After writing a post on mindfulness recently (Mind Power in Physical and Mental Therapies), I had some correspondence with my former life coach Serge Prengel. Serge shared with me something he’d written about mindfulness in response to the same news report, which I thought I would share here, republished with gratitude to Serge.

Mindfulness Coaching & Therapy

By Serge Prengel“>Serge Prengel

What is mindfulness, and what does it have to do with therapy or coaching?

1. Is it mystical?
First, I’d like to dispel some of the esoteric, mystical associations that many people have with the word “mindfulness’. For many people, “mindfulness” still has the connotation of something magical, endowed with mysterious powers. In fact, mindfulness is very much a part of the human experience. While some people do develop their ability to reach “higher” states of consciousness, everybody has the ability to be mindful and to increase that ability.

Helping clients practice mindfulness has long been a part of many traditional, talk-based psychotherapies, even though it has not necessarily been conceptualized as “mindfulness” within the theories underlying these therapies. For instance, many therapists help clients grow from self-consciousness into self awareness, without necessarily thinking of this as mindfulness training. Another example is how therapists help clients develop the “observing self”: In addition to noticing your mood, you become aware that there also is an “observing self” that notices how you feel, but doesn’t drown in this feeling.

2. The practitioner’s mindfulness

Having a personal experience of mindfulness has profoundly influenced the way many therapists and coaches experience what they do, and changed the way we do our work.
By this, I do not mean that we “prescribe” meditation to our clients. In fact, many of us do not specifically refer to either “mindfulness” or “meditation” during the work we do with our clients. But the profound change is that it influences how we are, and what we do, during our sessions. The practice of mindfulness helps us look for a different quality of listening - - a deeper way of paying attention to what clients say and mean.

By the way, the experience of mindfulness doesn’t just come from the practice of traditional meditation techniques. Standard “lotus” meditation is not the only way to mindfulness. Many Buddhist traditions include such practices as “walking meditation”. Some traditions go further, considering that any activity can be an opportunity to practice a mindful attitude (e.g. the injunction to “chop wood, carry water” as a way to spiritual development). Other gateways include “Focusing”, which was developed by Gene Gendlin as he analyzed the process of therapy to understand what happened in successful therapies.

3. Transmitting an experience

As a therapist/coach, you have the possibility of shaping the experience of what happens in sessions in order to help your clients “get it”. You are not teaching a whole class to try to impart them some general knowledge of what mindfulness might be. You see one client at a time, and this gives you the opportunity to tailor each session to help each client get a direct, personal experience of mindfulness.

This experience starts with what I was describing in the previous paragraph: How a mindful therapist can give a client the experience of being listened to and heard in a profound way. This continues into a creative process that is based on the very specific circumstances of this very specific client, and the nature of the interaction between this very specific client and this very specific therapist.

Over time, clients come to internalize this mixture of mindfulness, receptivity and creativity. Neural pathways adapt so that the client knows how to get back to that state of mindfulness/receptivity/creativity without thinking about it, without having to remember a procedure (much the way “procedural memory” helps us remember how to use a bike).

4. Self-regulation

As the findings of neuroscience make more inroads into the psychotherapy world, there is a growing interest in “bottom up” processes as opposed to “top down” processes. In a nutshell, “top-down” approaches focus on how our “higher” functions, such as the intellect or the will, influence what we do. “Bottom up” approaches focus on how what happens at a sensorimotor level affects what we do and who we are. Far from seeing the brain as just the organ of cognition, we tend to see it more as the place that receives input both from the outside world and from inside ourselves, and that regulates our functioning “from the bottom up”.

So there is a growing interest in how mindfulness can help us enhance the natural processes of self-regulation. This is not done in a mechanical way – i.e. saying “meditate 15 minutes a day” the way you would say “take two aspirins”. Regulating a complex mechanism is a complex thing, as everybody knows from the experience of how difficult it is to relax by just thinking “I should relax”.

Several contemporary therapies have developed ways to help people achieve more self-regulation in dealing with difficult or overwhelming circumstances. The process of doing that involves moment-by-moment attention to fleeting experiences, including body senses. This is facilitated by of the ability of the therapist to be attuned to the client, and to have the ability to be mindful during this process. This creates a learning experience where the client experiences mindfulness and develops skills to increase the ability to be mindful. While this has a lot of similarity with the skills fostered by meditation, it is not meditation per se - - and it goes further than most people can hope to achieve individually through meditation.

Serge Prengel

Following up on my post of a few days ago, news reports today indicate that the junta in Myanmar has resorted to even more extreme violence in suppressing the ongoing demonstrations. “YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Security forces in Myanmar opened fire on demonstrators Wednesday, and witnesses said police beat and dragged away dozens of Buddhist monks. The government said at least one person was killed, while dissident groups and media reported up to eight dead.”

Even knowing that the consequences of its actions can have no positive outcome, the junta escalates the confrontation and resorts to violent suppression that can only fan the flames and bring more attention from the rest of the world. Not to repeat what I’ve already said, but this is an immature strategy, even from a junta.

A similar conclusion can be drawn from seeing the headlines of the New York City tabloids this week, vilifying the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When we spend so much energy making Ahmadinejad, and by inference Iran, an evil enemy, aren’t we encouraging and supporting the efforts of the current administration to pursue a policy of escalation with the possible consequence of another disastrous war? Although we now know that the administration’s goal in Iraq was not to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction, we still do not know what was the true goal. To avoid a similar sequence of events with mass fatalities, it would be helpful to understand this as rationally and fully as we can.

I saw a news clip today about a New York City stockbroker assaulting a fellow spinner in a spin class (he pushed him and his bike against the wall). The reason: he was enraged by the man’s grunting.

And yesterday I was introduced to the term “Dumbfounding.” As reported in the science section of the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, has proposed that human beings have an innate and pre-rational sense of judgment about right and wrong that evolved as useful to our survival, but leaves us “dumbfounded” when our rational mind can’t explain why we feel that something is abhorrent or wrong.

I would guess that the NYC stockbroker’s ire derived from a pre-rational response; when he wakes up tomorrow he’ll wonder how he could have been so enraged as to assault another person for grunting, and get himself into so much hot water in the process.

Haidt’s hypothesis concurs with my own thinking on the origin and evolution of our moral sense. In LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I propose that our sense of morality has been baked into our genes through evolution, and came about for the very simple reason that if we are to persist as an organsim we need to react in certain ways that will help us survive (all of which I tie to the very concrete principles that shape the universe). This also gives us a very concrete basis by which to understand and discuss our sense of morality.

But upon reading about the poor stockbroker and his unfortunate victim I was struck again by something that occurs to me regularly. We live in a world, in a society, that has evolved very rapidly, and evolves ever more rapidly. We are evolved but we’re less evolved than sometimes we’d like to think. We step out into the world feeling that we are equal to its challenges, but it’s like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk. Whether it’s the grunting of a fellow spin class member, or a jittery stockmarket, or a pair of dirty socks left lying on the bedroom floor, we’re not always as psychologically well-equipped as the world demands. Our rational minds have created a mental world that has a dizzying range of customs, procedures, laws, etiquette, social and workplace demands, and underneath the surface our innate urges and responses sometimes can’t keep up.