Do you remember what I wrote in the prolegomenon, about what led me to an interest in mindfulness in the first place? It was that I had a very hard time listening carefully to my clients. Whether in conversations with a client or in everyday social exchanges, all of us have had at least some trouble with listening. This difficulty is in large part due to the fact that, without active and focused attention, we can literally miss half or more of what people say to us in a conversation. We want folks to follow our vocal instructions, so we need to do things that keep people from spacing out and going off on little head journeys while we’re speaking to them. In ordinary conversation, we can listen to about half of what people say and get by pretty well. Watch yourself while you’re conversing with someone, and notice that you can often anticipate what’s coming. Notice that you don’t listen to every word. Notice also that while you’re not listening, you’re somewhere else—planning, pondering, or thinking, perhaps, but somewhere else and often somewhen else. The same is true of others. (Or maybe this is just me—yipes! Is it just me? Heavens! I hope it isn’t just me! You know what I mean, don’t you?)
Try this experiment: When speaking casually to another person, just toss random words into your sentences. Don’t change inflection or pace; just drop them in like they belong there. People will often hear what fits and not necessarily what you said. Likewise, people see what fits. Here’s a visual example:
Paris in the the spring
Right now, go to the bottom of this page and read the footnote.1
PLACEMENT OF MINDFULNESS IN
A SESSION
Since our sessions are essentially hour-long conversations, you can easily see how much opportunity might be lost if half or more of the conversa- tion in the room goes unnoticed. Integrating mindfulness into the session is one of the best antidotes to this disconnected situation. But how and where should you begin to introduce mindfulness into your work?
As I suggested above, dropping a small bit of mindfulness in at the beginning of a session is a great idea. A brief mindfulness exercise prior to experientially challenging exposure work is likely to facilitate greater engagement with the distressing object or situation. Even two or three minutes devoted to simply noticing the inflow and outflow of breath can make an important difference. Tom Borkovec’s work has been very sug- gestive in this regard. Tom has found that a bit of progressive muscle relaxation prior to an exposure session causes the exposure to produce better outcomes (Hazlett-Stevens & Borkovec, 2001).
This makes sense when you consider basic learning processes. We learn better when we’re present than when we’re absent, distracted, or preoccupied. Humans are great at being physically present but psycho- logically absent (several of my students have mentioned my capacity for this). Exposure sessions are, like virtually all of the work we do in therapy, opportunities to learn new behaviors. In particular, they are opportunities to learn how to respond to distressing stimuli in new and, we hope, more adaptive ways. The presence that the initial mindfulness work fosters makes the goal of learning these new behaviors more easily attainable.
Another very good place for a mindful moment is when we find ourselves or our clients working very hard. As a general rule, when you find yourself in conflict, struggling, or exerting a lot of effort, a mindful moment can help. Things capture our attention. Things we call “ problems” really capture our attention. Again, there are likely very good evolutionary reasons for this: we remember very well from our days wan- dering the savanna that it’s better to miss lunch than to be lunch.
1 Without looking back, immediately write the words you just read below. Then go to the footnote at the bottom of the last page in this chapter (page 96).
The problem with problems, though, is that they become merely prob- lems. It’s the “mereliness” of our problems and struggles that damns us. Our problems often insist that they must be dealt with right this moment! And this insistence can cause us to lose all sense of everything else that surrounds us. Such a sense of struggle and effort while sitting in a chair is a sure sign that your mind is trying to keep you from being eaten. When either you or your client gets into this situation, look carefully around the room. If you don’t see any bears, it’s probably safe and useful to stop for a mindful moment. Just let the silence fill in around you and encourage your client to do the same. Sometimes the most surprising things will show up in those moments.
I originally started doing this pretty naturally. I wasn’t really thinking in terms of mindfulness. I was just stuck and confused, and I somehow learned to shut up, sit still, and cease any effort when I didn’t know what else to do. I learned to wait. I learned to practice acceptance. I learned to let my thoughts run on ahead. I promised them that I would catch up later (but really I was just shining them on). As I write this, I feel a tug inside that wants me to write you a list of complicated- sounding instruc- tions about how to do this. But the truth is that I got there by just sitting still for a while and giving my mind permission to take a short holiday.
It sounds almost too easy, and it can be. But remember that, in the context of a mindful moment, just sitting still can and should be done quite intentionally and explicitly. Try it in your practice—either in your consultation group or with a client. When you notice yourself getting busy, ask the client if you can take just a moment to settle. Let the room grow still for a couple minutes. Get present to something, anything in the current environment—sound, temperature, muscle tension, or your breath. When you find your attention coming back to the problem you’re struggling with, notice that, and return gently to whatever it is that you’re focused on. Take a moment. Let the world fill in around you. And then, having settled, come gently back to the task.
I’m often asked about correct placement of these mindful moments. Really, it’s difficult to go wrong. Human avoidance is so ubiquitous that stopping humans at just about any given moment will mean stopping them when they’re running. I sometimes joke at workshops that I have a fail-safe detector that can tell me whether a person is in need of a mindful moment. I then feel the person’s wrist. If I can detect a pulse, the answer is yes. If you really want to get a direct sense of the ubiquity and automaticity of human problem solving, try what is suggested in the previous paragraph. You can even try it all by yourself. I’ll even make it formal in an exercise.