All Resources & Writing
Mechanisms of Mindfulness
In mindlessness, we are often drawn into our thoughts and feelings. They distract us from, inform, or seem to control our behavior while we, consciously or unconsciously, assume our internal processes to be realistic and true. Through this assumption, we become immersed in or fused to our internal process. A main practice in mindfulness meditation is to defuse from our internal experience so that we can observe the contents of consciousness (e.g., values, impressions, thoughts, emotions, reasoning, stories about experience). This is a shift from subjective immersion in to an objective perception of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Mindful Psychotherapy
A mindful approach to therapy differs from conventional approaches because it is more concerned with opening directly to experience than with problem or symptom resolution. An emphasis on presence, what is happening moment-by-moment, instead of cognitive reflection, allows for a radically different approach to exploring experience. Reflection is an exploration of the contents of consciousness; while presence is the way we observe, hold, react to, contract in, strive toward, and ultimately experience the contents.
Mindful-Being Psychotherapy & Increased Therapuetic Efficacy
In addition to mindfulness-based and mindfulness-informed therapy, I suggest a third, equally important category of mindfulness integration: the therapist’s being mindful in the moment with the client, which I call mindful-being. Of course, I could simply call this mindful psychotherapy, but that title doesn’t delineate which part of the therapy is mindful. Mindful-being is the therapist’s way of being in session, touching every aspect of therapy, for example, what is noticed, interventions, counter-transference, compassion, or insight. This has more of a bearing on how the client experiences the therapy than what is said to the client.