Mindfulness Exercises
Mindfulness
Below is a basic set of mindfulness exercises designed to help you build mindfulness practice into your life. The purpose of these exercises is not relaxation, but to help you learn how to relate to uncomfortable emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations when they show up. For this reason, you will find significant time lapses between some of the instructions on some of the audio recordings in order to give time for these emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations to appear. Before you start I would strongly encourage you to read the “Why Mindfulness” article at the bottom of the page so that you will better understanding of the purpose of mindful practice. Please note that if you want to down load one of the audio files directly to your computer you may do so by right clicking on the link and selecting “Download Linked File As”.
Compassion Meditation 1 (12.16 min)
A basic compassion mediation containing all the essential components for a solid daily practice.
Compassion Meditation 1
Compassion Meditation 2 (14.24 min.)
A more powerful compassion medication that takes you deeper into some of the sources of your suffering.
Compassion Meditation 2
Basic Mindful Observation
A basic introduction to learning how to observe breath, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, sounds, and sights.
Basic Mindfulness
Observer-Self Meditation
A meditation designed to help you get into closer contact with the stable part of yourself from which you experience the world.
The Observer Self
Values Meditation
A powerful meditation designed to help you get in contact with what truly matters to you. You should be aware that this meditation has the potential to evoke some significant painful emotions so it should be used with care at a time when you feel ready and able to experience these feelings.
Values Meditation
Why Mindfulness
As evidence based practice begins to penetrate to the forefront of the psychotherapy world, mindfulness practices have taken a center stage. As research on mindfulness expands, information is beginning to develop that suggests that attempts to suppress, debate, or avoid distressing thoughts, emotions, images, or sensations can actually increase their frequency. The appears relate to the fact that in order to avoid a thought, emotion, image, or sensation we must in some way mentally reference the thought, emotion, image, or sensation we are trying to avoid.
If you want to get a sense of what I mean try the following exercise. The goal of the exercise is to avoid thinking of a pink elephant when you count to the number three. Now close your eyes, count to three, and try hard not to think of a pink elephant. Can you succeed?
If you managed not to think of a pink elephant, what did you do? Did you think of a blue elephant, a green giraffe, or something else? If you thought of something other than a pink elephant how did you know you were supposed to do that? Did it have anything do to with the fact that you knew were not supposed to be thinking of a pink elephant? In other words, in order to consciously avoid thinking of something, we have to remember the thing that we are trying not to think about. This actually causes us to think about it more.
Similarly, when we argue with thoughts or try to figure out how to make emotions, thoughts, images, or physical sensations go way, our attention remains focused on the things that are upsetting us. Not surprisingly, this often makes us feel worse. Most of us have had the experience of trying to convince ourselves to not be anxious, sad, or angry by listing reasons that we should not feel the way that we do. Unfortunately, the reasons that we give ourselves often do not change how upset we feel. They do, however, keep us thinking about why we are upset.
While over the long term we cannot make distressing emotions, thoughts, images, or sensations go away without doing very destructive things to ourselves (suicide and addiction come to mind), we can at least learn not to be as upset about having these unpleasant experiences. Mindfulness helps us to learn how to experience distressing emotions, thoughts, images, and physical sensations without struggling to get away from them.
Of course, this is simple in theory but difficult in practice. Humans are almost hardwired to avoid things we find unpleasant. Thankfully, if done properly, it turns out that it requires relatively little mindfulness practice (about 5 a day over a 30 day period) to make substantial changes in the structure of the brain that can lead to significant increases in the ability to tolerate distress. Research has shown that there are 5 basic steps to effective mindfulness practice.
The 5 steps are as follows:
1. Notice the emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations that are present in your mind and body.
2. Identify, name, and describe these emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations.
3. Approach the emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations giving them openness, space, and permission to be there.
4. Turn towards your experience and suffering with compassion.
5. Expand this feeling of compassion out into the world gaining distance from and perspective on your own suffering.
