Mindfulness Technique

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Emotion is a clearly localized physiological sensation supported by mental dialogue.

Recently, conversations about a certain technique of mindfulness (in English - mindfulness) have been prevalent in Western psychotherapy. Mindfulness is widely used in educational and business circles. They also use it in psychotherapy. Skeptical conservatives view mindfulness as a cross between Buddhism and classical Western psychotherapeutic practice.

Be that as it may, the effect of the mindfulness technique is colossal. To ignore it would be, at least, selfish, since in psychotherapy it implies teaching a person the ability to independently cope with emotions and find peace of mind without the direct participation of the psychotherapist. For this reason, mindfulness work is disliked by financially focused psychotherapists, as it deprives the emotional analyst of the opportunity to make money in long and repetitive sessions with a client.

Conscious psychotherapists, however, turn their inner gaze to the root of the phrase: “Give a man a fish and he will be full for one day. Teach a person to fish - and he will be fed all his life”. Reorientation to the benefit of one's work and a high-quality result for the client can bring much more joy from the work of the psychotherapist himself, and that is why it would be unreasonable to ignore the technique of mindfulness.

Putting awareness in simple and understandable words, let's see what it is, what to do with it, and what benefit it can bring to a person.

To apply mindfulness to working with emotions, it is important to focus on the opposite first

For a long time, psychotherapy has been dominated by the idea that the analysis of emerging emotions leads to mental healing. Relief comes when a person realizes why he has this or that emotion at any given moment. A person travels into the past and understands the origins of his feelings, searches in his memory for the moment when the emotion captured him for the first time. The downside of over-concentration on analysis is that emotions arise faster than we are able to connect the brain to rationalize this or that feeling. Problems are being worked through, but not fixed. As a result, the person is unable to act effectively under the influx of emotions. He is able to work through them “in hindsight” - and yes, the more a person does this, the closer he becomes to understanding his psychology. At some point, a worked person runs into a wall: he has worked everything, but emotions continue to come to him. Suppression does not work, control does not work. In fact, understanding the origins of emotional states does not help a person become happier. So is there any sense in all this?

Mindfulness as a technique for dealing with emotions offers the opposite approach of dealing with a person's emotional responses. Mindfulness practitioners view emotions as physical sensations that manifest themselves at different points in a person's body. Neuroresearch says: in order for the emotion to manifest itself, the brain commands to release hormones into the bloodstream that cause certain sensations in us (joy, anger, irritation, excitement, fear, etc.). when you were experiencing a strong emotion: for example, excitement. Chances are that by focusing on your physical sensations, you can easily determine where a given emotion is nesting in your body.

As soon as the physiological manifestation of the hormone reaches the point at which a person begins to feel it, an all-rationalizing and comprehensive mental dialogue is activated that accompanies all our emotional states. As we know from personal experience, mental dialogue at such moments rarely leads us to something good. Basically, the rush of thoughts that arises in the head in such situations deprives us of the ability to make good decisions and cloudes our common sense. The practice of mindfulness is NOT to deny, suppress, or replace an existing emotional physiological response, but to calmly observe it.

Observations in the field of neuropsychology show that the emotional response of our body lasts no more than 90 seconds. Thus, if you set your mind the goal of observing the body's reaction to certain stimuli, without trying to influence what is happening and calmly accepting it, over time the emotion ceases to dominate our consciousness. We return to our daily task again, armed with the ability to concentrate on it in such a way that as a result we complete it with pleasure and a positive outcome.

Let's see what awareness is NOT. So, awareness is:

• NOT self-deception. Rather, self-deception is the brain's attempts to “substitute” a negative emotion for a positive one.

• NOT control (we do not try to evoke certain emotions in ourselves, thereby not driving ourselves into a framework that depress us even more. Trying to force ourselves to experience certain emotions, we a priori do not allow ourselves to accept ourselves as we are and, as a consequence, we aggravate the "division" of emotions into "good" and "bad").
• NOT suppression (we accept every emotion as it is, without trying to drown it out. We observe how the emotion manifests itself in our body, not trying to control it).
• NOT mystical adventures in the halls of your mind, NOT fantasies, NOT affirmations, NOT empty dreams. In its most basic sense, awareness is a straightforward way to get closer to understanding reality as it is. This is a simple and accessible path to mental health for everyone.

The most important healing effect that mindfulness has is a sane, calm mind, a state of contentment, and the absence of anxiety and irritation. It is the ability to think clearly and clearly, to see events, situations and motivations of people through and through

Mindfulness brings us back to the here and now, helps to manage attention, teaches concentration and increases the chances of success.

To start practicing mindfulness, you need to understand for yourself what it is in the first place, because there is no point in practicing what you do not fully understand.

The difficulty in applying the mindfulness technique during therapy is that it precludes understanding the role of the psychotherapist in the classical sense. What should we be aware of when we practice mindfulness?

In what follows, I will talk about the specific use of mindfulness in working with the patient and in private. Understanding mindfulness requires open thinking and a willingness to shake the established understanding of the emotional sphere of a person. Ready?