Applied Clinical Mindfulness Q and A
What is applied clinical mindfulness?
It is using mindfulness and its associated psychology to enhance general mental health and to help some specific problems like poor concentration, over reacting to emotions, and negative thinking associated with anxiety and depressive states, whether they are troublesome personality tendencies or traits, symptoms or actual disorders.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness represents functioning of the experiencing mode of the mind and can be described but like music must be experienced to be really understood through its practice in daily living and using meditative techniques. Mindfulness is the awareness that comes out of the first moment of any experience that is accepted for what it is before we emotionally judge it and think about it comparing it with past experience and future wishes and fears. Most simply it is present moment experiencing by feeling-sensing, accepting it, without using thought.
Can you give an example?
A bell gongs, the mindful moment is just sensing feeling the air vibration we label as sound having a certain intensity and duration, that is experiencing the wave like nature. That is how a child might experience it for the first time. “ loud noise lasted long time” that would be a mindful experience. Almost instantaneously the thinking mode of the mind judges the sound as good, bad or neutral, and then compares it to past experience and future wants and fears, and begins to think about it giving it a story, maybe a drama, maybe a comedy. The same child’s mind based on emotional judgment and thinking could turn that “noise”, into “ sad sound when my grandpa died”, remembering the church funeral and thinks “ I don’t want to die” adding to the mindful experience and thus changing it from its original state, of being a bunch of air vibrations we call sound.
How can this be applied to mental health issues?
Continuously and mostly operating on auto pilot, out of conscious awareness, we react to emotions and live out scripts based on thinking about the past and the future, rather than staying in the present moment long enough to evaluate it by experiencing and accepting it for what it really is. In a sense we form pre mature judgments based on the initial emotional impact a stimulus makes, not following it through its wave like nature form beginning to end, or least longer, or long enough to get to “mindfully know” it, so we can have an accurate or more accurate data base to offer to the thinking-doing mode mind, rather than a changed and likely distorted representation of the original reality of a thing. The stronger the emotional charge , the more likely there will be unmindful interference, change and distortion.
Can you illustrate this?
The same child years after perhaps years of unmindful experience associates the gong of his alarm clock , the school bell, with the anxiety and excitement of going to school, associated with a rapid heart rate, some shortness of breath, can’t catch his breath for a second, and because of continuous unconscious emotional reacting and thinking about the past and the future, feels the dread of a panic attack, of losing control, “might have a heart attack and die like grandpa” then refuses to go to school, based on panic disorder. Most if not all of this would occur on auto pilot out of awareness, and may only be “felt” or “sensed” on the physical level by having aches, pains, poor sleep, a racing heart, trouble breathing any other bodily discomfort or manifestation. History of these symptoms, with the memories, and thoughts may not be available to the conscious mind, but may be able to be accessed with using mindfulness meditation.
How would applied clinical mindfulness be used?
Through the use on using mindful psychology the child could be educated and be taught how to experience the emotions associated with panic attacks in the present moment, rather than continue to add layers of thought from past experience and future fears and wants. The child could learn how to feel-sense the emotions and physical discomforts of the panic and accept them without using thinking at all. By doing this the emotional “energy” fueling the feelings, bodily sensations and thoughts of the panic attack would be lessened and perhaps eliminated if experienced mindfully over and over again as done in daily mindfulness and most intensely in the practice of mindfulness meditation using breathing. Little by little the disconected thoughts and memories and their associated memories, with all of their conncetions to the present panic attacks would be brought to concious awareness if mindfulness meditative techniques were applied to the problem over time. This approach could be applied to any emotion, like anger, or depression, negative thinking, or a psychosomatic equivalent like headaches, irritable bowel or an upset stomach.
How would one practically do this?
The best training ground to develop the mental muscle of mindfulness is to practice mindful breathing in and out of meditation. Here one would gradually learn to switch mental modes from the thinking-doing mode, “ got to think more about this and do something to solve the problem” to the experiencing mindful mode where the emphasis is on not doing more thinking, but experiencing, allowing and accepting the feelings and bodily sensations associated with the problem. BareBonesMeditation, Child Mindful Breathing to help anything,
How does that happen?
Mindfulness is applied to the sensations of breathing over and over , again and again, the 4 F’s. Find your breath, follow it, feel it, and then focus only on it. As you do this your mind will wander, and when this happens you just go back to Finding it again, and then Follow, Feel and Focus, on it over and over.
By Focus to you mean think hard about the breathing and what you are doing?
No mindfulness is experience before we think, it is feeling and sensing, allowing and accepting what is, as it is happening, before we change it by thinking and judging the emotions associated with it. The Focus is a soft touch wide angle kind of awareness, not the intense pin point focus of thinking oriented concentration. You allow your awareness to gently rest on the physical sensations of the breathing and feel and accept it with mindfulness.
Can you explain more of what you mean?
The Focus summarizes the whole mindfulness experience, stay in only the present moment, no thinking from the past or the future, just feel and accept the breath and the associated physical sensations, without emotional judgment of the breathing or anything else you are doing, allowing it to unfold without interference accepting each breath and everything else whether it feels good, bad or neutral, equally, then letting go of one breath for the next, and do this over and over. It can be conceptualized as being mindfully aware and letting go over and over. Technique of Breathing with Mindfulness the Fine Points
What do you mean mindfully “aware” and letting go over and over?
First being aware of the breathing, and letting go of every else, then aware of only feeling the sensations of the breathing and letting go of thinking, then aware of the present and letting go of the past and the future, being aware of being non interfering, accepting, allowing, and letting go of judgment based on emotional charge, being aware of one breath at a time, letting it go for awareness of the next breath, being aware of repeating this process, over and over, eventually letting of the awareness of the process, and until one is just being aware of being.
What do you mean aware of being?
Practically this means "being one" with the breath. This occurs as you follow the breathing, allowing ones awarness to get closer and closer to the breath, until they aproximate each other, then you awarness, your feelings, and the sensations of the breath, become like one.
How would know if this has occurred?
You would have shifted out of the thinking-doing mode of mind to the being-experiencing mode, and if this is sustained this "being one" with the breath could be associated with a distinct but unique only know to you set of feelings-sensations, that are very pleasant, peacful and calm, difficult to describe with words but a very distinct experience that is replicated and can be used as a new object of meditation.
Why do you have “awareness” in quotes?
Because I am not speaking of ordinary awareness but the “awareness” that comes from mindfulness. Mindfulness is a process but for teaching and learning purposes it can be broken into parts or features, that in reality are interconnected pieces, more like intermingling a waves, functioning as whole. Mindful awareness or mindfulness has a five basic features 1. of being conscious and intentional, 2. staying only in the present moment, 3. using equanimity that is the accepting and allowing of everything equally regardless of the emotional vector, which is the intensity and direction of the charge, 4. experiencing the wave like nature of a thing though its sensations or feelings, and 5. then letting it go, for the next present moment of experience. I have used the memory aid PEALT , which stand for the intentional Present moment, Experiencing, Accepting, and Letting go, all done without using the activities of the Thinking-doing mode of mind.
What do you mean no thinking mode activities?
No comparing with past or future, no expectations, no controlling, no judging, no of anything associated with thinking and logical analysis. Q and A: Getting Started Guide -Part 1. Switching into the Mindfulness Experiencing Mode
What is there left for the mind to do?
In a sense there is nothing left to do, but just experiencing, that is to be aware, feel, sense, accept and allow what is in the present moment, then moment to moment, a just being one with what is, as it is happening, which describes the experience of mindfulness.
This equanimity feature seems confusing, can you further explain it?
Normally our thinking-doing mode of mind reacts to stimulus by wanting more of if it positive, avoiding it if its negative, and ignoring it if it seems neutral. Every stimulus, anything our mind perceives has an emotional charge which can be seen as a vector having direction and intensity. Equanimity accepts and allows everything equally, regardless of the emotional vectors direction or strength. When you are experiencing with the equanimity of mindfulness, if it is sensed as positive you won’t be pulled toward it and want more and more , like an addiction, if negative you won’t be pushed away and avoid it or fight with it like the enemy or give into with a mental collapse or its equivalence, and if it seems neutral, uninteresting you won’t ignore it, or get bored with it, but equanimity treats all of these equally and the same , it will help you hold your ground, feel it out, get to know it, stay with it as it goes through its wave like existence, of arising, peaking and going away, or for as long as you can tolerate it, so you can sense and feel it as accurately as possible before you switch to the thinking- speaking-doing mode.
This is difficult to understand, is it difficult to do?
It is difficult to understand, equally difficult to do, but can be experienced with practice. It is so becaus of the nature of the thinking mode of the mind, but it can be accomplised, with experince of mindfulness over and over. It is a critical part of mindfulness which means it is not a question of understanding in the thinking sense, or doing anything, is about pure direct experiencing, and must be practiced, over and over to be really “understood” though what is described has an internal intuitive consistency that is “correct” beyond logic.
How essential is Equanimity to the process of applied clinical mindfulness?
It is part of essential process of mindfulness at its heart from beginning to end. Equanimity is the crux of the process because emotions being both the lynch pin and drive shaft in a sense of mental functioning holding together and yet the driving force of our thinking -doing -behavior and its physical manifestations, and their mental health symptomatic expression with tendencies, problems and disorders. Emotions are the driving stuff of life and death, of suffering and pleasure, of being and non being. Learn to deal with emotions with “mindful awareness and equanimity” in a skillful manner and you will have less suffering, more satisfaction and have little to boredom. You will have peace of mind.
This sound like a wonderfully philosophical ideal but how does it apply to mental health and its problems?
Rather than handling a problem or trying to enhance your mental health by using thinking and doing only, especially when it no longer helpful, because it may be fueling feelings and sensations, switch to the experiencing mode of the mind, out of the thinking-doing mode. Then use mindfulness, its awareness, equanimity, and letting go, over and over, to lessen the mental energy that is fueling and driving feelings and sensations associated with emotions, thinking and body functions. As one does this the feelings and sensations will get less and less, until they eventually go away.
Again this sound well and nice ,but how do we actually apply it?
Practically one only has to learn how to do one thing, that is mindful breathing in and out of formal meditation, for in the process everything that can be experienced will come up, including mental health issues and its problems, and when experienced with sustained mindfulness will be helped. The positives, the pleasurable and the good will get more satisfying and powerful, the negatives and painful, will become weaker with less suffering, and eventually will be eliminated, and what appears or seems neutral will become filled with the unexpected, and will no longer be uninteresting or boring.
Can you illustrate this last point of the the positive being more satifying, the negative having less suffering, and the neutral being less boring and more interesting?
We can use mindfulness applied to breathing as done in meditation and mindful breathing. The breathing is a relatively neutral, mostly uninteresting, process that we ignore, just another boring body process, and yet if we give it some mindful awareness, and some unexpected things happen. Concentration which is positive thing will increase and become more powerful. If we continue to do this over and over the concentration will not only continue to improve, but it leads to another good thing, a even more satisfying things a calm mind and relaxed body. Further as you are focusing on your breathing you notice some muscle tension in your neck, face or other parts of your body, a negative thing, as you give that mindful awareness, it lessens and may go away. The boring becomes interesting with unexpected results, the positive improves and becomes more satisfying, and the negative lessens and may go away, everything is helped.
Is applying mindfulness to breathing the only way to get benifits or can you use it with other activities?
Mindfulness can be applied to any activitiy of daily living. If it is a repetitive activity, that activity can litterally be turned into a "mindfulness exercise" and if sustained, it becomes a meditation. You can get benifits by applying mindfulness to anything! See the following: How Anything can be turned into a Mindfulness Meditation Experience
What does this mean when it comes to the specifics of mental health?
It means mental functioning will improve like concentration, memory, emotional stability, with less negative and more logical positive thinking, that is processed at the right speed, not too slow, or too fast, as you stay aware, alert, calm with a relaxed body and mind, leading to less impulsivity and compulsivity, based on emotional reactivity. As these improve your general mental health will be enhanced and your problems will lessen and perhaps be eliminated, because you will gain new awareness with intuitive and emotional insights, that will lead to intellectual insights that can be now used by the thinking-doing mode of mind, to help solve past, present and future problems.
You said practicing mindfulness meditation everything will come up, how does that happen?
This will happen in two ways, in doing mindfulness meditation using breathing your special issues and problems will come up as distractions to trying to stay focused only on the breathing, and in the process of dealing with the distraction, which will be your problem, with mindfulness they will be helped. The second way is by making you problems or special issues the primary object or focus of meditation to be dealt with more directly and intensely. This is easy to learn in theory but hard to get results because of the nature of your mind, but you can be successful with consistent practice starting in small steps, but practice is essential.
Introduction to theory of meditation
A. Concentrative meditation alone can improve attention, concentration, relax the body, decreases anxiety, improve depression, stabilize the mood, and slows down thinking, being useful for symptom relief. Mindfulness meditation adds the possibility of symptom elimination, similar to psychoanalysis and cognitive therapy.
B. The concentrative meditative state is based on the fact that if the mind can stay relaxed and focused on one object at the exclusion of all others, over and over again, it induces further relaxation and focus. With the body relaxed, the mind calm, alert, concentrated, it is more open to direct experiential, preconceptual, awareness, understanding & insights of mindfulness that may lead to lasting change in emotions and thinking.
C. Mindfulness adds the insight to meditation. It is a purposeful here and now paying attention , a mirror like awareness, a direct experience of all things that enter the mind as they are in reality, before the mind changes and distorts them by responding with thinking, feelings, past memories, fantasies and future planning.
D. Mindfulness psychology is based on the mind sensing pleasure or pain in a reality, responds with attraction or aversion, making changes and distorting the original reality. Doing this habitually, quickly, automatically, sometimes instantaneously to pull the mind away from the present experience , not giving one a chance to see things the way they really are and getting attached to the new reality. Then having constant fear of losing the pleasure or avoidance it unrealistically gained in the created distorted reality. Mindfulness sustained and repeated counteracts these effects allowing the original awareness with relief of suffering caused by the attachment and enhances pleasure.
E. Mindfulness like a muscle gets stronger and develops endurance the more it is used in and out of meditation. Meditations calm alert focus cause the mindfulness to grow exponentially, that is without meditation practice 10 + 10 + 10 = 30, vs. with meditation 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000. This effect increases the pre conceptual “intuitive” believability and certainty that results with mindful “insights” and increases the chance of healing effects.
F. The goal of mindfulness or insight meditation is to sustain through concentration uninterrupted mindfulness to purposively experience true here and now reality of mental phenomenon in and out of the meditative state.
G. Mindfulness is analytic like psychoanalysis in it tries to breakdown down complicated problems and processes to their origins, and like cognitive therapy it deals with emotional and mental distortions that cause, amplify, and keep fueling problems, but it does these things not by changes induced by logical thinking and reflection, but by accurately directly experiencing the problem, and that experience itself changes the problem.
H. It is based on a similar principal in quantum physics that just the process of observing a thing causes the thing to change. The experience itself results in the change. Three factors need to be experienced by mindfulness to have this change, knowing what the experience is, knowing its intensity, and its duration. Mindfully experiencing what was previously unknown directly reduces fear and gives one the option to act on the new knowledge.
I. Mindfulness experience of deeper reality reveals that what we believe are unchanging permanent separate things, are in fact ever changing interconnected interdependent processes or events . Like subatomic physics wave vs. particle and energy vs. matter=wave-particle, for mindfulness it is conditioned vs. original reality.
J. Two negative effects increasing anxiety and depression of not being mindful of this deeper reality, 1. Not seeing a thing as a multi process, one cannot deal with it by breaking it down to more manageable parts. 2. We are driven by excessive & obsessional attachment to avoid pain and seek pleasure in what we believe are unchanging things. Then we live in constant fear that we may not be able to keep avoiding the feared thing which is constantly changing, or we will lose the pleasured object gained and have been attached to, and then get depressed when it changes or goes away, feeling it as a loss. Mindfulness can prevent these outcomes.
K. In brief and simplistic summary mindfulness alone can help do three things, 1. To stay in the present and do what the present requires, 2. See things as they really are not changed by emotions & 3. See the deeper reality free of conditions and attachments. Used with meditation it exponentially reestablishes the original reality of experiences, decreasing pain & increasing pleasure ,leading to decreased mental health symptoms, may eliminate them, prevent relapses with lasting and healing emotional, mental and behavioral change.
L. The power and usefulness of mindfulness is best demonstrated using it in daily life beginning with mindful breathing and meditation on breathing.
More on the theory of mindfulness psychology and how mindfulness helps
A. Our mind works in two modes, our usual the thinking-doing mode, and when that is no longer helpful, for problems one can switch into the being - experiencing mode. Problems are solved in the being mode, more accurately mental states changed not by thinking-doing but just by the ”force” of mindfulness direct experiences based on its intensity and duration, similar to the sub atomic level where just observing a particle changes it.
B. The application of mindfulness direct experience to a problem or anything changes it. Also like quantum physics mindfulness experiences reality as a wave like inter connected every changing process vs. it being a permanent isolated particle or thing. Energy-awareness similar to matter-particle-wave in space time based on E=mc2.
A. The Mindfulness Being Mode helps anything, special needs or problems by it effect on mental states, their functioning and their attributes doing the following individually or in combinations.1. Enhances and builds good things, 2. Sustaining and stabilizing all things 3. Diminishing and eliminating harmful-toxic things.
C. Mindfulness meditation is ideally suited to help us shift into the being mode and keep us there long enough to help in at least four ways, 1. Direct effects improving concentration, decreasing anxiety-depression, stabilizing emotions, relaxing body, calming & stilling the mind, “ re tracking” to help short term memory, 2. It leads to new insights that can now be applied to the thinking mode, 3. It can reduce the intensity-duration of problems& may even eliminate them by peeling away layers of experiential distortion, burning off the existential glue holding them & suffering together, 4 By generally enhancing pleasure &interest, decreasing suffering and boredom.
D. Mindfulness Meditation has two parts 1. the mindful part which is the knowing or insight part, which requires understanding what it is, its features and attitudes, and 2.the concentrative part requiring one to know two things, how to focus on breathing to develop concentration, and to deal with distractions which pull your off your focus. Of the two mindfulness is primary, the most important, most valuable and harder to learn and apply.
E. Two forms of paying attention are used 1.the hard focused single pointed concentration which we usually use, and will be used to develop the direct effects of meditation, and 2.the wide angle soft focus of bare attention of mindfulness which leads to awareness, insight and healing, if applied patiently and persistently to problems or to enhance special needs. To do this one needs sustained mindfulness which is the purpose of the meditation process.
F. Mindfulness a way of experiencing the world is defined as the immediate direct awareness and attention in a wordless mirror like way of an experience, while still connected to the rest of every changing reality, before we isolate it and make it a thing, driven by our positive, negative or neutral response, by adding concepts like thought, feelings, sensations, memories, fantasies, future plans, or anything else to it, in the process attaching to it, changing & distorting its original reality. Mindfulness reverses attachment & distortion of unmindful experience on reality.
G. Un-Mindful psychology distorts reality. Experience is originally only actual- latent energy and pure awareness. We cannot control or change, things entering our mind, or change the original energy. We can only control how we respond to reality. We first sense its wave like energy with, duration and intensity, and depending on our accuracy of reality testing, may label it as good, bad, or in a gradation to neutral. Because of this experience alone the original reality will change. Therefore reality is, and is always changing based on our interactional experience.
H. Distortion of experience is caused by ignorance or partial awareness that all reality is 1. in constant change, 2.of its inter connectedness & 3.inter dependence. Due to this ignorance-distortion, it senses pain-pleasure-neutrality , responds with attraction or avoidance instantaneously, automatically, habitually, adding thoughts, feelings, fantasies, sensations to the original reality in layers over time, changing it. This distortion causes 1. a tension or anxiety, 2. making the original experience more and more unknown adding more anxiety as it masks it. 3. A simultaneous attachment occurs causing more anxiety over fear of losing what it thinks it has gained ,or inability to get more, and fear of inability to continue to avoid, 4. all made worse because of continued ignorance of constant change, and interconnectedness, which adds more anxiety when what was believed to be permanent is lost.
I. Diminished Pleasure and Problems are caused by these layers of continued realty distortion and anxiety.
J. Mindfulness reverses the un-mindfulness of reality distortion, problem formation and diminished pleasure.
K. Mindfulness learned best by applying it always, do mindful breathing when you can ,and in scheduled meditation.