SPOTLIGHT
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: A Healthy Component of Spring Cleaning
home, our office, our car, our body, or our mind, we benefit so much from a fresh start. When we talk about detoxifying the body, we often think about going on a regimen of special foods, and dedicating time to detoxify ourselves. Hopefully, after going through this kind of cleansing, we make a commitment to behave and consume dif- ferently so that we can extend the benefits of our efforts and prevent the accumulation of future toxins. There is a lot of effort involved in giving the body a “spring
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cleaning”, but we rarely consider taking such good care of our minds! Let’s call this kind of detoxification the practice of Mind- fulness.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR©) is a method
of training our minds to notice and examine our habitual reac- tions connected to survival mechanisms. With this method, we can detoxify the mental reactivity that has become automatic into more healthy responses. We can decide what we want to keep, and what we wish to let go of, or transform. MBSR teaches people how to use their innate resources and
abilities to respond more effectively to stress, pain, and illness, according to the founder of this program, John-Kabat-Zinn. His work over the past 35 years at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, shows consistent, reliable, and reproducible demonstrations of improvement for a wide range of diagnosis, including pain, anxiety, and/or panic, as a result of participation in an eight-week MBSR program.
You are the world expert on your life, your body, and your mind, or at least you are in the best position to become that expert if you observe carefully. Part of the adventure of
meditation is to use yourself as a laboratory to find out who you are and what you are capable of doing. – Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
Who can benefit from a MBSR practice? 1. Anyone who is feeling stressed or anxious, and noticing these feelings in the body. These feelings are a symptom of the sense that we may be overloaded with work, family, community, and other commitments. There’s a sense that there is too much on our plates, and we are losing our ability to manage everything. We may notice that we are more tired, more irritable, unable to concentrate well, even getting sick more often. This is our body telling us that our mind needs some help – that we need some detoxification.
2. People experiencing chronic body pain, or a lack of ease 16
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t’s springtime and that means time to open the windows, scrub the floors, examine what we want to keep and what we can let go of from a long winter. Whether we are cleaning our
(dis-ease). This can manifest as back pain, irritable bowel syn- drome and other pains because our body is not at ease. We lose ability to have ease and enjoy life. Many of our physical symptoms result from chronic mental habits, such as worry, anger, fear, anxiety, and stress.
3. Individuals who wish to cultivate a deeper sense of self- compassion, calm, joy, resilience, and trust can benefit from a MBSR practice. Once we recognize the “toxic” thoughts and feelings that are habitual, we can systematically examine each of these and learn to both take care of them – and to transform them.
MBSR Workshops / Mental Detoxification Sound interesting? Here’s what someone can expect from an eight-week, nine-class MBSR program:
• Orientation is where participants learn more about MBSR and how the practice can help them with their specific concerns.
• Classes 1 through 4 focus on returning to the body, contact- ing the body, and befriending the body again. We get to know the physiology of stress reactivity in the body and experience body scans and mindful movements. Students learn to recog- nize the symptoms of stress reactivity, and why these symptoms, such as the fight/flight/freeze reactions, are arising,
• Class 5 is the time when we have practiced becoming a very good friend with our bodies, and can now recognize that it lets us know what is coming. Because we practice creating space between the trigger and how respond, our reactivity can be intentionally transformed into a response.
• A full day silent retreat provides six hours of immersing our- selves in our ability to really listen to the body and to our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and be available to its signals.
• Classes 6 and 7 provide the opportunity to cultivate loving- kindness – allowing the body and the world to be a recipient of love, compassion, and understanding. Through lovingkind- ness we are connected with ourselves and have the ability to offer others our good wishes. In Class 7 the focus is communi- cation, and how it can be a source of stress unless we amend our style to cultivate more understanding than separation.
• Class 8 is a review of what we have learned throughout the experience, to share resources from the community, and to feel supported as we continue with our practice.
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