Mindfulness – from therapy to wellbeing

Mindfulness as a therapeutic technique has grown in popularity in the past few decades and there is now a lot of evidence in support of its short and long term benefits.  This is perhaps unsurprising given that mindfulness develops beyond a technique for many people and instead becomes a complete framework for living.  Mindfulness, in other words, is a way of being in the world rather than simply another technique that we ‘add’ to our lives. 

In terms of therapy, this means that we don’t ‘take’ mindfulness as we would a pill.  Instead, being mindful means not denying or pushing away our current experience, but meeting it with an open curiosity. 

Mindfulness is cultivating the ability to be present for whatever is arising in our lives and learning to make friends with those experiences. Where before we may have reacted to painful emotional experience by (sometimes violently) pushing it away, now we have the ability to rest with those experiences and allow them to unfold their story.  We learn to ask “is it the experience itself that makes me uncomfortable or the way I respond that causes so much frustration and unease?” 

Beyond therapy, mindfulness helps us recognise and savour the wholesome moments that are already present in our lives. Often these are the quiet moments – they are so natural and smooth that they tend to slip by unnoticed. With mindfulness we touch these moments and we begin to taste the quiet joy that accompanies them.  With practise, the experience of joy and contentment grows and a way of life develops where open curiosity rather than closed-off anxiety becomes the norm. 

Helping others to appreciate these quiet moments and to rest with the rich fabric of life experience – in an open and non-judgemental way – is surely a positive and worthy goal of mental health promotion.

Grant Rix, Midlands Mental Health Promoter