Mindfulness at TFL

Presented by Robert Cray MBACP (Sen Accred)

Aims for today

• A brief history of mindfulness

• Clinical application for TFL treatment services

• Practical application for you

Roots of Mindfulness

• Mindfulness has been a part of Asian contemplative traditions for over 2500 years.

• Initially founded in Hindu yoga practices as a way of unifying an individual with their body/soul

• These practices also been adopted by some of the other major religions.

Definition of Mindfulness

• The centre for mindfulness research and practice [CMRP] in Bangor describes mindfulness as:

“The development of the ability to pay deliberate attention to our experience from moment to moment, to what is going on in our mind, body and day to day life and doing this without judgement”.

East meets West

• There is a great deal of interest in the efficacy of mindfulness practices in the psychotherapy

• The field of psychoanalysis showed some interest in Buddhist psychology as far back as the 1930’s.

• Carl Jung wrote a commentary on the

Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1939 and had a lifelong curiosity with Eastern psychology

Compassion

Mindfulness and Psychotherapy

• Many practicing therapists started to take a great interest in mindfulness/meditation practices in the 60’s.

• These influenced some of the humanistic movements in particular gestalt and its emphasis on the “here and now” and “awareness”.

• Studies on meditation flourished, including

cardiologist Herbert Benson’s (1975) use

of meditation to treat heart disease.

Mindfulness and Medicine

• Jon Kabat -Zinn is Professor of Medicine and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

• Jon Kabat-Zinn life work has been largely dedicated to bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society.

Efficacy of Mindfulness

• Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneering work appears to have supported further empirically-validated mindfulness-based interventions.

• Marsha Linehan’s Zen-inspired Dialectical-Behavioral Therapy [DBT] primarily developed to work with clients with Borderline Personality Disorder [BPD]

Efficacy cont

• The use of Mindfulness based cognitive therapy [MBCT] has proved to be an effective mindfulness-based treatment for chronic depression.

• Another Cognitive/mindfulness based psychotherapy is Acceptance Commitment therapy [ACT]

• Affective contemplative neuroscience

The efficacy of mindfulness in practice

• All of the previous programmes mentioned have demonstrated the clinical efficacy of mindfulness with physical and psychological difficulties

• One experiment was carried out by a group of neuroscientists and Buddhist monks to discover the affects of mindfulness on brain architecture.

Mindfulness Research

What they discovered

• Then monks practiced compassionate mindfulness practices.

• This practice activated the left prefrontal cortex the part of the brain that is associated with positive states affect regulation attention.

• Also increased gamma activity considered to connect with the parts of the brain involved in higher states of consciousness.

• Changes in thickness of pre frontal cortex

A taste of mindfulness

Nine functions of mindfulness

• Body Regulation (sympathetic/parasympathetic response)

• Attuned communication

• Emotional balance

• Fear extinction/modulation

• Response flexibility

• Insight (awareness)

• Empathy

• Morality

• Intuition

Building New Pathways

Skillfull use of Neuroplasticity

• You can use your mind

• to change your brain

• to change your mind for the better.

• This is self-directed neuroplasticity.

• How to do this, in skillfull ways?

Practice

• Let’s Try It

• Notice the experience already present in awareness or bring up a positive event/experience or aspect of self

• I am alright right now

• Have the experience

• Enrich it

• Absorb it

• Create the experience of compassion

• Have the experience - bring to mind someone you care

• about . . . Feel caring . . . Wish that he or she not suffer

• . . . Open to compassion

• Enrich it

• Absorb it

Like syrup into a sponge

Mindfulness at TFL

Most of our treatment service practitioners, counsellors, drug and alcohol therapists and

physiotherapists will use some aspects of directed mindfulness at various stages of the overall

treatment process.

In short mindfulness interventions are used to raise client/patient powers of self observation

Generic Counselling

• Mindful attention enables clients (employees) to recognise their habitual emotional responses in dealing with the range of stress and general life issues.

• The insight achieved from mindful awareness helps clients make specific changes to limiting beliefs, negative thinking and emotional patterns affecting confidence and motivation

Mindfulness in Trauma

• Mindful attention interventions helps facilitate dual awareness where the client can simultaneously explore some of the physiological symptoms of past traumatic reactions while feeling safe and fully aware in the present. Dual awareness or dual processing helps prevent the distressing dysregulation which occurs when clients are automatically

Mindfulness in Trauma CONT

• Mindful awareness creates a therapeutic gap between the stimulus and response between retriggering and the traumatic reactions.

• This gap allows clients to be curious and explore different reactions so gaining mastery over debilitating symptoms

Physiotherapy

• Physiotherapists utilise mindfulness in helping patients (employees) become aware of their own self limiting beliefs and thinking habits which may be restrictive and therefore impede recovery to full physical function.

Condition Pain Management

• Mindfulness is also a powerful intervention tool with condition pain management groups where patients can become over focused on and over sensitised to pain signals increasing a sense of disability. Recognising this through mindfulness exercise helps them to change their focus which will likely decrease pain sensation and increase the sense of what is possible.

DAATS

• In drug and alcohol work there are many occasions where mindful awareness techniques are employed such as helping clients to have raised awareness and identify their own addiction/abstinence vulnerability triggers. These may be unique situations or physical, emotional or mental state triggers

SRG (Stress Reduction Programme

• Stress Cycle

• Mindfulness practices

• Cognitive/emotional

• Resilience Matrix

Mindfulness Pilot

• Six week programme

• Mindfulness practice formal/informal

• Compassion

• Gratitude

• Thinking/Emotion

Types of Application

• Formal meditation practices

• Everyday mindfulness

• Retreat practice

• Directed mindfulness as part of therapeutic treatment

• Mindfulness groups

Types of Meditation

• Concentration meditation

• Mindfulness meditation

• Visualisation meditation

• Loving kindness meditation

• Walking Meditation

• Any task

Thank you, Any Questions?