In my first post about mindfulness, I’ll look at how it is incorporated within the framework of Dialectical Behavior Therapy as presented by its founder, Marsha Linehan. In further posts I will talk about it as a stand alone tool to use to increase emotional intelligence, as a means for dealing with negative emotions and distress tolerance, for example during an anxiety attack, its relation to Buddhism and Stoicism, and how it can be a very effective tool in the work place.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the act of consciously focusing the mind in the present moment without judgement and without attachment to the moment. When we are mindful, we are aware in and of the present moment. [1] As discussed in my post about This is Water, which is actually about mindfulness but presented in different words, mindfulness is contrasted to “mindlessness”, or automatic, habitual, or rote behavior and activity. When we are mindful we are alert and awake, when we are mindless we tend to cling to the present moment as hard as we can, almost as if we can change it if we cling hard enough.
In the context of dialectical behavior therapy, Marsha Linehan presents mindfulness skills as psychological and behavioral translations of meditation practices from Buddhism. Mindfulness has to do with the quality of awareness or the quality of presence that a person brings to everyday living. “It’s a way of living awake, with eyes wide open.” As a set of skills, mindfulness practice is the intentional process of observing, describing, and participating in reality nonjudgmentally, in the moment, and with effectiveness.
Practicing Mindfulness
In order to become more mindful, as with any behavioral change, we must practice being mindful. Mindfulness practice is the repeated effort of bringing the mind back to awareness of the present moment, without judgement and without attachment. It includes the repeated effort of letting go of judgments and letting go of attachment to current thoughts, emotions, sensations, activities, events, or life situations. Mindfulness practice teaches us to move into the moment and become aware of everything in it, functioning from there.
Mindfulness everyday is a way of living with our eyes wide open. If we want to first accept what’s happening to us, we have to know, objectively, what is happening to us. We have to know how to open up our eyes and look. Linehan offers the following: “Now a lot of people say, ‘I keep my eyes open all the time.’ But if we look at them, we’ll see that they are not looking at the moment. They’re looking to their past. They’re looking to their future. They’re looking to their worries. They’re looking to their thoughts. They’re looking absolutely everywhere else, except at the moment. Mindfulness as a practice is the practice of directing our attention to only one thing. And that one thing is the moment we are alive. The very moment we are in.“
Mindfulness “What” Skills
As presented within DBT, mindfulness is broken down into six sub-skills, namely “what” skills and “how” skills. As the name suggests, mindfulness what skills are about what to do. They are observing, describing, and participating.
Observing
The first “what” skill, and in my view one of the most important, is simply observing. When I say observing I don’t mean in a non-participatory, only watching way, I mean it in the sense that you are attending to events, emotions, and other behavioral responses without necessarily trying to terminate them when they are painful or trying to prolong them when they are pleasant. The important thing here is to allow yourself to experience, with awareness, the moment; do not leave a situation or try to terminate an emotion. Simply observe that the situation or emotion exists. When viewed from the perspective of existence, as we will discuss below, something can be neither “good” nor “bad”. It just is. It is only our perception of that thing, and then our judgement of it that makes it “good” or “bad.
Observing is more difficult than people often realize due to the fact that, generally, if we are attending to an event, it requires us to also step back from the event; to remove our opinions and judgments, and just see it as a thing that is. For example, observing walking and walking are two distinct things. Likewise, observing thinking and thinking are two different things.
Describing
By describing events and personal responses in words, we are strengthening our skills in both communication and self-control. Learning to describe requires that a person learn not to take emotions and thoughts as accurate and exact reflections of environmental events. For example, feeling afraid does not necessarily mean that a situation is threatening to life or welfare. Many people confuse emotional responses with precipitating events.
Participating
Participating, or rather, participating without self-consciousness, involves entering completely into the activities of the current moment, without separating him- or herself fro ongoing events and interactions. The quality of action is spontaneous; the interaction between the individual and the environment is smooth and based in some part on habit. Participating, can, of course, be mindless or mindful. An example of mindless participation is driving home along a complex route while we concentrate on something else and arrive home without really being aware of how we got there. An example of mindful participation is that of a skillful athlete who responds flexibly but smoothly to the demands of the task with alertness and awareness, but not with self-consciousness. Mindlessness is participating without attention to the task; mindfulness is participating with attention.
Mindfulness “How” Skills
The remaining three mindfulness skills are all about how one performs the above “what” skills. They include taking a nonjudgmental stance, focusing on one thing in the moment, and doing what actually works.
Nonjudgmentally
Taking a nonjudgmental stance means taking a non-evaluative approach, not judging something as good or bad. Many people at first confuse this to mean going from a negative judgment to a positive one; it does not. The point to get across is not that people should be balanced, or optimistic in their judgments, but rather that judging in most instances should be dropped altogether.
In the context of DBT, judging is abandoned for simply observing the consequences of behavior and events. For example, a person’s behavior may lead to painful consequences for self or others, or the outcome of events may be destructive. The nonjudgmental approach recommended by DBT simply observes these consequences, and may even suggest changing the behavior or events, but would not add a label of “bad” to them. DBT also stresses the accurate discrimination of one thing from another and description of what is observed. In discriminating, one determines whether a behavior meets a required definition or not.
One-Mindfully
One-mindfully means focusing the mind and awareness in the current moment’s activity, rather than splitting attention among several activities or between a current activity and thinking about something else. Achieving such a focus requires control of attention – a capability that many people lack. People are typically distracted by thoughts and images of the past, worries about the future, ruminative thoughts about troubles, or current negative moods. They are sometimes unable to put their troubles away and focus attention on the task at hand. When this is the case, past negative experiences, and even potential future ones, are given the chance to taint the present moment.
Effectively
Being effective is directed at reducing the participants’ tendency to be more concerned with being “right” than with what is actually needed or called for in a particular situation. The inability to let go of “being right” in favor of achieving goals is often related to experiences with invalidating environments. A central issue for people who have been frequently invalidated is whether they can indeed trust their own perceptions, judgments and decisions. Taken to an extreme, an emphasis on principle over outcome can often result in these individuals’ being disappointed or alienating others. People often find it much easier to give up being right for being effective when it is viewed as a skillful response rather than “giving in”.
Skillful Means: Balancing Doing Mind and Being Mind
Doing mind focuses on achieving goals; being mind focuses on present experience. In other words, doing mind is “something-to-do” mind, and being mind is “nothing-to-do” mind. The concept of wise mind brings these two mindsets together. Without aspects of being mind and doing mind it is difficult, if not impossible, to lead a balanced life, but when we spend too much time in one mindset we often experience troubles in our day to day life.
Wise Mind: Walking the Middle Path
“Walking the middle path” is living life between the extremes, or find a synthesis in the extremes that works for you. The idea is that mindfulness brings together opposites, synthesizing reasonable mind and emotion mind, as well as between doing mind and being mind.
References
- Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT® skills training manual (2nd ed.). New York, NY, US: Guilford Press.