter. Attention to our breath helps us to focus in that way. Mindfulness is a spiritual practice that liberates us into the authentic present by awakening us to how our mind distracts us with fear, desire, judgment, attachment, comparison, bias, and attempts to control what happens around us.

As we live more fully in the present, we begin to trust ourselves more and become more discerning about how trustworthy others are. Mindfulness focuses us on the moment and on our own presence in it. This is how trust grows.

Elisha: If you were sitting across the table from someone who was struggling in their relationship due to issues with trust, what might you tell them?

David: Mourning is our practice when we experience a loss of trust. We let ourselves feel sadness that our trust is lost, anger at the one taking it away, and fear that we will never find it again. We stay with the feelings of grief for as long as they are up for us. This automatically leads to a letting go of our pain, and we stop blaming ourselves or anyone else.

It is important to pay particular attention to our anger, defined as displeasure at an injustice. This means that anger is appropriate when it is based on the breaking of an agreement, a hurt at the heart level. Alternatively, an expectation is held by only one person. We are hurt at the ego level because our sense of entitlement was not honored. That anger is a frustration that can become aggressive and unhealthy. When we are committed to personal integrity, we look within ourselves to explore our anger. If it is appropriate, based on the breaking of a bilateral agreement, we express our anger directly to our partner, always nonviolently. When our anger is the indignation of our disappointed ego, we call ourselves on our projections and expectations. Then we bring our whole experience—and our unsatisfactory partner—to our loving-kindness practice.

Elisha: Thank you so much David!

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

Barry Boyce, Editor for Shambhala Sun Magazine has finally coined exactly what is happening in our culture today with his newest book The Mindfulness Revolution. Since Jon Kabat-Zinn appeared on Bill Moyers in 1993, research on the applications of mindfulness has soared exponentially.His Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program has been splintered off into Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)  for depressive relapse, Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) for addiction, MB-EAT for eating disorders and many more.

There is absolutely a revolution happening right now and there likely couldn’t be a more perfect time.

Corporations across the country are becoming increasingly interested in the applications of mindfulness to the workplace. In March 2011, Google, Facebook, Intel, Twitter and many more took part in the Wisdom 2.0 conference curious about how to integrate this into their work environments.

If you have an IPhone, you can get a Free 21 Day Mindfulness for the Workplace Pilot Program, available for a limited time to people who want to test it out.

In one chapter of The Mindfulness Revolution Norman Fischer, principal meditation teacher at Google’s mindfulness program gives us some practices to maintain mindfulness throughout the day:

Taking three conscious breaths – just three! – from time to time to interrupt your busy activity with a moment or two of calm awareness.

Keeping mindfulness slogan cards around your office or home to remind you to “Breathe” or “Pay Attention” or “Think Again.”

Training yourself through repetition to apply a phrase like “Is that really true?” to develop the habit of questioning your assumptions before you run with them.

Whenever you get up to walk somewhere during the day, practiced mindful walking—noticing your weight as it touches the ground with each swing of your leg and footfall.

Instituting the habit of starting your day by returning to your best intention, what you aspire to for yourself and others when you have a benevolent frame of mind.

Mindfulness is now being talked about as a catalyst for emotional intelligence which has applications in politics, business, sports, education, healthcare and so many other places.

Go ahead; try one of these suggestions today, what would happen if you actually brought a bit more mindfulness into your life?

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

Photo by mindfulness, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.

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

Nowadays most people who come in to see my for private therapy come to see me because of my background with mindfulness and psychotherapy. Whether the issue has to do with stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, or addiction, there is a sense of wanting to come home, to come back into their life, to gain emotional intelligence, to get back in touch with what really matters.

However, there is also a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda that mindfulness will be used as a relaxation exercise of some kind. While this may be a nice side effect of mindfulness practice, mindfulness is not relaxation.

It’s legitimate to ask, what is the difference between mindfulness and relaxation? After all, the most mainstreamed and popular program out there is called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Right in the title is the implication that we’re using this for stress reduction. However, it’s just a clever title to get people in the door; the program is so much more than that.

In A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook we answer this question:

How is meditation different from relaxation?

“While meditation can certainly bring on feelings of relaxation, it also may not. Your intention is what makes the difference. When you want to relax, you can engage in a wide variety of activities, from watching TV, reading a book, lying in a hammock, soaking in a bubble bath, doing breathing exercises…the list goes on and on. In mindfulness meditation, the intention is simply to place nonjudgmental attention on whatever object of awareness you’ve chosen.

So if you’re practicing mindfulness with eating a raisin, you’re tuning in to all of your senses, not for the purpose of relaxation, but for the purpose of truly and deeply experiencing the present moment. Practicing meditation for the purpose of relaxation can actually be a trap; if you meditate and don’t feel relaxed, your mind might start racing with thoughts about how it isn’t working. This could lead to feelings of frustration, anxiety, and disappointment, which may send you on a downward spiral toward becoming anxious or depressed.”

So mindfulness isn’t about just relaxing, it’s as Derek Walcott says, “Introducing the stranger who was yourself.”

It’s learning how to be present for your life so we don’t get so swept up in the tides of conditioned reactions that don’t serve us. It’s come back in touch with ability to choose new responses, open up the lens of life and see so much more than the same movie we’ve been seeing before.

While many programs suggest taking out large chunks of times to practice meditation, you are welcome to start just with 1 minute or 30 seconds right now.

Close your eyes and open up to what’s here physically and emotionally. Pause just to check in and allow whatever is here to be as it is. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “This is it!”

For this moment, feast on your life.

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

Photo by Emilian Robert Vicol, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.

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

While there have been many things that may have gone through your mind the minute you heard of Japan’s recent 8.9 earthquake, all the subsequent aftershocks, the Tsunami and threat of radiation from their impacted nuclear plants, one thing we begin to realize is how connected we really are.

A short time after the Tsunami hit the coast of Japan, large waves rolled into the Harbor of Santa Cruz, Ca thrashing the marina around. It’s become clearer to me that we’re all responsible for one another and I think that’s a huge driving force in the growing interest in compassion.

Compassion is defined as being able to put yourself in the shoes of another and inclining your heart toward wanting to help in some way.

Compassion practices have been shown to reduce stress and increase well-being.

A year ago I created the EBook A Mindful Dialogue to raise money for the people of Haiti. This book has now been expanded to include interviews with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Daniel Siegel, Sharon Salzberg, Christopher Germer, Sylvia Boorstein, Tara Brach, Zindel Segal, among so many more.

100% of the proceeds of A Mindful Dialogue go to Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org) which has been operating in Japan for the last 25 years.

You can get A Mindful Dialogue on your Kindle, IPad or Ebook Reader or directly as a download to your computer.

I think the reason so many people are now interested in compassion is not only because it has been linked to feeling better, but because the world has become so much smaller with the advent of technology and we can actually see the suffering of the world more clearly.

It seems that a continued and intentional practice of compassion can not only change our lives individually, but the ripple effect can be significant. People do this every day by giving donations, making sandwiches for people on the street, helping someone across the street, visiting those who are dying, or even just offering a smile to someone who seems to be having a tough day.

There has never been a more important time to cultivate compassion and it happens through practice.

Right now in this moment many people need our help, but the future of this world depends on the children.

If there are other organizations that you know of that are helping the children of the world, in particular associated with Japan’s relief, please share with us below.

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

Photo by Nasa Goddard Photo & Video, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.

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