Key Components of Mindfulness Based Therapy
Mindfulness based therapy, or use of mindfulness in therapy, invites us to turn our attention to what is already available as a resource, regardless of the content of our thoughts, how we’re feeling, or the experiences we may be mentally caught up in.
Folks often come to therapy seeking relief or some sense of helpful separation from racing thoughts, intrusive emotions, dissatisfaction in life, and defeating narratives or beliefs they’ve come to carry about themselves and the world. In short, they come seeking improvement and change. How then can a practice centering observation, noticing, and doing less, help to propel that desired change forward?
In the here-and-now of session, mindfulness based therapy encourages us to observe and reflect on our moment-to-moment experience. This may include observing breath, the information gathered by our senses or physical sensations, and naming or labelling what mentally or emotionally arises before blending with it, creating enough distance to allow it to exist at the same time as us – without taking us over.
Mindfulness based therapy then attempts to afford us agency in how we receive or respond to uncomfortable stimuli, even when we can’t opt out or control whether discomfort or distress happens to us. Read on to learn about some key components of this approach.
Developing Awareness of Thoughts, Emotions, and Sensations
Mindfulness practices center growing our awareness of our internal experiences as a safeguard against becoming enmeshed with them in a way that erases our power and risks us feeling helpless against them. By beginning to foster this observing eye, we may begin to be with our inner landscape from a place of curiosity and calm over frustration, overwhelm, or judgement.
Developing an Accepting and Non-Judgemental Stance Towards Internal Experience
As much as we might want to change our feelings or thinking patterns, or even our moods, mindfulness based therapy wants to soften our struggle with them first, enabling us to widen our ability to tolerate or be with them, regardless of if we like them. It does this by fostering an attitude of acceptance and non-judgement towards our thoughts and feelings, putting the pressure off of change and eradication. It trusts that by taking a stance of acceptance, interest in, or observation towards thoughts and emotions, we simultaneously shift our perspective to one that affords us more mental or emotional flexibility, potentially making change easier to access.
Developing Mindfulness Practices Outside of Activating Moments
It’s challenging to use a new skill in the best of times, let alone when we may be triggered emotionally, or activated in our nervous systems. Generally, therapies that utilize mindfulness techniques (such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy), promote building a regular practice with the mindfulness skills taught so they’re more readily available, familiar, and routine by the time we come head-to-head with a difficult emotion, thought, or situation.
To explore potential mindfulness based practices to incorporate into your day to day or therapy sessions, you may take a peek at this article for suggestions. Rest assured that you do not have to sit down to meditate or take a class to practice mindfulness. It might simply involve becoming more present in the activities you already part take in, like naming sights, sounds, and smells on your commute to work, or observing the texture and temperature of liquid while drinking a glass of water.
Mindfulness based therapy subsumes that by more reliably accessing presence and reflectiveness when in our moment-to-moment experience, we begin to develop a tool for creating new relationships with difficult thoughts, and may start to find greater agency over aspects of our inner lives we hadn’t encountered before.