"Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won't)."
~ Baraz and Lilyana (2016)
Core Process Mindfulness Based Psychotherapy and Humanistic Existentialist Counselling
- Working through Emotional Pain
- Trauma Informed
- Sadness
- Anxiety and Fear
- Anger
- Life Transitions
- Psychospiritual Emergence / Higher Self Connection
- Disassociation, Numbness, Defensiveness
- Gender Diversity, Sexuality
Psychotherapy and counselling can help us to be with ourselves in more accepting, kind ways.
A 3 phase journey (originally developed by trauma expert Pierre Janet) offers a helpful general framework for growth and development in order to work through emotional difficulties. Although described as 3 phases, it is by no means linear, and we move in and out of these different phases as an organic, holistic approach to health and wellbeing:
Phase 1: Awareness of our current needs in life (in all our different realms of being: social, personal, deep Self, and physical) for stabilization and safety. This helps us to ground and resource ourselves in our present lives.
Phase 2: Processing our traumas, patterns or difficulties from our personal history. Making meaning out of our defence mechanisms, protective strategies and childhood patterns. Through decompensating (or demasking / or letting go of our defences / personnas / our holding field) we can replace stuck patterns with new ways of being that work better for us in our current lives.
Phase 3: Integration of our learning, so that we can apply our insights into the future and re-structure a Self that feels more in alignment to our needs. We can start to notice that our fears may be internalised fears that we may be projecting out onto the world. We notice and relinquish: where our evaluation of the external has become hyper-vigilant because of disturbing or traumatic life experiences in the past; where we have mistaken our internal reality for external reality.
A mindfulness based approach can help us to develop a capacity for awareness of our difficulties, and this will aid integration by processing our traumatic or problematic responses or reactions. As we become more aware of our trapped or stuck thoughts, feelings and emotions from childhood patterns or memories, we can move through them. We become less affected through integration, which helps us to become more conscious of our patterns, so that they are contextualised and relegated to their proper place in personal history where they belong. We can become freer to grow and develop without those inhibitions keeping us in a certain fixed shape or position.
If we can turn towards our pain, and bring kind attention to what we are experiencing, this helps us to gain clarity and awareness. Our emotional bodies understand this, so when we work on deepening our connection to our felt sense, we become more aligned to our more grounded, balanced Self.
When we emotionally slow down, and notice our inner life, we are engaging with our processes in a way that allows us to work with more spaciousness and to connect to ourselves and others in a way that is more authentic.
"Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. We don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments." - Charlotte Joko Beck
In working with self-compassion, acceptance and kindness, and having this witnessed and mirrored by a therapist, we can start to free ourselves from stuck patterns, often unconsciously developed in childhood.
We can grow our container and become a more conscious participant, and not just an observer, of our experience, so that we can create change in our inner and outer lives. Through exploring the way we contain our experience, we can become more contemplative in the way that we live our lives, noticing the way we are thrown into ‘samsara’ or pain of existence, as an ordinary part of our daily life’s conditions. When we reflect on the way we contain, and are the container, of our experience, we can find it in us to become more responsive. This can help us to move through difficulty.
We can also develop an understanding of what is contained within us, and appreciate our distress or emotional difficulty, with kindness and non-judgment. Then we can become more open and curious about allowing different inner parts to integrate, come in, grow and evolve. In honouring our limited mental formation patterns, defence mechanisms, and our protective patterns, we acknowledge, validate and appreciate ourselves as we are.
Rather than favour joy over distress, this approach helps us to contain the whole Self, so that we can develop our capacity to meet our own humanity, including our emotional pain, in our experience, without becoming defeated or collapsed by it.
A relational mindfulness approach can help us to include experiences that we may have avoided, such as anger, boredom, sadness, despair and shame. Instead of pushing them away, we can integrate them, and be with them more consciously, so that they don’t stay split within us. If we don’t include them in our ‘mandala’ of life, we have a tendency to act them out in the way we live our lives. Much of the work can be in discovering our resistances, and honouring this as our experience, so that uncomfortable insight or awareness can be welcomed.
"Acknowledge the wave, but stay with the ocean" - Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Working with openness helps us to try out different choices for ourselves and to experiment with our neural plasticity, so that we can continue to explore possibilities without judgment, or shaming ourselves. In so doing, we work in a compassionate way in the relative truth, rather than absolutes, so that we see the work as incremental. Working with our emotional wounds is painful, but if we can meet that pain with kind honesty, and an intention to process that pain, inner resolutions can come through.
"Those who suffer from trauma become vigilant for triggers that elicit somatic reactions, often confusing a trigger with the original events and losing their ability to hold dual awareness that distinguishes the present from the past" - Babette Rothschild
Links
Karuna Institute
karunainstitute.co.uk/
karunadartmoor.co.uk/
