>The Buddha told monks to take meals silently, with no books or conversations to distract them, only an awareness of what their body needs to get through the day. When they felt full, they stopped eating, even if that meant leaving food in the bowl.
Dr. B | February 5, 2010 at 2:24 PM | tagged acceptance, emotion regulation, emotions, metaphors, skills If you’re in the rain, you’re probably going to get wet. If you’re in an emotional situation, you’re probably going to get emotional. It doesn’t make sense to believe (or hope) otherwise.
Mindfulness of breath. There are obvious benefits to using breath as your focus but it’s nice to have a variety to your breathing exercises. Dr. Anthony Weil has 3 easy breathing exercises that will improve as you practice them.
When teaching mindfulness as a DBT skill as often as I do - up to 10 times per month - I have to come up with new material to keep my classes, and myself, interested. Often, group members have heard the typical DBT core “what” mindfulness skills of:
And the “how” skills of:
But rarely have they been exposed to the actual origins of the DBT skill of mindfulness. In my studies, I’ve found that it’s a very deep and complex topic. I’ve not even been able to scratch the surface and I wish I had the time to understand it better.
To that end, I’ve been using Mindfulness in Plain English to help guide my reading and discussion points. Yes, that’s the full book as a .pdf. Unbelievably, the publisher has allowed us to post it for free as long as I don’t charge you for it. Quite amazing. Please feel free to re-distribute it far and wide.
Teaching mindfulness is probably the most frequent therapeutic activity I do in my practice. I do it more than cogntive restructuring, activity scheduling, interpersonal skills training, more than anything. Suffice it to say, I believe that it’s a pretty important skill. Well, here is Marsha Linehan teaching it. You can’t get better than the best. Enjoy.