Why Am I Talking About Mindfulness?
Like a lot of people, I didn’t handle my anxiety very well when I was young. My typical teenage stress was compounded from having had a clinically complicated and wacky childhood. So, years before I became a therapist, I searched for ways to live a healthier life. I stopped drinking and drugging and started exploring Tai Chi, Chi Gong, yoga, and meditation.
For twelve years before becoming a therapist, I engaged in hundreds of hours of yoga, Tai Chi, and Chi Gong. I spent over a thousand hours practicing meditation and mindfulness. I connected with socially-engaged Buddhists in both the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the Zen Peacemaker Order to explore the intersection of contemplative practice and social justice work. I completed meditation and yoga retreats varying in length from one to thirty days each. And, I read hundreds of books on meditation, and Eastern philosophy and psychology.
My years of personal work on myself had transformed so much of my earlier misery and angst into calmness and happiness. And, my broad explorations had taught me much about how mindfulness practice not only helped my own anxiety and challenging emotions, but deepened my interest in incorporating such wellness practices into my therapy service. So, from the beginning of my professional career, I continued to research techniques which could be included in treatment and watched to see if the things I shared with my clients produced the types of results I have enjoyed. Therapists have been incorporating meditation and mindfulness into therapy since the 1970s. So, at the start of my career in 1997, there were quite a lot of books and research articles for guidance.
I was also fortunate to get the opportunity to teach a full-semester stress management course at Indiana University and eventually delivered it to over 4,000 students. So, during the past twenty-five years, I have gotten feedback from thousands of my patients and thousands more students about how the practices I have shared with them have worked (or not worked). My own practice is the result of my own path and it serves me well. But, I know we are all individuals and had to find out what types of things could be easily taught so that people could actually practice them enough and for long enough time to get the results they wanted for themselves and which were relevant to my role as their therapist or teacher.
You can easily learn practices that take just minutes per day and which will start to give you valuable benefits within two weeks. These include: lowered stress, more positive and effective coping with stress, reduced anxiety, and improved mood and sleep quality. I have seen this over and over with thousands of patients and students. And, the good news is that because the practices are easy and take so little time, they are valuable additions to conventional therapy modalities like cognitive-behavioral approaches and central to both acceptance and commitment therapy and dialectical-behavioral therapy.
The purpose of this article is to share a summary of my path and how mindfulness became central to what I offer as a therapist. In other articles and videos, I’ll dive more deeply into many facets of how and why to practice as well as the range of benefits.
Jon
Check out my video on this topic below:
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