Mindfulness-Based Strategies
About
The practice of mindfulness: Mindfulness, or mindful awareness, is a life-skill leading to a way of being that improves the quality of our lives.
Mindfulness practice involves becoming more aware of our everyday experiences and how we react to them. In particular, it involves paying attention in a non-judgemental way to our feelings, thoughts and physical sensations so that we become less caught up in them and better able to manage them. This practice creates a ‘mental space’ in which we can make more carefully considered decisions and life-enhancing choices.
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Origins and development of mindfulness: The practice of mindfulness originates within the Buddhist tradition and has been central to it for approx. 2500 years. Over the past 30 years or so, certain Westerners have been teaching mindfulness in a secular setting in order to help people manage the stresses and strains of modern life. One of the founders of this work is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn who established the Stress Reduction Clinic at the Medical Centre of the University of Massachusetts in the late 1970s. The main application of mindfulness in this setting was to help people overcome their suffering from chronic pain and illness. There have been some 16,000 participants through this programme since its inception, with proven beneficial outcomes of reduced stress and significant improvements to the quality of their lives.
What to expect
One-to-one sessions: For those that are drawn towards practising mindfulness-based strategies, Free Flow Healing therapy sessions will include them alongside other therapeutic work. For example, there may be a guided body scan to ground awareness in the body and so enhance the effectiveness of the shiatsu, energy field healing or reflexology. Or, one of the most immediately effective of exercises, before, during or after treatment, is the 3-minute breathing space - bringing attention and awareness into the present moment more fully. It is hoped that such exercises will also be carried on beyond the session as part of a developing “home practice”. And for those wanting to learn in more depth about the practice of mindfulness for pain, illness or stress, treatment sessions will have this as a primary focus.
Courses: From February to March 2012, Alison will be teaching an 8-week mindfulness course in Brixton / Herne Hill SW2. The course offers a wide range of mindfulness skills to ease the suffering associated with chronic or long-term pain, illness, stress or fatigue.
Click here to find out more about this course
Benefits
The benefits of mindfulness are far-reaching. It helps us learn how to be with and relate to our difficulties in a way that is both compassionate and healing.
There are many ways that mindfulness practice may aid health and well-being. Practitioners, course participants and researchers have reported the following benefits:
• Better mind–body integration. Many of us have a tendency to live “in our heads” and ignore what is happening in our bodies. Mindfulness makes us more aware of what is happening both in our bodies and in our minds, so we can experience and take into account the full range of our thoughts as well as our feelings
• Greater insight. By taking a mindful perspective, we observe our experience but don’t get caught up in it. Mindfulness helps us get greater clarity on what is happening in our minds, and in our lives
• More acceptance. Through mindfulness, we see that events, thoughts and feelings always change, and we can learn to bear experiences more lightly, and let them go. We are more able to enjoy well-being that does not depend on things going “right”
• Greater enjoyment of life. We can become more aware of pleasant experiences that were previously unnoticed because of our mental focus on the past and the future
• Less “beating ourselves up”. Mindfulness reduces our identification with negative thinking patterns – we stop thinking we are our thoughts, and we can be kind to ourselves when we have negative thoughts about ourselves
• Improved problem-solving. By slowing down and investigating our thoughts, feelings and experiences more carefully, we create space for coming up with wise responses to the difficulties in our lives. We create space between the urge to react and our actions themselves, and we can make considered and creative decisions about how to behave
• Better attention. We can concentrate better on tasks, maintain our focus and reach goals. We are less distracted. Experience can become fresher, lighter, clearer, richer and more vivid
• Less selfishness. We are less wrapped up in our own thoughts and feelings and so have greater ability to take others into account. We can be more considerate, empathic, compassionate, sensitive and flexible in our relationships
• Less neurosis. We experience the world in an open way that is not so weighed down by unhelpful psychological patterns. We are better attuned to ourselves, to others, and to the world, and able to act more skilfully, based on present need, rather than past conditioning
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