Mindfulness and Psychotherapy has been gaining a mounting interest among  thousands of clinicians and clients. The following is one in a series of informal conversations between Trudy Goodman, Ph.D., Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. and Steven Hickman, Psy.D., the teachers for a unique upcoming professional training retreat entitled “Mindfulness in Psychotherapy” to be held October 2-7, 2011 at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center in Southern California. This series is primarily aimed toward clinicians, but I’m hoping if you are not a healthcare professional you can also gain some insight from it. Enjoy!

Today Steve, Trudy and I talk about the similarities and differences between Mindfulness and Hypnosis.

I’d say the majority of us start off our days with an alarm ringing us awake. As we wipe the sleep out of our eyes and drink our morning coffee or tea, the cobwebs begin to break away and the doors of the mind open to start looking forward and planning/worrying about the day.

The reality is, the planning and worrying sometimes doesn’t wait and they dart in the moment we open our eyes. So, I’m going to suggest a simple and easy idea that could have a major impact not only how you start your day, but how the rest of the day unfolds.

Take a moment to consider what’s really important to you in this life.

Derrick was 13 years old when he stepped into my office complaining of “just not enjoying anything in life.” His parents told me they’d tried everything. They had him playing piano, going to soccer practice, involved in drama practice, along with a few more activities. “He just doesn’t seem to be interested in any of it,” the mom said.

One day, Derrick came into session and I asked him if he could tell me his happiest memory. Sitting slumped into the couch, his head perked up and he said: “I remember when I was six my parents bought something that came in a big box. When they emptied it out, I played in that box for hours, it was my favorite place. It made me happy.” It was clear that Derrick was missing out on his natural right to have more play in his life.

Play deprivation doesn’t just apply to kids, but to all of us. We can easily fall into a state of being overly strict with ourselves and taking life too seriously.

To bring mindfulness into our lives and cultivate a healthy, flexible and resilient mind, we need to loosen up on ourselves, allowing openings to arise, and then like cultivating a garden add in nutrients that facilitate the kind of change we’d like to see. You can think of play as a fundamental way of bringing mindfulness into your life creating spaces for your healthier mind to take root.

There’s a certain way of relating to life that I try and come back to again and again. It’s something that we often lose as adults along the way as life gets filled with overflowing and endless list of “to-dos.” It’s not our fault, our brains are wired to make life routine, getting us disconnected from the wonders of everyday life. Hafiz, a 14th century poet and mystic, sums up this way of relating to life best:

Every Child

Has known God,

Not the God of names,

Not the God of Don’ts

Not the God who ever does anything weird

But the God who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying:

“Come dance with Me”

Come Dance

If you’ve followed my writings, you know that I believe bringing back a sense of playfulness into our lives is a critical factor in our mental health. Play is important to ourselves, in relationships, at work or with parenting. This isn’t something we can just think about because the reality is for many of us; we don’t practice it much and it goes against the grain.

The first thing is discovering what playfulness looks like in your life.

In order to get a sense of this follow this short practice:

You may have heard about the hot topic of bringing mindfulness into the workplace and the benefits of:

• Stress-reduction
• Increased clarity of mind, balance, energy, zest for life
• Improve complex problem-solving and decision-making
• Enhanced leadership
• More emotional intelligence, less reactive
• Mood regulation and immune system enhancement

You might have even says it sounds like a good idea. Maybe you even practiced it a couple times. But the dependable habitual ways of thinking and acting take over and it goes by the wayside.

So let this post be an opportunity to commit or recommit to cultivating mindfulness at work.

Take a few deep breaths right now after reading these words. Then go down the list and honestly ask yourself, when was the last time I did this and where can I bring it into my day?

Here are 9 ways you can start today:

Some say the fact that most of us are so filled with self-judgment is an evolutionary impulse to keep us safe from danger. If the mind is constantly on the lookout for what’s wrong, we’re more likely to be prepared for it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson lays out the problem:

“Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.”

Or maybe Nelson Mandela echoing Marianne Williamson’s words says it best:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

Very good question Marianne.

Whether it’s an evolutionary automatic negativity bias or a developmentally constructed belief system from wounding as a child or both, the fact is, many of us are afraid of our own light. Something in us heavily guards against it saying, “I can’t do that,” or “I’m no good at this,” or “That’s not important.” And then the shadow is created.

A while back I wrote a post with the inquiry, “Is it Time to Unplug?” The question was rhetorical in a way saying that in our culture there are too many things to pay attention to and when we end up abusing all our options, we become overconnected and this feeds mental and physical dis-ease. But, what about when our work requires us to be plugged in, what can we do then?

First it’s important to break down how we pay attention to technology. At times we are focused and need to get things done so we power through a number of emails. Other times we need to do research and so we surf the web looking for content and resources. This is an effective use of attention.

However, other times we get overwhelmed by mounting projects and we use technology as a distraction or a way to “kill time.” Maybe we start answer unimportant emails or start surfing the web for brain dribble. This is what is called a distracted or wasteful zone of attention.

So what can we do when we really feel like we want to Unplug, but we can’t because our work requires us to be Plugged in?

I love how more and more research is coming out in the field of neuroscience pointing to neurological correlates of things we’ve all known for years. It’s validating.

One of the number one things that drive us nuts is outside noises we can’t control. It’s the car alarm, the neighbor’s noisy stereo, or a friend’s baby who can’t stop crying.  Cathy Kerr, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and her colleagues recently found that meditators are quicker and more precise at adjusting the alpha wave rhythms in the brain. These are brain waves that help regulate the transmission of sensory input from the outside and are also a sign of relaxed activity in the brain.

So, as she put it in a recent NY Times article, “If you’re reading something in a noisy environment and you want to be in a bubble, you might use your alpha rhythms like a volume knob, to turn down the volume on neurons that represent sound from the outside world.”

Participants in her study who took an 8-week mindfulness course were asked to turn their attention their left hand or foot. These participants showed quicker and more precise alpha waves than the people who did not practice the meditation.

What does this mean to the rest of us?

Nowadays most people who come in to see my for private therapy come to see me because of my background with mindfulness and psychotherapy. Whether the issue has to do with stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, or addiction, there is a sense of wanting to come home, to come back into their life, to gain emotional intelligence, to get back in touch with what really matters.

However, there is also a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda that mindfulness will be used as a relaxation exercise of some kind. While this may be a nice side effect of mindfulness practice, mindfulness is not relaxation.

It’s legitimate to ask, what is the difference between mindfulness and relaxation? After all, the most mainstreamed and popular program out there is called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Right in the title is the implication that we’re using this for stress reduction. However, it’s just a clever title to get people in the door; the program is so much more than that.

In A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook we answer this question:

While there have been many things that may have gone through your mind the minute you heard of Japan’s recent 8.9 earthquake, all the subsequent aftershocks, the Tsunami and threat of radiation from their impacted nuclear plants, one thing we begin to realize is how connected we really are.

A short time after the Tsunami hit the coast of Japan, large waves rolled into the Harbor of Santa Cruz, Ca thrashing the marina around. It’s become clearer to me that we’re all responsible for one another and I think that’s a huge driving force in the growing interest in compassion.

Compassion is defined as being able to put yourself in the shoes of another and inclining your heart toward wanting to help in some way.

Compassion practices have been shown to reduce stress and increase well-being.