Thank you for all your wonderful questions! Magdi Tornyai asked about presence; Jason Smith asked about a suggestion for a single mindfulness exercise; Jennifer Gray Hooks asked about mindfulness and easing ruminations; and Jeff Edwards asked about the importance of “walking the walk” in mindfulness teaching and education. Still others have asked a range of related questions about specific therapeutic techniques, the use of the concept of mental illness, and the ways in which we can heal “small t” and “large t” trauma. Meirav Schreiber asked about learning neuroscience as a clinician, and Searainya Bond’s question about how we can best use words to convey complex scientific knowledge, and Cynthia Keefer’s query about how to best guide students in this field are each relevant to how IPNB can be a useful foundation to start. The questions that overlapped most were those about mindfulness and awareness so in this post I will try to answer that. We can state that mindfulness is an integrative practice that promotes integration in mind, in relationships, and in body. And as integration can be seen as the heart of well-being, having a regular (hopefully near daily) intentional practice of creating an integrated state of mindful awareness can then become an automatic habitual trait of being mindfully aware and fully present for life. To help teach this to others, we need to practice and be this way ourselves. So yes, we need to walk the walk! It’s worth the time to take “time-in” each day, for a minute, or ten, or twenty, to focus on the unfolding nature of our inner mental life. Mindful awareness can be considered as a way of being, more than something that involves our “doing” something. Yet we engage in a certain “state of mind” that has the range of qualities we have heard repeatedly even though there is no fixed and final definition of mindfulness: How we pay attention (different from awareness), on purpose (but it doesn’t have to be done with active effort, it can in fact be an intention that happens “automatically” as a habit of being, not a consciously thought out plan of carrying out a way of focusing attention) to the unfolding of present moment experience (but, in fact, we can pay attention to memories of the past or plans for the future—but do so…) with a sense alertness, attention to detail, and with kindness and compassion. If you’d like to read more on mindful awareness and how it relates to your questions, a longer blog will be posted in Psychology Today.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:43:13 +0000
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