The psychological community has wholeheartedly embraced mindfulness in response to the many mental health benefits that are reported by individuals and documented in peer-reviewed literature. The research continues to develop with more robust design, and the scientific community has just begun to quantify and qualify the effectiveness of this practice.
As a passionate mindfulness teacher, this is encouraging and exciting — however, it comes at a cost. As with the wide-spread adoption of any new technology or idea, critical elements and insights can become lost or diluted, and as a result, so does its impact. While I applaud that mindfulness is being adopted on such a large scale, and its benefits are becoming more accessible to more people, I also see how misconceptions about what the practice is have affected what is offered in the name of “mindfulness.”
The understanding that “mindfulness is not a technique” often goes unheeded in the pursuit of its adoption.
As mindfulness continues to grow in acceptance, it has increasingly been used over the past several years in psychological practice as another “modality” or technique. However, when therapeutic practitioners seek to incorporate mindful techniques into their work without appropriate understanding, the practice loses its efficacy.
Mindfulness is not (just) a technique
Although we may hear this often — or maybe because we do and therefore it becomes merely white noise — the understanding that “mindfulness is not a technique” often goes unheeded in the pursuit of its adoption. The issues this presents are two-fold:
- when a technique-based teaching is utilized, mindfulness and many of the benefits it can provide are no longer being offered
- a technique-based approach can, in some instances, cause harm.
To understand why this occurs in the context of the therapeutic community, there are a few concepts to unpack: how the therapeutic encounter is understood, what the elements of a therapeutic encounter involve, and finally, what it looks like to teach mindfulness in this context (or any context).
Recognizing healing vs. fixing
Most therapists would acknowledge that the most powerful work they do is in the realm of “healing“, rather than “fixing” (which approaches the individual as a problem to be solved) — recognizing and reaffirming the person as a whole, rather than as a problem to be solved. The catalyst for this healing work rests within the “relational field”, the dynamic created between the client and the therapist, rather than with any techniques or approaches. Similarly, the art of teaching mindfulness exists firmly in the realm of healing in this way. However, in the therapeutic encounter there are also necessary elements that function as intervention, with an intention to “fix” or help.
The movement between these two intentions is where the use of mindfulness in a therapeutic context can become confused and lose its impact: the therapeutic power of mindfulness lies, at its very heart, with the paradox of letting go of the need to fix in order to heal. This doesn’t mean that we give up trying to help ourselves or others — but the ability to recognize the difference between these intentions informs the understanding of the practice of mindfulness. This can be difficult to understand because it can’t be grasped through a conceptual framework and is therefore easily lost in the push to utilize mindfulness as another “modality” in therapy.
The therapeutic power of mindfulness lies, at its very heart, with the paradox of letting go of the need to fix in order to heal.
While the work a therapist does is relational in nature, it is generally held within some conceptual framework or theory of psychology that informs that relationship (think: psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive, integrative, etc.) Additionally, there are the many therapeutic modalities, often informed by these paradigms or theories, which function as intervention, technique, or tool-kit. Modalities might be conceived of as methods to work with a set of symptoms or issues (cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) or to work with a particular kind of resource (equine therapy, sand-play, etc.) in the interests of therapeutic “work.” However, to treat mindfulness as one more modality involves a fundamental flaw.
To approach mindfulness in terms of therapeutic modality is problematic in a number of ways. The problem begins with a fundamental operating principle of mindfulness practice in the context of trying to “fix” something. A practitioner has to be willing to set aside all goals other than awareness of what is happening in the present moment. This doesn’t mean that there is anything invalid about learning mindfulness practice because we want to change something in our lives — it’s perfectly legitimate to have a reason or motivation for wanting to learn. In fact, most find the practice because they are suffering in some aspect of their life and are looking to find a way out of that suffering. Those dealing with anxiety, depression, or chronic pain, or any number of physical and emotional difficulties have found relief and healing after coming to mindfulness intentionally for that purpose.
But that drive to escape suffering, that’s where things can get a bit messy in the utilization of mindfulness as a modality in a therapeutic environment, because this very benefit can only be found in the subtleties and paradox within the practice, where embracing what is allows change and healing to happen. This isn’t something that can be easily translated through the introduction of a few “techniques” to employ when difficulties arise, or by practicing in order to achieve change directly.
How do we heal through letting go?
It’s helpful to look at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness — Kabat-Zinn is the pioneer of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and the father of mindfulness in health care, and he includes “nonjudgemental” in his definition of mindfulness.
What is nonjudgmental awareness?
A critical capacity in teaching mindfulness is guiding others to recognize the various ways we hold “lenses” that obscure our ability to see clearly what is happening in the present moment.
Recognizing the presence of these lenses is included in the descriptor of mindfulness offered by Kabat-Zinn when he discusses the “nonjudgmental” element in mindfulness p