Fuentes del discurso intercultural

Mindfulness Practice: Find Your Breath

Breath work is a foundation practice of mindfulness, and it’s your most powerful tool for helping yourself to stay grounded and remain in your own skin. The beauty of your breath is that it’s always with you and you can always bring your atten-tion back to it. You can find yourself with your breath.

Remember that paying attention to your breath is a way to slow down your thinking and your reactions so that you can connect with yourself and what’s important to you.

Find a quiet place and sit in your mindful position. This practice is about counting your breaths. Some people use only numbers; others prefer to count using an image, such as climbing up a set of stairs or a ladder. Beginning with a two- minute practice, you will count your inhalation and exhala-tion as one, then your next set of breaths as two, and so on.

Self- Dysregulation

157 Try to follow your breathing instead of making your breath-ing fit your countbreath-ing. This means that your inhalations and exhalations may be uneven. Don’t worry if your breathing starts to match your counting; as you continue to practice, this will get easier. For this practice, you will count to ten.

When your mind wanders, which it will, or you find yourself counting beyond ten, start at one again. Each time you notice your mind getting distracted, bring your attention back to the task of counting and begin at one. For some people, when you catch your mind in distraction, it can be useful to say to your-self, Wandering mind, and then return to inhaling and count-ing from one.

The goal for this practice is not necessarily to reach ten, but to notice your mind wander, catch it, and bring it back.

The act of bringing your mind back, not simply having a quiet mind, is mindfulness. You will need your skills of nonjudg-ment here as well. Remember, your mind produces thoughts, so it will continue to do so. When we do this practice, it’s not often that either of us reaches ten.

You may be asking what this has to do with identity. This practice helps you to stay in your skin and in your experience without reacting. This practice can also help you to get con-nected to your intuition or what is called your “wise mind” in DBT (Linehan 1993). Your intuition helps you to connect to your values, morals, needs, and wants. We recommend doing this as a daily practice and seeing if over time, you can increase the duration of this practice, adding thirty seconds or a minute each week.

Once you begin to do this practice formally, you can use it in your daily life to help slow down your reactions. For example, before agreeing to do something, making a big change in your life, or having an emotionally charged con-versation, find your breath, slow yourself down, breathe, stay in the present moment, and then assess your own thoughts and feelings before taking action. This gives you time to

assess whether your behavior fits with your own goals and values so that you avoid reacting to thoughts and emotions.

The goal is to build your own sense of who you are and stay steady, even when you notice urges to sacrifice your own identity for someone else’s. Because this is a new behavior, you may notice that other people begin to react to and treat you differently as well.



Chronic Feelings of Emptiness

When Ann, a twenty- three- year- old college senior, came to the clinic seeking help for her BPD, the aspect she struggled most with was how empty she felt:

I feel so empty inside. I try to fill the emptiness with people and activities, but it only lasts a while and then I feel empty again.

Cocaine, sex, and online gaming seem to help for a while, but they are distractions. I can’t find a nice, stable guy; I have to find guys whose lives are full of drama. That excites me for a while, but I know it’s not healthy. I know it; I just can’t stop myself.

If not with lovers, drugs, or other distractions, how do you deal with emptiness? Of all of the DSM criteria for diagnosing BPD, perhaps the most difficult symptom to explain to others is having chronic feelings of emptiness. Emptiness is such a subjective experi-ence, and people with BPD know it when they feel it. Other symp-toms, such as anger, black- and- white thinking, and impulsivity are easier for others to see, but trying to explain your sense of emptiness to someone who has never experienced it can seem nearly impossible.

The criterion of emptiness is present in more than 70 percent of people with BPD (Grilo et al. 2001). Research shows that feelings of emptiness often precede suicide attempts (Schnyder et al. 1999), and yet this criterion has not been well studied.

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