MBI's in Coursera Journal

Purpose: consider and share your own experiences with (and knowledge of) Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs).

Response: write a post outlining the details of your experience of MBIs, and engage with the experiences of your peers.

The only experience I have with Mindfulness-Based Interventions is the work my therapist and I have been doing for the past few years. I don’t know if it classifies as MBCT or MBSR or if it is simply her teaching me about being more mindful and learning to regulate my breathing and stay in the present moment. We started with simple exercises- guided meditations, body scans, focusing on our breathing. She has lent me several books on the subject, including Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn, and mindfulness CD’s ranging from Sharon Salzburg to TNH. On a therepeutic level, I haven’t gotten much farther than that. It’s very touch and go and I haven’t gotten the hang of applying mindfulness to all aspects of my life, yet.

Intellectually, I have a deeper understanding of mindfulness that stems from my exposure in therapy. I work with youth in a secure treatment facility and find that I am much more effective with them when I am present in the moment than when I am preoccupied with my own issues. It is much easier for me to apply mindfulness to my work-persona than to my crisis driven internal persona. I can read all about mindfulness and see how it can be beneficial, but it is much more difficult for me to actually apply it to my life at times. (I am getting “better” at it, though!)

In summary, I am much more the Scientist than the Buddhist…I can intellectualize mindfulness far more completely than I can internalize it, if that makes sense. My understanding of the therapeutic and clinical deployment of mindfulness is that it is a strategy that many therapists may use when “talk therapy” and medications don’t work. Although from this course I am discovering that it is becoming so much more than that…