Mindfulness and Psychotherapy
Mindfulness has become increasingly integrated into Western psychotherapy over the past several decades, though its roots extend back more than two millennia through Buddhist contemplative traditions.
Mindfulness is the capacity to attend to present experience as it unfolds, with openness, curiosity, acceptance, and less automatic judgment.
Mindfulness and meditation are related, but they are not the same thing. Meditation refers to a broad family of contemplative practices, including concentration, Vipassana, Zen, Dzogchen, and Direct Path practices. Mindfulness is one capacity many of these practices cultivate: noticing experience as it is happening without immediately becoming lost in it.
This capacity has particular importance in psychotherapy.
1. Disidentifying from experience
Normally, much of our psychological life simply happens. A thought appears and we believe it. Fear arises and suddenly we see the world through fear. A familiar relational pattern begins playing itself out before we realize we have entered it.
Mindfulness allows us to observe experience while it is happening.
Thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, and impulses become experiences we can notice rather than realities we automatically inhabit. Different therapeutic and contemplative traditions have developed their own languages for this shift: decentering, cognitive defusion, the observing ego, witnessing, and disidentification.
Different traditions, but a related movement: from being immersed in experience to becoming aware of experience.
Many therapeutic traditions also recognize that the psyche is multiple, composed of parts, ego states, or self states. Sometimes one of these takes the seat of consciousness and, for a moment, we become it.
IFS calls this blending. When blended with a frightened part, we do not simply feel fear. We see ourselves and the world through fear. As the part unblends, something else becomes available. IFS calls it Self: a capacity for awareness, curiosity, compassion, calm, and clarity from which we can relate to our parts without becoming them.
Contemplative traditions take this even further. In Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta, and other nondual traditions, awakening involves a profound shift in identity: from identifying with the changing contents of consciousness to recognizing awareness itself as our true nature.
Psychotherapy does not have to make this metaphysical claim to make use of the same experiential discovery:
We can fully experience what arises without becoming what arises.
2. Moving from conceptual to experiential knowing
Mindfulness also privileges direct experience over conceptual understanding.
An old Buddhist metaphor warns us not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
Our concepts about experience are the finger.
The experience itself is the moon.
We can become extraordinarily sophisticated at explaining ourselves while remaining disconnected from what is actually happening inside. In experiential therapy, mindfulness brings us back from our explanations to the immediate experience beneath them.
3. Making the unconscious conscious
Much of our psychological life operates automatically, outside awareness.
Mindfulness makes these processes available for observation. We begin to notice reactions, impulses, sensations, and patterns that would otherwise simply unfold.
In this sense, mindfulness becomes a tool for one of psychotherapy’s oldest pursuits:
Making the unconscious conscious.