by Halko Weiss
For meditation purposes, a range of techniques is employed. The meditation student may at first simply concentrate on an object in present experience. For example, a foundational exercise is to count one’s breaths from one to ten, without losing focus. (Easier said than done, as it turns out.) Alternatively, one may immerse the mind in a mantra or a chant, or exhaust one’s enthusiasm for logical thought by contemplating a Zen koan. There are a number of established variations. It may involve the practice of pure open attention, such as the Shikantaza (just sitting) practice observed by Zen Buddhists of the Soto school, or the systematic sweeping of attention through the body and the active differentiation of mental processes that characterize vipassana (insight meditation) practice. There are analogous meditation forms in other worldwide traditions.
Often, meditation is practiced in a peaceful setting, where external distractions can fade. As the mind settles, it becomes possible to observe mental activities as they arise within the field of awareness. This process is often likened to dropping a stone into a still pond and watching the ripples that are automatically and effortlessly created.
Regular meditation can improve focus, calmness, self-regulation, and expansiveness, sometimes in profound and lasting ways. It improves with practice, and experienced practitioners can develop highly refined states of awareness. Skilled meditators show interesting changes, such as the effective dissolution of the startle reflex (Goleman, 2003).
Mindfulness in Psychotherapy
Mindfulness practice can be a lifelong path, leading perhaps to the deeply absorbed states achieved by experienced meditators—called samadhi in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions—and maybe even ultimately to a state of enlightenment. In psychotherapy, we can employ mindfulness for more modest aims. Even fleeting glimpses of deeper awareness can be immensely useful in therapy.
The practice of mindfulness utilizes the internal observer or witness—an aspect of the mind that is inherently detached or disidentified from the objects of which it is aware, constituting a different neural net than the parts of one’s ego with object relations histories (Kershaw & Wade, 2011). There have been analogous concepts in psychotherapy. Psychoanalysts talk about employing the reflexive ego. The externalization techniques of Gestalt and other modalities put clients in the position of observing inner dynamics, as opposed to being blended or fused with them. Cognitive-behavioral therapists have realized the importance of distancing to many of their techniques (Beck et al., 1979; Hayes, 2004; Hayes et al., 2004). As Kegan (1982) suggests in his approach to therapy, it is important that what was subjective is made objective for a person to have freedom to grow.
Mindfulness can be used to promote greater detachment from thoughts and feelings. For example, instead of trying to distract from or argue with an unpleasant thought, mindfulness simply makes the thought less important by being able to witness it as one aspect of experience among many. When mindful, individuals are able to observe the panoply of sensations, feelings, thoughts, images, and memories that typically bypass conscious awareness. This bare attention has great power. By “decentering” from the contents of mental phenomena, clients are able to tolerate distressing thoughts and feelings without avoiding or “acting out” (Fulton & Siegel, 2005). Moreover, mindfulness also allows an automatic response to “recognize itself” before it is carried out (Myllerup, 2004). Studies indicate that even though the intention to act is formulated in the brain before we are aware of it, people have veto power over motor activity when they are mindful (Libet, 1999 in Germer, 2005, p. 23). Mindfulness thus modifies automatic habits by putting distance between one’s feelings and impulses and by making unconscious impulses conscious. Consequently, mindfulness has become an accepted practice in the treatment of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder (Baer, 2003), and other disorders.
Even a modest practice of mindfulness can produce a range of benefits, including improved immune function; improved response flexibility and the capacity to understand someone else’s mind (Siegel & Hartzell, 2003); improved self-regulation (the ability to modulate emotional reactions); greater self-awareness; and a capacity to develop distance from impulses, beliefs, or feelings as they arise (disidentification).
Becoming mindful generally expands the field of awareness through locating one’s consciousness in a serene, poised mental state that can release itself to a wider spectrum of experience. Over time, the chatter of thoughts tends to recede, displaced by the more immediate sense of aliveness that arises from the constantly changing waves of sensation and sense experiences that are the foundations of the self (Damasio, 2000). With sufficient practice, mindfulness can produce clear and lasting shifts in consciousness that make it easier to connect and center oneself in its qualities of awareness and compassion (Hanson with Mendius, 2009).
Repairing Disconnections
Change is founded on the capacity for self-observation. Eugene Gendlin (1982) observed that the capacity of a person to remain focused on present experience is a trustworthy indicator of good outcomes in psychotherapy. Moshe Feldenkrais understood the vital role of awareness in achieving change, and was known for saying that until you know what you are doing, you cannot do what you want.
Mindfulness increases coherence between various mental functions, weaving together thinking and feeling, connecting the left and right brains, and improving communication between, and awareness of, various ego states or subpersonalities (Siegel, 2007).
By making the mind space bigger, mindfulness allows for a higher-order understanding of mental processes. This has been likened to zooming out a camera lens. We begin to see the forest and not just the trees. We are identified with the seer, not fused or blended in what is seen. As the field of awareness is expanded, disconnected aspects of experience can be integrated into a more complex whole. This is in accord with Wilber’s (1979) suggestion that therapy can be conceived of as healing disconnects or splits. Perhaps one part of the mind (anger or sadness) is split from another (care or independence). The mind might be disconnected from the sensations, feelings, and muscle tensions of the body. The mind-body self might not sense its connection to the environment around it. Kabat-Zinn concurs with this perspective: “With regard to disease and dis-ease, we might say that most fundamental dis-ease stemming from disattention and disconnection, and from mis-perception and mis-attribution, is the anguish of the human condition itself, of the full catastrophe unmet and unexamined” (2005, p. 124).
Lost in Thought
Mindfulness promotes experiential knowledge over conceptual understanding. This reverses a form of disconnection that can be broadly characterized as a split between thoughts and direct experience (Johanson, 1996; Johnson, 1985). The mind has an automatic tendency to reify experience—to substitute symbolic representations (thoughts, ideas, images, and so on) for experience itself. When we are swimming in an ocean of concepts, mistaking them for reality, we are not “grounded” but rather cut off from the aspects of our intelligence that arise from the direct experience of sensations and feelings (LeDoux, 1996). Charles Tart suggests this is an especially contemporary ailment: “Believing that we fully know a thing just because we can give it a verbal name and associate other intellectual knowledge to it is one of the greatest failures of modern culture” (1987, p. 190). While modern culture may indeed encourage us to become lost in thought, this tendency has been recognized for centuries. Not to mistake the pointing finger for the moon to which it is pointing is a counsel of ancient Buddhism.
Falling Asleep
The human mind naturally tunes out, or disconnects, from painful or unwelcome aspects of experience. This censoring leads to a range of dissociated states, some which have been likened to being partially asleep (Cozolino, 2010).
“Dissociation” is a loose term that describes a vast and complex range of mental phenomena. Fragmentation of experience may occur for short episodes or may be effectively permanent. We can check out anywhere along the continuum
of ordinary human experience that ranges from thought to feeling. At the thought end of this spectrum, we may become ungrounded—disconnected from the immediate somatic experiences that give us the sense of embodiment. In such a state, we lose access to the felt sense of our emotional intelligence. Folk wisdom has long recognized this phenomenon. Popular parlance reflects the value of “coming to our senses.” At the other extreme, we may become flooded (Gottman, 1998) in strong feeling states without much capacity for thought, self-awareness, or self-regulation. Disconnection may arise between the building blocks of experience (thoughts, memories, images, feelings, bodily sensations, impulses, and sense experiences) or between higher orders of psychological organization, such as between different subpersonalities or ego states (Watkins & Watkins, 1997).
While dissociative responses are usually understood to be self-limiting, they can also be seen as functional attempts to deal with internal conflicts when more effective resources are not available. Gestalt therapist Joseph Zinker says,
This sleepy wakefulness, this creative adaptation to the pain in the world, is . . . resistance to contact and resistance to awareness. In this way, resistance . . . allows the avoidance of one type of contact in favor of maintaining contact with something other than the immediate experience; unawareness becomes for the organism the “lesser of two evils.” (1994, p. 117)
Optimal psychological organization broadly involves a combination of thinking and feeling, a connection between what Gilligan (1997) has termed the autobiographical self and the somatic self. But adapting to emotional insults may bring a kind of psychological fragmentation, as certain aspects of experience become split off or dissociated.
The end result of this process has been termed “self-negation.” Although it is an intelligent attempt to adapt to a particular environment, there is a cost to such a strategy. A part of the person has been shut down or kept out of awareness. As Almaas explains, “But something happens when we build a shell and hide inside it, which is the source of most human complaints. When we cover up our vulnerability so we’re not open to hurt and pain, fear and influence, we also become insensitive to joy, love, happiness, pleasure, and aliveness” (1990, p. 196). This splitting off creates the kind of disconnection that mindfulness can eventually integrate or repair. Mindfulness is great medicine for almost all forms of dissociation.
A special case of dissociation, of course, relates to those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, which includes lower brain activation stemming from fearing one’s life is in danger. Mindfulness is crucial to healing such conditions, but the therapist must switch to mindfulness of sensation and bottom-up processing so that retraumatization is avoided (Ogden et al., 2006; see Chapter 24 on trauma).
Disidentification
Entering into mindfulness can radically change our notions of who we are. While we may embrace the ego’s conceit that it is the author of our experience, our sense of identity is in fact an artifact of mental processes, and not the source of them. Brain studies have shown that our experience is constantly being generated before we become aware of it. In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, found that brain signals associated with voluntary actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
Not only is our ego identity haplessly astride an experience-making vehicle over which it has no real control, but further investigation also reveals that there is not even one single, reliable I. For this reason, the koan “Who are you?” has long been employed for its powers to loosen the grip of the autobiographical self. To likewise loosen up one’s sense of solidness, Kurtz invented an exercise in which one person would ask another some basic questions, one at a time, such as, “How old are you?” “Are you male or female?” “How many children do you have?” The one questioned would sit with his or her response until able to say, “I don’t know.”
In contrast to the myth of a monolithic self, many schools of therapy (such as Gestalt, transactional analysis, psychosynthesis, and so on) have recognized that human psychology is organized into a repertoire or multiplicity (Rowan & Cooper, 1999) of distinct personality patterns, which can be thought of as “parts” (Schwartz, 1995) or “trance identities” (Wolinsky, 1991).
Typically, we are not aware that we contain multitudes. The mind conceals an automatic procession of characters by creating an overarching sense of “I-dentity” that endorses each state in turn as “This is who I am.” Without mindfulness, the transition from one part to the next happens unconsciously and automatically, as the costume of one player is seamlessly exchanged for that of the next. However, through the use of mindfulness, we can cultivate a witness that is able to watch this inner pageant from a detached yet compassionate perspective. When we can observe our experiences as they arise, we begin to directly discern automatic responses, to understand them and to free ourselves from their grasp. As we become disidentified from what would otherwise be automatic patterns of perception and behavior, we become more self-aware. Daniel Goleman (1996) has called this the cornerstone of emotional intelligence. This is immensely useful in individual psychotherapy and it is also of tremendous value when working with couples or groups, where mindfulness can disrupt the inevitably cyclical interplay of such automatic patterns (Fisher, 2002).
Mindfulness in Hakomi Therapy
Hakomi therapy employs mindfulness in that most traditional of psychotherapeutic pursuits: the making conscious of what is unconscious. Thus, like the spiritual traditions it has borrowed from, Hakomi employs mindfulness with the aim of helping people to wake up—to become conscious. The use of mindfulness is deeply integrated into the methodology and process of Hakomi. This is in contrast to therapeutic approaches that employ mindfulness simply as part of a tool kit, where clients are taught elements of mindfulness as an adjunct to traditional treatment protocols.
Talk therapies seek to reveal the hidden layers of the mind through techniques such as free association or self-reflection. This kind of inquiry often brings a certain calmness that comes simply from deeper understanding. But mindfulness can take us far deeper than mere introspection. It can also provide access to the deep psychic structures that directly shape what we like to think of as reality. The human mind relies heavily on stored models of the world, which are generalized from previous formative experiences. Most of these patterns are useful, but some contain inherent limitations because they are historical in nature and therefore not necessarily a very good fit with the present moment. Elements that were wisely shut out of one’s life—such as support, intimacy, or self-assertion—because it made survival sense at earlier times continue beyond the time when they could be realistically reintroduced.
Ron Kurtz has called these mental maps the “organizers of experience.” “These core organizers are definitions and blueprints of the most basic issues about our being in the world. They are our reference points, our measures of the self and others, with which we set our expectations, goals, and limits” (Kurtz, 1990a, p. 14). They are part of our universal need to make meaning out of the life we experience (Stolorow et al., 1987).
These mental maps are encoded in what is known as nonverbal (implicit) memory. In contrast to verbal (explicit) memory, when implicit memory is retrieved, it lacks the internal sensation that something is being recalled. Thus, emotions, behaviors, bodily sensations, perceptual interpretations, and the bias of particular nonconscious mental models may influence our present experience (both perception and behavior) without our having any realization that we are being shaped by the past (Bennett-Goleman, 2001; Siegel & Hartzell, 2003). In this fashion, human psychology is greatly determined by automatically arising patterns of experience. As creatures, we are most typically on autopilot.
The normal narrowing, shrinking, or fixating of attention of everyday consciousness has been characterized as a kind of trance (Wolinsky, 1991). While such trances are a natural (and often functionally necessary) aspect of the mind,
some in particular can prove troublesome, because they are strongly regressive and, at the same time, profoundly compelling. They bring issues and emotions from long ago into what Hakomi founding trainer Dyrian Benz has termed the “past-infused present.” To the extent that we are not aware of these patterns, we are at their mercy. But with consciousness, we can free ourselves from their grasp.
It is possible to reach the underlying material that shapes our trance states by paying mindful attention to aspects of present experience shaped or organized by the core narrative beliefs.
When you work in therapy to study how a gesture, a feeling, or whatever, is automatically made part of experience, you eventually come to memories, images, and beliefs about who we are, what’s possible for us, what type of world it is, what it wants from us, and what it will give and take. (Kurtz, 1990a, p. 14)
Observing the automatic nature of self-organization is a central undertaking for Hakomi therapists. On one hand is the stream of automatic, somatic, emotional, and mental self-organization. On the other hand is the observing mind. This observing mind, what is often called the internal observer or the witness, is the Hakomi method’s vehicle toward conscious awareness. Mindfulness is the premier tool for empowering one to study the organization of one’s experience and get some freedom from its automaticity at the same time (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Eisman, 2006; Kershaw & Wade, 2011).
Through the observation of emotions, sensations, impulses, and other automatic reactions to stimuli, we can begin to become conscious of automatic reactions as they arise. Thich Nhat Hanh notes,
Bare attention identifies and pursues the single threads of that closely interwoven tissue of our habits. . . . Bare attention lays open the minute crevices in the seemingly impenetrable structure of unquestioned mental processes. . . . If the inner connections between the single parts of a seemingly compact whole become intelligible, then it ceases to be inaccessible. . . . If the facts and details of the conditioned nature become known, there is a chance of effecting fundamental changes in it. (1976, pp. 10–11)