By talking about “mindfulness” in the context of therapy, what I’m referring to is staying with what is real rather than what’s imagined.
Mindfulness itself is a bit of a wacky term that has risen to prominence in the West as a catch-all for what is basically meditation.
It’s been said a better term for mindfulness should be “mind emptiness” because the practice of mindfulness is about staying with what’s real and nothing to do with what’s going on in your head.
Mindfulness is taught in schools and other settings as a very practical and genuinely helpful way for everyday people to alleviate stress, anxiety and depression. Mindfulness exercises point to a way out of overthinking and rumination by instead focusing the attention on things in the outside world.
Whether for a minute or an hour, a classic mindfulness exercise is to focus externally and take in what each of the senses are perceiving. Identify five colours, five sounds, five smells, textures, and so on.
What mindfulness offers in so doing is the same thing as meditation by a different name, because even though it is widely misunderstood – including by many people who describe themselves as meditation guides or teachers – meditation is about staying with what is real.
And everything is real except for what you think.
How then does that fit when we talk about mindfulness-based psychotherapy?
Simply being mindful doesn’t sound like it will do much to help alleviate the suffering of everyday people beset by what feels like very real, very urgent problems.
Bringing an attitude of mindfulness or meditation to working with clients is about trying to identify what is actually happening versus all of the shenanigans, drama and confusion occurring in the mind.
Putting it that way risks sounding dismissive. In the West, we have long since really come to believe that our mind and its activities are far more important than they truly are. Unlike in the East – where people there have their own share of difficulties – the West has a rich history in which the dominance of the mind, the importance of thought, and the belief in solving problems by thinking up solutions is deeply entrenched.
The mind is a wonderful tool. Left unchecked, it can ruin our lives. The very difficulties that drive clients to therapy seeking relief are almost entirely of the mind. And the irony – and the error – is that the bulk of Western psychology is about using the mind to help resolve problems of the mind.
They say when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem ends up looking like a nail. Likewise, a solution conjured in the mind to a problem the mind is experiencing is the same as using a broken tool and hoping it can fix itself.
If we want to get to the heart of what’s really happening in our lives, we first have to get comfortable with what’s real. The mind with its myriad tricky coping mechanisms is a master, honed through years of thought and schooling to create a parallel dimension in which we live – often in suffering – believing what we think about our experience is true and then acting upon those mistaken beliefs.
And we wonder why we only end up with more problems!
It is the mind and its misguided, but well-intention beliefs that we really have to drill into if we want to find relief from the suffering we experience in trying to solve our problems without the clarity needed for a really clear idea of what needs to be done.
I invite you to take five minutes and focus on the world around you while declining to go into thinking about it, and then see just how different things can be when you realise the majority of the time absolutely nothing is happening.
And if you want to find this peace more often, click the button and drop me a line.