Explaining mindfulness interventions to clients
Mindfulness is a concept much in vogue these days. Everyone seems to have a mindfulness app or book on the go and the term is increasingly bandied around fairly mindlessly. This makes it all the more important to be able to explain it succinctly and clearly to clients so they understand what I mean when using the term.
I say something like:
‘Being mindful just means attending to the current moment. Human beings live in two worlds. The first is the world of direct sensory experience, in which we access experience through our five senses – seeing, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing. All these senses are based in the present moment – we taste and hear and smell what’s around us right now, not what was around yesterday or what might be there tomorrow. Animals share these means of accessing the world too.
However humans also inhabit the world of language, meaning we have thoughts and images. However thoughts and images time-travel backward to the past and forward to the future and can thereby create distress in the present moment.
Being mindful means moving away from the world of language and back into the world of direct sensory experience. A simple way of doing this is to focus your attention on the sounds you can hear around you. Take a minute to do this now – tune in to whatever you can hear around you right now. Notice sounds that are near to you and those further away, sounds coming from your body and from outside the room. Just notice all these sounds, letting them come and go as they do. If and when you notice your mind wandering off into thinking, just observe that this has happened, and then, without any need to chide yourself, just gently guide your mind back to attending to the sounds again. All minds wander –that’s just what they do - so you don’t need to tell yourself off, just notice it and then gently bring your mind back to the present moment, listening to the sounds around you. Just being open to all sounds around you…
Whenever you notice that you are experiencing intense, unwanted emotions and thoughts, you can focus on the sounds around you to bring yourself back into the world of direct sensory experience. You will be choosing to move yourself away from your distress and back to the present moment of attending to sounds.’
Most people find this explanation fairly easy to understand. Some have commented that it’s comforting because it explains that their mind will wander off into thinking again and that this is normal and to be expected. This normalizing is crucial otherwise the client has yet another thing to beat herself up about…