Today I’m really happy to bring to you Ronald Alexander, Ph.D., who is a licensed psychotherapist in Santa Monica, Ca, practicing mindfulness-based psychotherapy, Director of the Open Mind Training Institute, adjunct faculty at Pepperdine University and Pacifica Graduate Institute, and author of the very interesting new book Wise Mind, Open Mind: Finding Purpose & Meaning in Times of Crisis, Loss & Change. I’ve actually been waiting for a book that weaves mindfulness practice with uncovering our well of creativity with a sense of purpose.

Question: What is the 3-step mindfulness approach to help us navigate difficult changes in our lives while opening up to our creativity in everyday life?  

Ron: In my new book, Wise Mind, Open Mind I discuss a three step process that combines mindfulness meditation, creative thinking and positive psychology to help readers to let go of their past; tune into the present and their core creativity; and move forward with passion and purpose.  This approach allows one to focus on the building of their “mindstrength” — the ability to very quickly and easily shift out of a reactive mode and become fully present in the moment, experiencing the full force of your emotions even as you recognize that they are temporary and will soon dissipate.

Question: In your book you have a wonderful discussion of something we can all relate to…resistance. Can you tell us a bit about the “payoffs of resistance” to us?

Ron: I believe there are five basic payoffs of resistance.  First by resisting change, we can avoid the unknown. What’s familiar may not be terribly comfortable, but sometimes it seems that the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know. We fear that venturing into the unknown will cause us to discover painful secrets about the world and ourselves that have been hidden from us.   Secondly we can avoid being judged as “strange.” When parents are frightened by their child’s differentness, labeling them as “strange,” they’ll usually try to stifle his creativity. The child, …

Mindfulness has really broken out in a big way, becoming very popular among more and more people. However, there is a danger here that we need to all be aware of. The way of approaching life can bear wonderful fruit, it has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, prevent against future relapse of depression, change perception of chronic pain, help with eating disorders, cultivate joy, compassion, kindness, satisfaction with life and even change neural pathways in the brain.

Obviously being the host of The Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog, I am a big fan of living a mindful life. It is a way of life for me and has been life changing.

But wait; there is a danger in things that become popular in any capitalistic world. People can see something that is sell-able and as a result will exploit it in the hopes of reaping economic rewards.

There are pros and cons to this. The pros is that is gets the words out, how wonderful that so many people are learning about being more present to life and becoming introduced to being more aware of their minds. This is a very good thing we might say.

However, the cons are when people begin to use mindfulness with the primary purpose of cashing in on the popularity. In this respect, it becomes shallow and the real rewards of becoming more intimate with life becomes a far and distant dream. Some people get dragged into their narcissistic tendencies, craving to be recognized and to be famous and the shallow nature of this leads to a lack of efficacy in the practice.

It’s inevitable that Mindfulness, Inc. is already occurring and will continue to grow. Remember, this isn’t a bad thing in itself. It has wonderful consequences, but it’s important to be aware that with this will also bring some mindfulness approaches that are promising a “quick-fix” in service of the “quick-buck” and will lack depth.

Remember this, while mindfulness has its practices that we can all learn and cultivate a discipline with, it really can be considered …

The Mindful Mood that is…

Often times the day seems to become routine and before we know it piles of responsibilities from work and home have stacked up and we feel like chickens running around with their heads cut off.

I suggest taking a couple minutes to practice the video below 2-3 times a day for a week to come down from the busy mind, focus your attention, ground to the present moment and refocus to what you’re really intending to pay attention to in the moment. It may help to actually put it in your calendar at first.

When can you practice? Look for the “in-between” moments. These are moments before you are about to take a break or while you’re waiting for someone. As you get the hang of this you won’t need this video and can practice it when parked in the car, in the bathroom, or while waiting in line.

Note: When the mind says, “forget it, this isn’t going to work,” as much as possible, just note that judgment as a mental event in the mind that is happy to keep you at status quo. Your work is to become aware of these types of thoughts, let them be, and come back to this practice.

Click through to see the video…

It is my pleasure to bring to you today a woman who has helped thousands of people and revolutionized the benefits of tuning into our handwriting as a way toward greater self esteem and self image. Vimala Rodgers is an educator, Director of The International Institute of Handwriting Studies, and author of multiple books including, Change Your Handwriting, Change Your Life, and Your Handwriting Can Change Your Life!, and her newest book which is a comprehensive course with book, cards and audio CD accompaniment, called Transform Your Life Through Handwriting.

Question: Vimala, many people struggle with the issue of low self esteem and harsh critical self-judgments. In your most recent book, Transform Your Life through Handwriting, you guide people through a program to change the way their minds think by mindfully tuning into the stroke of their pens. How does this work?

Vimala: As a Psychologist, you know that it is the subconscious mind that interprets what happens to us, and from that, it dictates who we see ourselves to be (i.e., our self image), not who we ARE. It is not the hand per se, but this same subconscious mind who moves our pen to reaffirm this. Each stroke of the pen makes a statement about the image we hold of ourselves. By adopting Self-affirming writing patterns we redefine that self-image in a positive way. It takes 40 days of committed writing to realign the neurological patterns in the brain. In scientific jargon, this is called “cortical remapping,” or the brain’s ability to rewire itself.

Question: Tell us how handwriting can be a kind of meditation or yoga?

Vimala: Each letter in The Vimala Alphabet is soul-based. In other words, as we move the pen, each letter is designed to access the noblest part of the psyche. As writers use this alphabet on a regular basis, each stroke of the pen awakens them to an awareness of what is commonly called their “Highest Self.”  If you’ve …

In an earlier blog I had asked the question Can You Handle 5-Minutes of Solitude, which was an off-shoot of another blog that asked Can You Handle 24 Hours of Solitude? What’s this all pointing to?

In writing the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to explore the real power and potential that a retreat experience offers.

Mindfulness retreats are experiences that are offered all over the country and all over the world that people from all walks of life participate in. Some of these retreats are offered in silence where individual’s are simply guided in a variety of meditation practices throughout the day (including mindful eating), while others may not be in silence.

For example, I lead both kinds of retreats with the one coming up near Santa Monica, Ca on Saturday November 21st being a mixed retreat focused on emotional resiliency during difficult times. In this retreat participants will be silent part of the time to give a very different experience of being able to go a bit into these practices. While the other part of the day will include doing practices and then processing giving people the opportunity to connect and deepen understanding and insights around what arose.

People lead such retreats all over the country. In Southern California, InsightLA also offers a variety of different retreats. Two other popular centers are Spirit Rock in Northern California and Insight Meditation Society on the East Coast.

Another retreat center that offers donation-based silent retreats is the Goenka Centers all around the world. Most retreats offer a sliding scale so you can afford to come.

Note: Judgments and thoughts often automatically arise in the mind when thinking of a retreat such as “I don’t have time for retreats” or “I don’t deserve this time”, or recently one person brought up the thought “retreats are only for the wealthy.” Often times these thoughts are quite automatic, stemming from some resistance. I would encourage you to explore these thoughts and maybe the resistance that’s there.

One thing we …

Four months ago I wrote a blog post titled 10 Quotes for a Mindful Day. Since then I began an increasingly popular tradition called Mondays Mindful Quote where every Monday I post a quote that I think has some relevance to Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and then explore the quote.

Here is a list of 10 (More) Quotes for a Mindful Day, with some having links back to blog posts where I have explored the quote. There is a lot under these links, so feel free to bookmark this page and come back to it over and again. Enjoy!

1. “You can hold back from suffering of the world,
   you have permission to do so,
   and it is in accordance with your nature,
   but perhaps this very holding back
   is the one suffering you could have avoided.” ~ Franz Kafka

2.  “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” ~ Rumi
3. “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.”  ~ Henry Ford
4.  “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.” ~ Mother Teresa
5. “Nothing endures but change.” ~ Heraclitus
6. “To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections.” ~ Dogen Zenji
7. “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
8. “Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.” ~ Viktor Frankl
9. “When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.” ~ Pema Chodron
10. “You lose your grip and then you slip, Into the masterpiece.” ~ Leonard Cohen

    All of these quotes are reflected in the work done with mindfulness and psychotherapy for emotional healing.

    As always, please share your own quotes, stories, thoughts, and questions below. Your interaction here truly does create a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Today I bring you one of the leaders in the field who goes to the heart of the intersection between mindfulness and psychotherapy. Shauna Shapiro has co-authored The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions, with Dr. Linda Carlson and has published over 50 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic.  She currently leads mindfulness training programs for professionals nationally and internationally on the applications of mindfulness in the field of health care.

Question: In your book, you cite a huge rise in the last 10 years for National Institute of Health (NIH) funded research studies focusing on mindfulness-based therapies for stress, pain, and/or illness.  Can you tell us a bit about why you think there is such growing interest?

Shauna: In both research and clinical environments there is a rapidly growing interest in mindfulness-based approaches.  For example, searches of the scientific literature on PsychINFO and PUBMED using the same term, “mindfulness-based”, yield 260 and 115 published scientific articles, respectively.  And the enthusiasm of funders, grant peer reviewers and the scientific community has followed this trend:  In 2008 there were 44 funded studies in progress; this number has increased from zero in 1998 and only three in 1999.  I believe the interest and increased funding is due in part to the strong body of research conducted by pioneers in the field, such as Kabat-Zinn and Segal, Williams and Teasdale who provided a clear rationale and direction for future research.  I also believe that there is a cultural shift happening and a deep yearning for greater wholeness and health, for both patients and therapists. Mindfulness offers a simple and easily accessible path toward this - mindfulness offers enormous potential and possibility to the field of health care.  

Question: In your book you talk of three different ways mindfulness can integrate into psychotherapy. The first, the mindful therapist, the second, mindfulness-informed therapy, and the third you call mindfulness-based psychotherapy. Can you give us a rundown to what each is and …

Sharon Begley, science editor for Newsweek and author of The Plastic Mind: New science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves, just wrote an interesting article titled The Upside of Depression. In this article she reviews some recent research that basically flies in the face of the “Happiness” surge and says that depression is actually adaptive. In other words, it is part of our evolutionary make up.

How can this be?

She reviews an article titled The Bright Side of Being Blue, by J. Anderson Thompson at the University of Virginia and Paul Andrews at Virginia Commonwealth University who give a scientific argument that:

• Depressive rumination can be good because it allows for analytical thinking that can be important when coming up with a solution for depressed mood. This may be the case, but sometimes the mind’s anxious habit of looking for a solution is exactly what keeps us stuck in depressed mood. The ruminative anxiousness seems to pour kerosene on the fire. At times letting things be, rather than falling into the trap of always having to “do something” about it, is just what the doctor ordered.
• Depression tends to focus thinking. This is one of their findings, but it’s news to me. My experience is that people who suffer from depression feel more clouded and distracted with their thinking making it difficult to even pay attention to reading a magazine or book.
• Depression leads people to seek isolation and this can be good as it allows for the space to think about what might have triggered the depression in the first place and therefore find a way out. She goes onto quote a study citing the importance of writing as an expressive way to come out of depressed mood. This is absolutely true, however the reason writing might be helpful is because it allows us to get our thoughts out on paper and externalize them, taking away the emotional charge of our thoughts and laying to rest their need to swim or “ruminate” in our …
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There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday, I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding. So for today, here is a quote by Franz Kafka:

 “You can hold back from suffering of the world,

you have permission to do so,

and it is in accordance with your nature,

but perhaps this very holding back

is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

In a recent blog, Mindful Monday: A Note to the Severely Depressed–Don’t Try So Hard, author Therese Borchard wrote about her first hand experience with trying to get out of a depressed state through her bag of mindfulness and CBT tricks. What she found was the harder she tried and was unable to succeed the more her judgments about being a “failure” grew.

What her doctor’s told her was when you are in the eye of a depressive episode, “distract, don’t think.”

When we’re really depressed, the mind is searching for things “to do” in order to get us out. However, this is a trap, especially when we’re really depressed. The harder we try, the more stuck we get.

Why?

Because it’s a set up.

The moment we’re reaching for mindfulness practices as a means to an end, as a means in that moment to feel better, get out of depression, or achieve calm, is the moment our minds develop the rule: “If I don’t see any relief come from this, then I am a failure, or there must be something wrong with me.”

From then on, the mind becomes vigilant in looking for relief and every moment it is not found, is a …

I am very happy to bring you and interview with Tara Brach again. If you missed the last interview on Radical Acceptance you can view it here.  Tara Brach is a clinical Psychologist who has been integrating mindfulness and psychotherapy for many years. She is author of the popular book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, the CD Radical Self-acceptance, and her newest CD, which I highly recommend, Meditations for Emotional Healing: Finding Freedom in the Face of Difficulty. She is also working on a new book calledTrue Refuge (Bantam, early 2011). Tara has weekly podcasts from her Wednesday night sitting groups that address forgiveness and compassion and is senior teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington.  She really embodies and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging our aversions in life and cultivating compassion for oneself and others as a means toward mental health.

Question:  Tara, you put a lot of work out there that incorporates mindfulness and psychotherapy. Your newest being the upcoming CD Meditations for Emotional Healing: Finding Freedom in the Face of Difficulty . From all of these, can you give us 5 key elements emphasized in emotional healing and spiritual freedom?

1. Aspiration - The entire spiritual path arises out of our sincere aspiration to awaken. As one Zen master put it, “The most important thing is remembering the most important thing.”  We each have our own way of sensing what is most important.  It may be to be present, to know who you really are, to love without holding back, or to help others be free of suffering. Try to begin the day by reflecting in a fresh way on your aspiration, and pause through the day to remember what matters. This remembering will wake you up from the daily trance and energize your unfolding towards freedom.
2. Daily practice - A daily meditation practice is a gift to …
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