5 Ways Mindfulness Supercharges Therapy
If mindfulness is getting left out of your therapy, you’re missing out.
Traditionally, mindfulness and psychotherapy have been used as two separate approaches. You go to therapy to talk through issues and gain insight about your life but mindfulness practices are done separately, if at all.
Here’s 5 ways mindfulness makes therapy more effective and speeds up your growth and healing…
1.Turning Off the Engine
Our brains are busy machines, handling many different complex operations at once. We zip through our lives like cars in motion. Sometimes we get a signal that something is wrong in the car’s functioning, maybe a check engine light, an unusual sound, or a sensation like rumbling as we drive.
There is no way to find out what’s causing such a disturbance while the car is still in motion. Imagine trying to open the hood and inspect a car while still driving it! Instead, we have to pull the car over, put it in park, and turn off the engine, before we can look inside.
Let’s take this analogy back to therapy…
A client wants to understand what has been causing his anxiety attacks. The anxiety is his check engine light, it’s a signal that something in his experience wants and needs attention. In a session we use mindfulness to help this client slow down his thoughts, lower the internal noise, and drop more deeply into his experience. In a mindful state this client can start to really observe how this anxiety is occurring in him in the present moment.
Now rather than guessing about and talking on and on about the issue as we bump along the road, we can witness the anxiety directly. From this deeper contact with his anxiety we can begin to get a sense of what is happening outside of his everyday awareness of it that is keeping him in this anxious state.
2. Cultivating an Observing Witness
Everytime we practice mindfulness, we exercise the muscle of non-judgmental awareness. As in the previous example, once we’ve pulled the car over and turned off the engine, we can get out of the car and observe what’s actually going on.
Mindfulness helps create the space necessary to cultivate a non-judgmental witness in ourselves to be with whatever comes up.
Building this skill of observing and being with what is happening in our experience is an important aspect of self-regulation. When we can witness what’s happening there is less of a chance that we will become overwhelmed or totally taken over with the feelings or sensations that arise.
From this place we can notice what’s there without jumping to meaning, judgment, labeling, or even having too many feelings about our feelings. When a client is mindfully witnessing their experience they may say something like, “I notice that a part of me is feeling sad and another part of me is feeling anxious.”
We offer clients regular opportunities to build and strengthen this capacity as mindfulness is woven into the therapeutic process.
3. Cultivating Self-Compassion
Being in a mindful state allows for more possibility of self-compassion.
In mindfulness, once we’ve cultivated this non-judgmental awareness that can more objectively see, sense, and name what is present in our experience, we can begin to cultivate a sense of compassion and care towards what is there. As we pay attention mindfully to our inner experience we can start to bring an attitude of curiosity, tenderness and love towards the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise. Instead of passing judgment and getting caught up in the feelings we have about what’s happening, we can actually turn towards the shame, fear, tension, or anxiety, and offer it our loving attention.
4. Bringing in the Body
Traditional talk therapy uses conversation and talking about our issues to move the therapy process forward. From an early age, in the industrialized world, we are taught that thinking is the best way to know or understand ourselves and the world.
Our human consciousness however, goes far beyond what we can easily put into words. Much of our experience happens in the form of sensation and movement and takes place in our bodies. By paying close attention to how our bodies feel we can understand much more about our emotional and behavioral patterns.
In therapy, we bring that embodied focus directly to the issues at hand. When speaking about a difficult relationship for example, we can slow down and use mindfulness to bring the body into the conversation. We get curious about the pain that is present while the relationship is being talked about.
We can then mindfully study what comes from focusing on that pain in the present moment. Things like memories, images, sensations, or feeling states may arise that are connected to our earliest relational traumas and the beliefs that we formed around them. This insight begins to open the door for transformational work that otherwise might not have been possible by just talking about the relationship.
5. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Like sensation, imagery is another main component of our conscious experience that can get overlooked in therapy. Pictures and symbols evoke powerful emotional reactions in us, and we can learn much about the contents of our unconscious minds by studying the images that move, transfix and compel us. As with sensation, mindful awareness allows us to pay closer, slower attention to mental imagery so we can learn and gain powerful insight that we may not have arrived at through talking.