I have been trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli and am also a certified Mindfulness Instructor through Naropa University. I maintain my own daily mindfulness practice and find that it is extraordinarily helpful in managing stress.
I incorporate mindfulness practices in all my work with clients. I have found that one of the most profound benefits of a mindfulness meditation practice is that it helps us to have the experience we are having even when that experience is not the one we want to be having. So often we go through our daily life enjoying those experiences we like and rejecting those experiences we don't like. Unfortunately life doesn't always agree to our plans. We can end up believing that if we just rejected our dislikes with a little more effort and held on to our likes with a little more effort we could be happier. However, this process of holding onto and rejecting begins to cause us trouble. We begin to be less and less willing to live our FULL life -- we are only partially present. We often also begin to feel more and more anxious about how things are going for us. This makes us work harder and harder at rejecting those parts of our life we don't want. This can get messy eventually leading to serious problems in living -- increased anxiety, increased stress, increased despair. The good news is that Mindfulness Meditation very gently puts the brakes on this process. It subtly teaches us to lean into the experience we are having when we are having it even if we don't like it. When we lean into our experience we learn we can actually HAVE it and nothing really bad happens. And, by leaning into it - it passes more quickly.
One of the most fascinating things about Mindfulness is that current research in neuroscience is confirming and validating what serious meditators have said for millennia -- this stuff works because it is having a direct, positive and measurable impact on the brain! If you are interested in this research please check out the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at UCLA!
