Reducing unnecessary suffering through mindfulness
Learning how to teach mindfulness as a practitioner is becoming easier due to books like The Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness. This post shares key concepts and scripts that helped me develop my own mindfulness practice as I learn to support others in their practice.
It has been said that the wandering mind is an unhappy mind. To reduce the mind’s (negative) wandering tendencies, it is helpful to learn how to slow down and pay attention. The simple meaning of mindfulness is “paying attention” and is described as non-doing, resting, and cooling down. The more we can pay attention to the present moment, the more we learn to self-regulate our mind and body so it can recharge.
Much of our suffering is perceived, mind-made, and unnecessary. As we start to concentrate on self-regulation, we start to see how much our mood impacts our experiences; how much our desires or aversion to discomfort influences our responses; how much we carry stress in the body; how we can experience more pleasantness within our moments; how our decision-making improves with more available information; and how our unpleasant past experiences can be released because they feel completed. With practice, we move from a conceptual level of mindfulness to a more felt experience of embodied self-compassion. This self-compassion can then be extended to others as a warm reaction to wanting to alleviate suffering in other living beings.
One way to cultivate and strengthen mindfulness is to practice different types of attitudes, such as curiosity, kindness, gratitude, generosity, acceptance, non-judgment, non-striving, letting go, patience, humor, trust, and a beginner's mind. Attention to particular attitudes can be spread out over a multi-week experience, helping reveal their interconnectedness. Examples follow:
Beginner's mind: Zen master Suzuki Roshi shares how the beginner's mind holds many possibilities, but the expert's mind holds few. By practicing a beginner’s mind, a teacher's language, guidance, and responses to students can stimulate curiosity and a sense of discovery to help enrich learning and relationship with mindfulness.
Non-striving: Accepting the present moment as it is, without the need to change it, releases the need for any agenda, including the agenda to relax or feel better. The teacher models accepting what is.
Humor: Humor creates the space to repel from over-identification. Jon Kabat Zinn shares how, “Life is way too serious to take too seriously.” Fostering lightheartedness in class could look like occasionally interjecting light jokes when introducing mindful attitudes, gently poking fun at the tendency to take practices too seriously, and reminding students that a playful witness of our human experience lies at the heart of mindfulness. Through humor, the teacher relaxes an overly earnest atmosphere, creates some healthy distance from over-identification, and models how to hold formal meditations lightly.
Based on mindfulness research, we now know that these attitudes actually reduce symptoms such as depression and anxiety and also influence biological markers. Meditation also affects neuroplasticity that produces structural changes in the brain. This not only impacts mood, but also changes the way the brain interprets pain in the body or mind. We can learn to live around the edges of pain without being overwhelmed or bothered by it so much because we relate to pain differently.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), calls mindfulness the “applied art of conscious living.” We’re not only practicing with others, but practicing for ourselves. Since the class is only as good as the instructor, the book continues to share program scripts that fulfill 6 mindfulness teaching competency domains: curriculum development, relational skills, embodiment, guiding practices, course themes, and group process.
