Mindfulness

The origins of mindfulness are in the world's spiritual traditions, and it is especially important in Buddhism: perhaps its most famous contemporary Buddhist exponent is the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who has written many excellent and inspiring books about mindfulness.

Although the origins of mindfulness are in the spiritual traditions, to practise mindfulness does not require one to follow any particular religion or adopt any particular system of beliefs. Rather, it is about your own lived experience and is completely compatible with science  In its scientific, secular manifestation, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn and others, mindfulness has been applied in treating chronic pain and stress reduction. 

Mindfulness is awareness of present experience, noticing whatever we are seeing, hearing, sensing, thinking, feeling - with openness, curiosity and compassion. In mindfulness we can enjoy what is pleasant but without clinging or being attached to it. Equally we can notice what is painful or difficult but without judging, fighting, suppressing or avoiding it. Instead, we give space to our experience and by cultivating awareness we are in a stronger position to make wise choices. Mindfulness provides the opportunity to explore and develop our relationship with experience.

One point to emphasise is that mindfulness is not avoidance of or disconnection from our feelings. It's noticing them, observing them from within but not tossed around by them. I have the image of a seagull when there is a storm at sea. Flying in the sky, the gull is not tossed around by the waves but is still there, present in the midst of the storm.

Mindfulness is an essential element of certain approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, among them third wave CBT approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), and it naturally integrates into, for example, Gestalt therapy and Psychosynthesis.

Although in a sense mindfulness is simple, one can go as deep as one wishes. There is no doing it right and wrong in mindfulness; there is just noticing (including noticing the thoughts of doing it right and wrong!). You can think of mindfulness as like a flowing river, the flowing river of experience.