An Introduction to Mindfulness

Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

Mindfulness has increasingly been incorporated into psychological therapies. It has been labelled the third wave in the evolution of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). First wave CBT is the behavioural approach that increased in popularity in the early 1900s. Behaviourism is about learning and has a focus on what we can observe with our senses. Second wave CBT focused on the interpretations that we give to observable events and was driven by Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy. A basic component of the therapy is inferring our automatic unhelpful thinking and replacing it with more adaptive thinking. Third wave CBT saw the incorporation of mindfulness with the behavioural and cognitive approaches that came before it.

An early example of a third wave CBT is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). In 1979 Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre where he began teaching patients secular meditation as an adjunct to their medical treatment. Kabat-Zinn brought meditation, a mindfulness practice, into mainstream medicine and psychology. Another example is Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical and Behavioural Therapy (DBT) that teaches mindfulness as a foundational skill to improving emotion regulation. After her own struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder, Linehan developed an effective therapy to help highly suicidal people beginning by teaching them mindfulness.  

Defining Mindfulness

Mindfulness is about waking up to our life that in our modern world is so often lived on autopilot. We spend a lot of time thinking, ruminating on events that have happened in the past, comparing ourselves to what we imagine of other people, worrying about what might happen in the future, planning for it. It’s a wonderful skill that we have evolved to help us to learn and to problem solve. It’s also a skill that can leave us feeling depressed, anxious, and unsatisfied with our lives. These unpleasant feelings can quite literally wreak havoc on our bodies showing up in a wide range of physical health complaints such as frequent illness, digestive issues, muscle tension, high blood pressure, fatigue, and chronic pain. There is good evidence that our mind wandering results in unhappiness and that our stressful thoughts literally age our body at a cellular level. This highlights the importance of being in this moment by taking note of what you are attending to, and perhaps, if your mind has wandered to someplace else, taking the invitation to gently redirect your attention back to the words you are reading.

Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

Mindfulness is effortful. It is easier to get mindlessly lost in the stream of thought and the busyness of perpetual doing, than it is to wake up to our life unfolding when we are not in the habit of paying attention. Just like any health habit, it takes work to make a habit of slowing down and being with our experience, establishing a meditation practice and incorporating mindfulness into our daily activity.

Mindfulness is not a relaxation technique nor a way to escape our problems. There are days when the timer bell sounds to end my meditation and I feel more exhausted than when I began, less able to get through the remaining items on my to-do list. There are days when meditating brings a heightened awareness of the anxiety in my body. This is the gift of mindfulness, allowing me to take better care of myself by showing me how I am feeling and what I need. Mindfulness is about showing up to an intimate meeting with our experience and accepting what we find, dropping out of the story of how things should be. It is an invitation to reduce the reactivity to experience that often drives avoidance and distraction. In this way, it is a process of regulating the nervous system and developing a healthier relationship with ourselves.

An Anecdote

My journey with mindfulness began in my early twenties. I was living on campus and studying undergraduate psychology. I took up yoga, a mindfulness movement practice, to manage the stress that came with moving out of home and meeting academic demands. My yoga studio became my sanctuary. I would catch the bus to yoga several times a week. The practice invited me to take up residence in my own body and to find comfort in my strength and flexibility. It introduced me to meditation.

As I became more interested in meditation and psychology, I looked for a more formal teaching in meditation. I took a MBSR course and developed a regular meditation practice. I felt better, I became less impulsive and more stable, life became more manageable. In the course, I heard about 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats and decided I had to go. I travelled to New Zealand and completed my first retreat. The rules at retreats are intended to support you to be with yourself, there is no talking or eye contact with other meditators, no use of electronic devices, no reading or writing. In the stillness and silence, I confronted the chaos and noise of my own mind. Away from the distractions of everyday life, unprocessed content seemed to float to the surface of my mind inviting me to accept it along with all the emotions I felt about it. Slowly my mind seemed to be working its way back in time, unlocking and releasing experiences help in my body.

In a very real sense, I spent several days practicing an awareness of breath meditation to focus the mind before moving onto a body scan meditation, moving awareness through the body part by part, sensing whatever was there to be felt. It was hard, it was rewarding, sometimes it was lonely, sometimes boring, but it helped. My experience inspired me to pursue further mindfulness training and to position mindfulness as the foundation of my professional practice of clinical psychology.

Awareness of Breath Meditation

The awareness of breath meditation involves paying attention to each breath as it arises and falls away, without any attempt to alter or change the breath. This practice is not unique to the Vipassana tradition or MBSR, it is a universal secular practice. It is a mindfulness practice that can be practiced formally in a sitting meditation or informally wherever you are. It can be a discrete practice with no one needing to know that you are attending to the breath. It can be as simple as feeling the body relax as you exhale in a moment of heightened tension. Perhaps staying with the breath for a few moments longer to connect more fully with the present.

If you are interested, you might like to try an awareness of breath meditation by setting aside some time to listen to the guided meditation below. You might like to then reflect on how you feel after the practice, putting some words to that experience.

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living. Bantom Books.