第七章 同理觉知：正念修炼之路

89CHAPTER 7 Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness In the layered approach we’re taking to understanding the process of CFT, we began by first con- sidering the therapeutic relationship, in which compassion is modeled by the therapist, who serves as a secure base for clients to begin feeling safe so they can approach difficult emotions and experi- ences. We then spent chapters 4 through 6 developing the next layer—­helping clients develop a compassionate understanding of their emotions in relation to evolution and the developmental factors that shaped them. This understanding is in the service of helping clients relate compassionately and nonjudgmentally to their difficulties—­many of which they didn’t choose or design, but must cope with nonetheless. In this chapter, we’ll consider the next layer of our approach to CFT: mindful awareness. It’s important to recognize that all three of these layers will be present from the begin- nings of therapy, with the relationship developing from the point of initial contact, and the thera- pist weaving in the understanding and mindful awareness pieces even during the first few sessions. Over the past few decades, mindfulness has become one of the most used and studied practices in contemporary psychotherapy. It has provided the basis for mindfulness-­based cognitive therapy (Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2001), and has long been featured in other “third wave” cognitive behavioral approaches, including DBT (Linehan, 1993), ACT (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999), and others. A body of evidence supports the use of mindfulness-­based interventions for a host of problems, particularly depression and anxiety (Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010). There are many existing resources for learning about mindfulness and using it in therapy, so I won’t be attempting an exhaustive introduction to mindfulness here. Rather, I’ll briefly discuss the conceptCFT Made Simple of mindfulness and how it fits into CFT, introduce a couple of mindfulness practices commonly used in CFT, and touch on some tips for effectively engaging clients in mindfulness practices. MINDFULNESS Mindfulness involves a particular sort of awareness. Probably the most common definition of mind- fulness comes from Jon Kabat-­Zinn (1994): paying attention in the present moment, on purpose, nonjudgmentally. Mindfulness means intentionally directing our present-­moment awareness in a way that allows us to see what is before us, both in our external environment and in our minds, exactly as it is. With mindful attention, we refrain from judging, criticizing, clinging to, or rejecting our experience. Rather, we allow ourselves to notice, accept, and curiously explore the contents of our experience—­ whether that experience comes to us from the outside world through our senses, or is the product of our own internal experience, as in thoughts, feelings, motivations, and bodily sensations. With mindful awareness, we allow ourselves to curiously observe all of these experiences—­noticing them for exactly what they are, neither clinging to them nor pushing them away. Mindful awareness can be a very useful ability for clients, particularly those who are haunted by powerful shaming and self-­critical thoughts. The problem is not that they have these thoughts—­to a greater or lesser extent, pretty much all of us do from time to time. The problem is that they ruminate on these thoughts, rehearse them, and believe them. Clients will also sometimes present with powerful emotions that seem to take them by storm, powerfully organizing their bodily experi- ence, attention, thinking, motivation, and behavior in ways we’ve discussed in previous chapters. Such clients can find themselves feeling trapped in the immediacy of such emotional experiences. The experiences can trigger unwanted feelings and problematic behaviors in the present moment, but can also lead clients to fear thoughts and emotions themselves—­potentially leading to the development of unhelpful patterns of experiential avoidance as they try to manage these scary and seemingly uncontrollable mental experiences. Practicing mindfulness can help address these challenges, and help prepare our clients (and ourselves) for compassion. Mindfulness involves numerous potential benefits that are relevant to CFT. Mindfulness training can give clients increased awareness of and control over their attention, helping them learn to direct their attention in helpful ways. It can help them learn to notice move- ment in the mind, to more quickly become aware when unhelpful thoughts and feelings arise. When these thoughts and emotions are noticed, the observing quality of mindful awareness can help keep clients from becoming stuck and fused with these experiences—­instead relating to them as temporary events playing out in the mind and body. In this way, clients can come to understand thoughts and emotions as mental and bodily experiences rather than who I am. Relatedly, the accepting, nonjudgmental quality of mindful awareness can help clients refrain from reacting to or elaborating upon these experiences in unhelpful ways (such as ruminating, or criticizing themselves for feeling anger or thinking certain thoughts that don’t fit with the person they want to be). The ability to mindfully observe one’s difficult thoughts and emotions without 92Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness either fusing with them or avoiding them by redirecting the attention can also help our clients develop distress tolerance, which is of vital importance for compassion. If we’re going to overcome avoidance and work with suffering, we have to be able to approach it and stay in contact with it while doing so. Mindfulness gives our clients a way to do that. Preparing Clients to Work with Attention As mindfulness is first and foremost a way of working with the attention, it can be useful to orient clients to this—­to help them get to know their attention a bit before introducing formal mind- fulness practices. This can be done quickly and easily with an experiential exercise in which we prompt clients to direct their attention to different targets—­internal, external, broad, narrow, present, past, concrete, conceptual—­so that they can see firsthand how their attention works. Let’s consider an example of how this might be done: Therapist: Josh, as we discussed in our last session, today we’ll be introducing a practice called mindfulness. Mindfulness involves paying attention in a particular way that helps us to become more aware of our experiences and helps us keep from getting caught up in unhelpful thoughts and emotions. How does that sound? Josh: Sounds like it’s worth a try. Therapist: Great. Before we dive into mindfulness, though, I think it might be useful to get to know what we mean by attention. We can think of attention as the “spotlight of the mind.” That spotlight can be pointed at lots of different things, directing our awareness in different ways. Are you up for a little exercise? Josh: All right. Therapist: Fantastic. I’m going to simply say a series of words—­and when you hear the word, try to direct your attention where the word indicates. So if I say, “Left elbow,” you’ll bring your attention to your left elbow. Got it? Jenny: (Nods.) Therapist: Okay, here goes: Right ear. (Waits two or three seconds.) Left foot. (Waits two or three seconds.) Your tongue. (Waits two or three seconds.) The feeling of your breath. (Waits two or three seconds.) The buzzing of the lights. (Waits two or three seconds.) Your favorite color. (Waits two or three seconds.) Tater tots! (Waits two or three seconds.) Justice. (Waits two or three seconds.) World peace. (Waits two or three seconds.) South America. (Waits two or three seconds.) What you’d like to have for dinner. (Waits two or three seconds.) And allowing your face to form a smile, the sensation of smiling. 93CFT Made Simple Josh: (Smiles slightly.) Therapist: What did you notice? Were you able to move your attention where I indicated? Josh: Yeah. It was kind of interesting. Therapist: Excellent. Did you notice how effortlessly you could move your attention around? When you moved your attention from one thing to another, did it happen quickly or slowly? Josh: Quickly. Like, immediately. Therapist: So you were able to very quickly shift your awareness from one thing to another. You may have also noticed how you were able to move the focus of your attention from external to internal bodily sensations, to ideas and memories, to the past and the future. You could also narrow it down to something like your elbow, and widen it onto broad ideas like justice. Josh: (Nods.) Therapist: What do you think? Pretty cool, eh? Josh: (Smiles and offers a slight, good-­natured eye-­roll.) Pretty cool. (Pauses.) Actually, it was kind of cool. I never thought of that before. Therapist: So that was just an example of how we can direct the spotlight of our attention in different ways. Let’s continue to explore that by learning our first mindfulness exercise. MINDFUL CHECKING-­IN The first formal mindfulness exercise I usually introduce in CFT is called Mindful Checking-­In (Kolts, 2012). Mindful Checking-­In involves bringing our attention sequentially to bodily experi- ences, felt emotions, and thinking, in fairly rapid succession. This exercise isn’t meant to be an extended meditation, although clients can certainly spend as much time as they like. Rather, the practice has a few specific purposes: • To help clients develop the habit of bringing their attention to their bodily experiences, emotions, and thoughts—­to get used to noticing these experiences. • To help clients begin to relate these experiences as they are—­physical sensations, feel- ings, and words or images in the mind—­without judging them. 94Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness • To help clients get used to practicing mindfulness exercises (and home-­practice gener- ally) in their daily life outside the session—­starting small with something they can hopefully do with little difficulty. Let’s take a look at how this exercise can be introduced in a therapy session: Therapist: The first mindfulness exercise we’ll do is called Mindful Checking-­In. Just like before, I’ll prompt you to bring your attention to certain experiences. This time, we’re going to direct attention to body experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Sound good? Josh: Sure. Therapist: In mindfulness, we want to be aware of these different experiences, bringing our attention to them. This is different from thinking about our experiences. So if your foot is cold, mindful awareness would involve noticing that it is cold, and maybe curiously paying attention to what those sensations of coldness feel like—­as if you were going to describe them, or explain what the experience was like to someone who didn’t have feet. That’s different from thinking about having cold feet, which might involves words in our minds like Crap, my feet are cold again. I should have worn my warm winter socks. Darn it! Get the difference? Josh: (Chuckles a bit.) I think so. Therapist: So if you notice yourself thinking instead of observing—­and you probably will—no worries. When you notice that, just try to bring your attention back to the experience. We’ll talk more about the thinking bit and how to handle that later. I’m also going to turn on my digital recorder here so that we can record the exercise in an mp3 that we can load onto your phone before we finish today, so that you can listen to it if you’d like, when practicing at home. Sound good? Josh: Sounds good. I can just record it on my phone right now. Therapist: Great. (Waits a few moments while Josh sets up his phone to record.) First, sit up in an upright, alert posture, with your head up. We don’t want to slump. Allow your breath to take on a comfortable rhythm, and if you feel comfortable doing so, allowing your eyes to close. If you prefer, feel free to keep your eyes open and lower your gaze onto the floor about six to eight feet in front of you, allowing your gaze to soften—­to unfocus a bit. If you need to shift about a bit as we go, or clear your throat, or anything like that, to remain comfortable—­don’t worry about it; just do it. Josh: (Straightens his posture and closes his eyes.) 95CFT Made Simple Therapist: Let’s start by bringing our awareness to the temperature in the room. Try to notice sensations of warmth or coolness… (Waits fifteen to twenty seconds)… • Now bringing your attention to external bodily sensations…the feeling of your feet on the floor…legs, buttocks, and back on the chair…the sensation of your hands resting in your lap. (Wait fifteen to twenty seconds.) • Now noticing information coming in through your other senses…sounds coming in through your ears…my voice, the rush of the heating system, the buzz of the lights… patterns of light on your eyelids… (Wait fifteen to twenty seconds.) • Now following these sensations into the body, noticing any internal bodily sensations. Bringing awareness to sensations like hunger or fullness, tension or relaxation, comfort or soreness. Just noticing these sensations, just as they are. (Wait five to ten seconds.) If any of these sensations call out for your attention, let it go to them, settling on the sensation and noticing what it is like… (Wait fifteen to twenty seconds.) • Now bringing awareness to the sensation of the breath. Noticing how quickly or slowly the breath enters and leaves your body. Noticing the heart rate… (Wait fifteen to twenty seconds.) • Following these sensations of arousal or relaxation, shifting your awareness to any emo- tions you may be feeling. Interest? Boredom? Anticipation? Curiosity? Just noticing these feelings as events in the mind. (Wait thirty seconds.) • Now that we’ve brought the attention to our feelings, allowing it to shift to another mental experience…thoughts. Notice any thoughts—­any words or images—­arising in your mind. Thoughts like, Is he going to talk in that slow voice the whole time? Just noticing any thoughts that might be coming through your mind, watching them arise and pass. (Wait thirty seconds.) • And if you like, you might bring your attention to the relationship between your thoughts and emotions…perhaps noticing that when you have certain types of thoughts, certain types of feelings tend to arise as well. Perhaps noticing that when you’re feeling certain emotions, certain thoughts tend to arise. (Pause for thirty seconds.) • And when you’re ready, allowing the breath to take a comfortable rhythm, gently opening the eyes, and returning the attention to the room… The first time, this practice will take five to ten minutes to go through, but we want to let clients know that it can actually happen much more quickly. This practice isn’t designed to be a long meditation—­although it can certainly serve as one if the client wants to spend more time on any of these aspects of his experience. Rather, it is designed to be an efficient way for the client to learn to establish the habit of checking in with his body, emotions, and thoughts. The purpose is to 96Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness establish the ability (and the tendency) to efficiently notice his bodily experience and what he is feeling and thinking; mindfully noticing and accepting these experiences exactly as they are—­ sensations, thoughts, and feelings. With a little practice, this check-­in can be done in thirty seconds to a minute, as the client efficiently brings his attention to his body, feelings, and thoughts in fairly rapid succession. Learned in this way, the client won’t need thirty minutes on a meditation cushion to mindfully connect with his experiences—­he’ll be able to do it during a television commercial, or stopped in traffic, or in the line at the supermarket. When we’re giving these instructions, we want to use a generally calm, slightly slowed tone of voice—­but remember, we’re not trying to put the client to sleep. I find that some natural variation in vocal tone and speed of speech can help keep clients engaged in the exercise. While the practice is fairly straightforward, it’s also good to record the exercise so that the client can use it (or listen to it for a reminder of how to do the practice) at home. I have this exercise and a few others avail- able on my website so that clients can access them that way as well. These days, many clients will have phone apps that can record the exercises during the session. There are some variations of the exercise that clients may find useful. Once they’ve gotten the basic practice, we can suggest that they check in with their three circles. They can either try to notice which of the three circles (threat, drive, safeness) is most dominant in their bodies, emo- tions, and thoughts, or perhaps rate each of the three circles on a 1-­to-­10 or 1-­to-­100 scale. Again, the idea is to get clients in the habit of noticing how threatened, motivated, or safe they are feeling. We can also suggest that they pause to do this whenever they notice the arising of (or after noticing they are caught up in) a particular emotion or string of thoughts. We can model this in session (for example, “It looks like something is happening for you right now. What’s happening with those three circles? How is that playing out in terms of your bodily experience? What feelings are showing up? What thoughts are running through your mind?”). In this way, we’re introducing clients to a nonshaming way of talking about and relating to emotional experiences that may previ- ously have been experienced as unpredictable and overwhelming. We can use these observations as a platform for helping clients explore and become familiar with how thoughts and emotions play out in their bodies and minds. This can help take the sting out of such experiences as we look closely and curiously at them not as something to fear, but as valid aspects of their experience that we seek to understand. We’re helping clients learn to approach these basic human experiences in a curious, manageable, and helpful way—­which is a core part of compassion. MINDFUL BREATHING While the Mindful Check-­In gives us an easy way to introduce mindfulness to clients that doesn’t require extensive practice time, there is much to be gained from longer, more meditative mindful- ness practices as well. First, there’s a growing body of scientific literature that supports the ability of such practices to quite literally grow the parts of our brains that are involved with things like 97CFT Made Simple emotion regulation and interpersonal relationships. Second, more extended mindfulness sessions are likely to be more helpful in assisting clients in developing attentional control, the ability to notice movement in the mind, and the capacity to tolerate distress. Teaching Mindful Breathing In essence, mindful breathing is a fairly straightforward practice: we’re training the client to settle her attention on the sensation of the breath, and to bring it back to the breath whenever she notices the attention has strayed. Notice and return—­that’s the practice. While different mindfulness teachers will give the instructions in slightly different ways, there are some basic components that tend to be present: • Sitting in an upright, comfortable posture. • Eyes closed, or gaze lowered to a spot six to eight feet in front with an unfocused, or “softened,” gaze, or a gaze focused on the tip of the nose. • Breathing at a natural, comfortable rate. • The attention settled on the breath, wherever it can be found most easily. This can include the tip of the nose, where it enters and leaves the body, the rise and fall of the abdomen, the path of the breath through the body, or any place the client finds it com- fortable to anchor the attention. • When the client notices her attention has wandered—­distracted by thoughts, emo- tions, or sensations—­she gently brings it back to the breath. Some teachers prompt the practitioner to label the distraction: thinking, listening, and so on. • It’s good to set an external timer to remind the meditator that the session is completed. There are numerous meditation timer applications with soothing gong tones that work well for this purpose. Let’s look at an example of how this exercise can be introduced in a session: Therapist: Jenny, I’m glad you found time to do the Mindful Check-Ins we introduced last session this week. How did you like them? Jenny: In the beginning, it was hard to remember to do it. So I started setting the timer on my phone. That really helped. Therapist: Good thinking. What did you notice about the practices? Jenny: One thing I noticed was that it made it easier to get things done. Therapist: (leaning in a bit, with an interested look) Tell me more about that. 98Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness Jenny: Well, a lot of the time when I start to do something, I’ll have lots of thoughts like, Why should I do this? There’s no point to it. Or I’ll go through all the different ways that it could go wrong. This week, a few times, I was able to notice those thoughts, but keep going anyway. Therapist: So “Anxious Jenny” still had a lot to say, but you were able to let her have her say and keep going anyway. That’s great. Jenny: Yeah. I do find myself wondering when someone besides Anxious Jenny will have something to say. Therapist: No worries—­we’re going to work on developing “Compassionate Jenny” as well—­a version of you that is compassionate, kind, strong, wise, and confident. Jenny: I’d really like that. Therapist: Actually, it sounds to me like Compassionate Jenny is already showing up. That’s the version of you that kept you going even after Anxious Jenny shared her reluctance. Jenny: Hmmm. (Looks a bit thoughtful.) Therapist: We’re going to be sending Compassionate Jenny to the gym, and one way to begin doing that is by introducing that second mindfulness practice we mentioned last session—­mindful breathing. How does that sound? Jenny: Sounds good. Therapist: Mindful breathing is quite literally sending Compassionate Jenny to the gym—­ there are scientific studies showing that practicing mindful breathing over time can actually grow the parts of the brain that help us with managing our emotions and relationships with others. To start, let’s sit up in a comfortable, upright position, head held up but not too high. (Models position.) Jenny: Like this? Therapist: Just like that. This exercise will take a bit longer than the check-­in, so again, if you feel the need to shift, clear your throat, swallow, or anything like that—­ don’t worry about it, just go ahead and do it. You may also find it useful to have your mouth slightly open, with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth. Jenny: (Shifts a bit.) Therapist: Now, allowing your eyes to close… 99CFT Made Simple Jenny: (Closes eyes.) Therapist: Breathing in and out through the nose, allowing your breath to take on a comfortable rhythm—­just breathing naturally, not attempting to slow down or speed up anything. Settling the attention on the breath, wherever you feel it most easily. That could be the tip of the nose where the breath enters and leaves the body, the rise and fall of the abdomen, or following the breath in and out of the body. (Waits thirty seconds.) As you breathe, you’ll sometimes find your attention moving away from the breath as you become distracted by thoughts, sounds, or other things. This isn’t a bad thing. It actually helps us learn to notice movement in our minds. When this happens, whether you’ve been distracted for a moment or for quite a long time, just notice the distraction and gently bring your attention back to the breath, over and over, again and again. This is the practice—­settle the attention on the breath, notice the distraction, gently come back to the breath. Notice, and return. Jenny: (Sits quietly, breathing.) Therapist: (Waits thirty seconds.) Notice the distraction, return to the breath. Therapist: (Waits one minute.) Notice and return. Therapist: (Waits one minute, thirty seconds.) And when you’re ready, gently opening the eyes, bringing your attention to the room. Jenny: (Slowly opens her eyes over the course of thirty seconds or so.) Mmmm. Therapist: So that was three minutes or so after I stopped giving instructions. What did you notice? Jenny: It felt like a really long time. It was relaxing, but also a little frustrating. Overall, I liked it. Therapist: So it felt like longer than three minutes? Jenny: A lot longer. I never just sit quietly like that. Therapist: It can feel like a lot longer, particularly when our minds are used to being so busy all the time. It can take a while for them to get used to sitting quietly, watching the breath. You mentioned a little frustration—­did you find yourself getting distracted? Jenny: 100 That’s when I’d get frustrated. It seemed like I’d be focused on the breath for just a second and then I’d start thinking, over and over again.Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness Therapist: (Smiles and chuckles a bit.) Yep—­that’s just what it’s like! The same thing happened for me when I was learning. Sometimes it still does. Jenny: Really? Therapist: Oh yeah! Sometimes I’ll have really sneaky thoughts—­I’m sitting there like, This is a great meditation session. I’m completely focused on my breath. No thoughts at all. I’m getting really good at this. I’m thinking the whole time! Jenny: (Smiles and laughs gently.) Therapist: It’s easy to get frustrated if our drive system sets up sticking to the breath as a goal. When we get distracted, we think we’re failing at our goal. The key is to remember that one purpose of the practice is learning to notice movement in the mind. And these distracting thoughts give us the perfect opportunity to do this. If we never got distracted, we’d never learn to notice what it feels like when thoughts take us away. So it’s not a problem—­does that make sense? Jenny: That helps. Therapist: Want to try it again—­say, for five minutes this time? Jenny: Sounds good. Therapist: Excellent. I’ll set my timer then, and let’s move into an upright posture, close our eyes, and bring the attention to the breath… The above example demonstrates one way of presenting mindful breathing to clients. Again, assuming that mindful breathing will be assigned as homework, it’s good to record the exercise or to provide the client with links to online mp3 recordings of the practices. Notice that in the vignette above, the therapist introduces the practice by giving brief instructions on how to hold the body and speaking briefly to various obstacles that might come up (instructing Jenny to shift if she needs to, for example). It’s also important to follow up after the practice, to see how the client experienced it, and to explore, validate, and address any obstacles that may have come up. Notice also that the therapist refers to his own practice, and shares his own challenges with the client, using a bit of humor along the way. Doing so underscores the importance of the practice (it’s important enough that the therapist practices as well), validates the difficulty, and reduces the likelihood of related self-­ criticism (the “expert” therapist sometimes struggles with the same things), and models how to handle such obstacles with good humor (working to soften the implicit frustration response with a bit of levity). Also note how the therapist utilizes the language of CFT, referring to “Anxious Jenny,” “Compassionate Jenny,” and the drive system—­helping shape her mastery of the CFT con- cepts she’s been learning. 101CFT Made Simple One last comment: I strongly, strongly advise, if you’re going to be using mindful breathing (or any other mindfulness practice) in therapy, that you will have practiced using the technique your- self (and optimally will have an ongoing practice). It will give you an experience of the practice to draw upon when explaining it to the client. It will help you observe the obstacles from the inside out, and what it takes to work with them. Finally, mindful awareness itself produces many practical benefits that can potentially improve one’s capacity to be an effective CFT therapist. At a practical level, think about it—­mindfulness and compassion aren’t just therapy “techniques.” They are complex capacities and skills that we’re helping clients develop. Would you choose to learn to play an instrument or a sport from someone who had never played it? While the best practitioners don’t always make the best teachers (and vice versa), teachers should have some mastery of the skills they are instructing. OTHER MINDFULNESS PRACTICES There are numerous other mindfulness practices our clients might find helpful as they work to bring this purposeful, present-­focused, accepting, nonjudgmental awareness into their lives. Almost any activity or experience can be chosen as a focus of mindfulness. The idea is that we select where we’re going to focus our attention, bringing our awareness to this experience and then nonjudg- mentally noticing and exploring it. Whenever distractions arise, we notice them, and bring the attention back to our chosen focus. Typically we’ll want to start with sensory experiences like the breath, physical sensations in the body, or sensory input coming in from outside the body. However, we can also use mental images or even ideas as the focus of concentration, or we can rest in open awareness, not anchoring the attention to any specific focus, and simply noticing whatever arises in our experience without clinging to or pushing away any of it. Here are a few commonly used mind- fulness exercises: • Mindfulness of the Body—­bringing nonjudgmental awareness to bodily sensations • Mindful Eating—­eating slowly and noticing all sensory aspects of the food or the eating • Mindful Walking—­walking slowly, bringing mindful awareness to all the sensations that come with walking • Mindful Showering—­showering while mindfully focusing on the feeling of water hitting the skin • Mindful Task Completion—­doing tasks like dishwashing or cleaning and mindfully noticing all the sensory experiences one has while completing the activity • Mindful Exercise—­mindfully focusing the attention on physical activity (such as yoga) 102Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness The idea is to come up with a variety of activities in which clients can apply mindful awareness. We work collaboratively with them to come up with activities that they are interested in, to keep motivation for the practice high. Over time, this sort of mind training can help clients learn to settle the mind, gradually quiet- ing the endless torrent of thoughts as they get better and better at bringing their attention to the present moment. This can pave the way for lots of good things. As clients learn to endure the initial discomfort of sitting quietly with a busy mind, they learn to tolerate distress and persevere when things are difficult, and are reinforced as their efforts begin to pay off. These practices also set the stage for the development of compassionate wisdom. For centuries, Buddhist practitioners have used exercises like the mindful-­breathing practice described above to prepare the mind for more involved analytical meditations—­learning to stabilize the mind so that they could deeply contem- plate things like compassion and the nature of reality. Once our clients have gotten comfortable with the more focused practices, they may wish to take some meditation time to explore the ques- tions that compassionate reasoning will often bring up: What sort of person do I want to be? What do I want my life to be about? How do I want to contribute to the lives of others, and to the world? WORKING WITH OBSTACLES IN MINDFULNESS TRAINING When presenting clients with practices we’d like them to follow through with, it’s important to troubleshoot around obstacles that might arise. There are some common obstacles that can get in the way when we’re teaching mindfulness—­particularly mindful breathing. The extent to which we can plan for and address these obstacles on the front end can increase the likelihood that clients will be able to establish an ongoing mindfulness practice. Forgetting Perhaps the most common obstacle is simply not remembering to practice. I’d recommend naming this as a likely obstacle when planning the homework to begin with, and working collabora- tively with clients to plan good times to do it (for example, when they will be alert, not sleepy), and ways to prompt themselves (such as setting an alarm): “One common challenge that can come up when learning mindfulness is simply forgetting to do the practice. What do you think might help you remember?” Avoidance and Low Motivation In my experience, if I try to have clients start out by doing thirty minutes of mindfulness prac- tice per day, they often won’t be able do it, and may well not want to do it. That’s a long time for 103CFT Made Simple someone with no experience of sitting quietly and watching the breath. We need to remember two things: First, consider how hard it can be to create twenty to thirty minutes of free space in your life to do something new—­even when it’s something you’re motivated to do and know will be very good for you. Not so easy? It’s the same for many of our clients. Additionally, many of our clients (like us) live in overstimulating environments filled with constantly shifting media, electronic gad- getry, text-­message conversations, and so on, that may have tuned their neurological systems to expect high levels of ongoing stimulation. When you’ve adapted to function in the face of an ongoing cacophony of flashing screens, beeping phones, and rapid-­fire interactions, the relatively quiet, inactive state of mindfulness meditation can initially feel disorienting, agitating, or down- right uncomfortable. So what to do? First, we can acknowledge these potential obstacles, so that if and when they arise, our clients understand them as common, completely understandable occurrences and not as some- thing that’s wrong with me. Second, we want to start small. While it depends on the individual client, I’ve often begun with two to five minutes per day of mindful breathing for the first week—­then increasing by five-­or ten-­minute increments, paced according to how the client is feeling and how it’s working. We want to start with a level of practice that can be sustained, and which gives clients a feeling of success when they’re able to complete it. If we start with the bar too high, an initial failure to follow through can kill the client’s motivation. However, if this happens at any point, we can problem-­solve around obstacles with the client—­in nonshaming, nonblaming ways which vali- date that there will often be obstacles that get in our way. Part of working compassionately with life challenges is learning to work compassionately with obstacles: “It can initially be really hard to keep up a mindfulness practice, and there are lots of obstacles that can get in the way. What got in the way of you being able to follow through with our plan? Let’s see if we can figure out something that will help make it easier.” Feeling Like a Failure If I had a dollar for everyone who has decided to take up mindful breathing and then has given it up soon after, feeling like they “just can’t do it,” I suspect I’d have enough money to fund my research assistants until I retire. The instruction to “settle your attention on the breath, and gently bring it back when you notice that it has wandered” seems like a simple one. It is simple. It’s just not easy. Well-­meaning practitioners will often start out very excited to have this tranquil meditation experience, only to give up in frustration as they observe that their minds are bounding about in every which way, with almost no time in which their attention is actually focused on the breath. Even if our fancy new brains know that our attention will wander and that this isn’t a failure, our old-­brain emotional centers will often register frustration as we find ourselves distracted by thoughts again and again. To soften this tendency, we can let clients know ahead of time that they will become distracted, and that this isn’t a bad thing. It’s really not a bad thing. As I mentioned above, one goal of mindful- ness is to learn greater control over the attention—­and over time, practitioners will be able to keep 104Compassionate Awareness: Cultivating Mindfulness their attention on the breath for longer and longer periods of time. However, we can emphasize that another goal of mindfulness meditation is learning to notice movement in the mind. When thoughts, emotions, and sensations take us away from the breath, we have the chance to notice this movement—­an opportunity that wouldn’t be there if our attention never strayed. So these distrac- tions actually give us valuable opportunities to learn to notice the arising of thoughts and emotions, to notice when we’ve disappeared into them, and to bring our attention back to the breath when this happens. One last piece: Clients will sometimes struggle with having thoughts that come up during meditation that they don’t want to let go. This happens for me a lot, as I’ll often do my mindfulness meditation in the morning before settling down to write. Thoughts come up that I’ll want to include in my writing. As you might imagine, attempting to hold these thoughts in mind while simultaneously returning to the breath is problematic for the practice. But it’s no problem—­I keep a pad of paper and pen in close proximity to my meditation cushion so that I can jot down any thoughts I want to make sure not to lose. This practice can be useful for clients as well. SUMMARY Like relational safeness and understanding the unchosen factors that shape how we develop, mindful awareness is an important part of the foundation that underlies the development of compassion in CFT. Mindfulness practices help clients learn to observe their emotions and experiences in accept- ing, nonjudgmental ways; to notice movement in their minds, and to use their attention to work with and tolerate difficult emotions. These capacities set the stage for what will be our focus for much of the rest of the book: the purposeful cultivation of compassionate strengths.