By now, you’re probably familiar with many of the benefits of mindfulness. Maybe you even practice it yourself.
Nevertheless, getting a client to try it out can still prove tricky for many therapists.
So in the video below, Zindel Segal, PhD shares a simple way for you to help a client begin to explore the practice.
And so these are two ways of knowing some of our experience because we’re still focusing on the same feet. We haven’t changed our feet. It’s the same foot. But one lens provides us with certain flow of information and the second lens provides us with a second flow of information.
And we can choose which lens to use simply by noticing how and where we direct our attention. And we’re doing this in the context of something very like our feet, but we can also do it in the same way when it comes to dealing with difficult emotional experiences and exploring in the same way what new information might be available to us, how we might see something that we feel we totally understand from a perspective that might give us a little bit more space, maybe even a little bit more freedom to understand it.
Mindfulness can complement many therapeutic modalities. To help you integrate it into your clinical work, check this out. We brought together top experts including Daniel Siegel, MD; Tara Brach, PhD; Jack Kornfield, PhD; Marsha Linehan, PhD; and more.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How have you used mindfulness with a client? Please leave a comment below.
I start each session with a mindfulness exercise. At first, I guide the process, but within three or four sessions, I switch roles. The client leads the exercise. Sometimes I find it useful to switch roles again, when I want to introduce a different mindfulness technique, e.g., rather than a body scan, introduce 3 centered breathing or using an approach similar to Siegel’s focus on one part of the body using two approaches (thoughts and sensations). I suspect three approaches would work well, too (adding feelings). One might also add imagination as well, depending on when in a session mindfulness might be useful. Perhaps in processing an image from a dream. Most significantly, inviting the client to lead is most helpful in all the mindfulness exercises so long as they have agency, knowing they can be creative and feel not judged, knowing, i.e., that there is no wrong way to proceed. Whatever the client does is informative. So, non-judgmentally receiving whatever they do is crucial.
For every therapeutic work which includes body processes like trauma therapy you need mindfulness.
For every conscious emotion and working through it, you need mindfulness.
For every process which belongs to our profession as healers of the soul we and our clients need mindfulness. This shouldn’t be such an extraordinary topic, at least not if we are familiar with Perls, Rogers, Lowen, Maslow and the humanistic psychotherapy lineages of the 50th, 60th, 70th etc., which are all based on mindfulness (even when they didn’t use this term then).
Miriam Popper, Switzerland
Thank you for this. I’ve been using mindfulness based techniques in my practice for some time now, most recently a patient is struggling with a very strong inner part that tells her she needs to continue to smoke for her survival, mindfulness helps with calming this strong voice, however I’m seeking advice for how to help the client move forward. Thank you.
I’m such a huge advocate for mindfulness because I’ve used it myself and it’s done wonders. Many of my clients are reluctant to try mindfulness and the ones that do, often tell me they didn’t do it right so I’m going to use this and see if it helps! Thanks!
Thank you for this. It was super helpful.