A Simple Way to Help a Client Experiment with Mindfulness

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.

Click here for full transcript

So there are a number of ways of understanding mindfulness and its application in the clinical context. And sometimes it’s hard to describe or really define through words alone. So the thing that I tend to do is I ask people to join me experientially in exploring it. So the first thing that we can do to try to understand this, is to see if we can think about our feet.So think about your feet right now. It’s a real time thing. And in thinking about your feet, maybe bringing your attention to ideas or thoughts that you have about your feet, maybe how long you’ve been walking or standing on them today. Any thoughts that you have about whether you like the way they look. Any ideas about whether they’re in good shape or whether you’ve got a concern about them that you want to find out about medically. If you’ve had any aches or pains in your feet and what that means to you.And just allowing any thoughts about your feet to just come into your mind and think about what it means, what you might want to do about that, if it suggests anything to you that is actionable or needs to take place. Just letting yourself think about your feet.And then maybe moving your attention to the breath and taking a breath, feeling yourself breathing in and feeling yourself breathing out and now taking your attention back to your feet. But this time, seeing whether you can sense any sensations in your feet.Just maybe allowing the sensation of pressure, of the soles of the feet pressing down into the floor through the soles of your shoes. Maybe noticing any throbbing, any pulsing, noticing the shoes as they cover the feet and maybe any areas of tightness or pinching or cushioning. Noticing any sensations on the top of the foot. And even as you do this, you may notice that there are thoughts too, but allowing them to be there and coming back to the sensations right now, moment by moment, sensations in your feet. Whatever they are. Making room for them as best you can.And then when you’re ready, moving to the attention, back to breathing, wherever you feel the breath. One in breath and one out-breath. And so here we have an experience of our feet but viewed through two different lenses. And so one of the things I’m curious about is what was the experience the first time when you were thinking about your feet and what was the mind doing and what did you notice? And usually people say that they are thinking about judgements, evaluation, thoughts that get associated with one another. My feet are like this, things like what it says about me. So there’s a lot of the mind trying to figure out what the feet means in terms of an action agenda.And then in the second, the second approach, those thoughts can be there, but they’re actually a little bit less frequent and there’s more attention that’s paid to the sensations that are in the feet that are sometimes missed in the first mode.

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.

5 Comments

Norma Lelless, Other, CA says

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.

Miriam Popper, Psychotherapy, CH says

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

Tiziana Perinotti, Stress Management, San Francisco, CA, USA says

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.

Lyne H, Counseling, CA says

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!

Debbie R, Counseling, Kansas City, KS, USA says

Thank you for this. It was super helpful.

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5 Comments