Don’t turn away, keep your eye on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you
—Rumi

Rumi’s elegant words point to the rewards of mindfulness, the nonjudging awareness of present-moment experience. Mindfulness, a central element of Buddhist meditation, is a practice of non-doing, of gently bringing curiosity and acceptance to whatever is arising in our experience. In therapy, the practice of mindfulness allows us to witness our defensive and habitual patterns of perception and reaction, and to study how we are organized internally, both in the client and therapist seats. Mindfulness invites us into more conscious and compassionate ways of being with ourselves and others.

Practically speaking, many clients can be guided into mindfulness simply by inviting them to turn inward toward their direct experience of body sensations, emotions, thoughts and core beliefs, memories, images, or any other embodied phenomena occurring in present time. Clients often find it helpful to close their eyes, or gaze downward, but this is not required. Mindfulness is not a matter of creating a particular state, such as relaxation but, rather, a compassionate witnessing of what is. For example, mindfulness of the breath means noticing its shallowness or fullness, its speed and quality, rather than trying to change or control it. Typically, I lead a client into mindfulness by verbally contacting her direct experience and then inviting her to put her attention on that experience: “Let yourself just stay with that fluttering in your belly. Notice what is the quality of the sensation…” I encourage the client to stay with and deepen into the details of her experience, and whatever unfolds naturally. Direct experience and meaning are interwoven in the process.

Tara Brach, clinical psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher, describes it this way: One of the beauties of (mindfulness) practice is that the more moments that we decide to stay put and feel what’s here, the more the confidence that we can handle whatever is going on grows. So rather than a life that is carefully constructed around controlling our experience, we have this confidence that we can handle life. And the fruit of that is that we get to live our life fully, spontaneously. We get to love freely because we’re not so busy defending and managing things.

In my therapy practice, a client I’ll call Marianna talked about the risks of connecting with a new potential partner, and the “danger” of hoping for a relationship. When she focused her attention inside, she became aware of a heavy sensation in her chest, then an “ink blot” image, which unfolded into a nauseated feeling lower down in her torso. A memory spontaneously arose of being at her previous lover’s gravesite at the one-year anniversary of his death a few months prior. She was then able to have an immediate experience of her profound grief about both the death of her lover, and the eclipsing of a sacred, inner-directed period she had allowed herself while grieving him. Over time, and with repeated opportunities to be present with her deep experience, she has moved fully into the new, satisfying relationship.

In the Hakomi method, an experiential form of therapy, we use “verbal experiments” or “probes” to access deep experience and to shed light on one’s inner organization. After being invited into mindfulness, a thematically-relevant phrase (e.g.: You are safe here, There’s room for your needs, You have all the time you need, etc.) is presented to the client. While such “probes” can feel nourishing, the therapist’s aim is not to convince the client of the truth of the statement, but to offer an opportunity to see what barriers, often in the form of core beliefs, the phrase evokes. One client was afraid to reveal to her new partner some personal information about herself and her family of origin. I offered her the probe: You are lovable exactly as you are. Immediately, her mind sent up the response: If I’m not perfect, he won’t love me. We stayed with her embodied experience, and eventually she was able to connect with the felt sense of two conflicting parts of herself: the confident part of herself and the part that had internalized the woundedness of her family. As she stayed present with both of these inner experiences, a natural shift took place in which she connected consciously to her strengths and felt less thrown off-balance by her fears. Shortly after this session, she spoke honestly to her boyfriend about the issues she had avoided and found him to be accepting.

Another client, Renee, began to apply mindfulness more and more in her everyday life, including a practice called “noting,” or naming, habits of thought, such as self-judgment or fear. During one period in our work, Renee found herself in the midst of excruciating emotions. She proudly described how she had stayed present with the torrent of feelings and body sensations—terror, despair, and physical and emotional grief . She let herself ride the waves of strong feeling without distracting herself. The next morning, Renee went to the beach where she mindfully watched the paths of both the full moon setting and the sun rising, as well as her inner experience of emotion and thought. She was amused to notice her impatience and her irrational thought that, on that day, “the sun might not rise.” She was flooded with awe and gratitude, connected deeply to her Self and the natural world. In our work, we often refer back to this “sunrise experience” as an inner resource, a reference point for her self-connection and faith in life.

This is a poignant time to be writing about the benefits of being present with our deepest experience. We can be inspired by the words of the Dalai Lama: A central aim of Buddhist practice is to reduce the power of destructive emotions in our lives. With that aim in mind, Buddhism offers a wide range of theoretical insights and practical methods. If any of these methods can be shown through scientific tests to be of benefit, then there is every reason to find ways to make them available to everyone, whether or not they are interested in Buddhism itself.” From Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? (Dalai Lama/Daniel Goleman).

Lisa Kully, MFT, has a private practice in the Rockridge district of Oakland where she brings mindfulness and body-centered practices to her work with individuals and couples. Lisa also leads social skills and “coping with divorce” groups for children and pre-teens. She can be reached at (510)595-5562.

Note: This article reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of
East Bay CAMFT.