What we’ve said about Mindfulness

“there are three necessary and sufficient parts to mindfulness practice. So it is a practice. It is something that you do. Okay, actively. Not just something that you experience, not just something that is done to you as the subject. But part one is deliberate attention, paying attention on purpose”

“And that includes not judging yourself for judging or falling out of a mindful state while you're trying to practice it. And there's a practice is practice because you fail, right? That's why we call it practice. So again, deliberate attention to the present moment without judgment”

“you should and can consider mindfulness to be a medical treatment. It is a treatment that the patient has to do rather than something that you do to the patient. But you should consider it as one of your treatment options”

“if you are ruminating You are living and experiencing your own thinking, right? You are paying attention to the words or symbols or fantasies in your head and not the outside. You are also probably focusing your attention on what could be, what should be, the future or the past”

“One is separation. of your experience from your own thoughts and process. The ability to observe yourself, to self-reflect. This is also captured in other terminology like egocentronic versus egodistonic or the observing ego”

“when I think of mindfulness, I think of taking a step back and instead of viewing these thoughts as me, as I, viewing these thoughts as a process that's occurring within the true me. So when I'm practicing mindfulness, experiencing thoughts is a process”

“So there it really just goes through the three what skills of mindfulness which are observe, describe, participate. For observe, you're just noticing the body sensations. Describe You can put words to your experience and label what you observe, usually without loaded value-based judgments”

“I don't see this as a religiously based Practice, even if there is a tradition within religion. Why is that? Well, I would argue that religion was simply the organizing culture of spirituality and higher order beliefs up until very recently in human history”

“Around the time in the 80s, it was I believe Kabat-Zinn and other people in this group that were researching mindfulness-based stress reduction treatments or practices, and they started to see that this was efficacious for certain mental disorders or mental distress”

“mindfulness, like anything else, is an intervention that, in my opinion, you should be reaching for, thinking about, and counseling about, similar to, for example, CBT-I or behavioral activation. Your options are not just medication prescriptions. You should and can prescribe treatments like mindfulness”

“This is an actual treatment. If you do this right, and don't get me wrong, there are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why often it helps to have a professional guide you through it”

“the ability to turn attention to neutral aspects of the present moment can be very helpful for ruminators and panickers because a lot of the time the cause of the fear or panic is not what is going on outside of you in real life in the present moment”

“Next, major depressive disorder. Similarly, I give it an A-. I think it's something that I think is really important”

“Especially you see in a lot of the AA programs, mindfulness is a huge part of treatment for substance use disorder”

“targeted, Scheduled and regular specific mindfulness practice again titrated and geared towards the individual patient is definitely a core component of the long-term treatment of DSM defined borderline personality disorder”

“I'm going to give it an asterisk because mindfulness on its own can actually be harmful to the patient. It really depends on the particular patient”

“mindfulness is not going to treat mania. It's not going to treat a bipolar depression. That said, it's still something worth teaching to someone who has bipolar or who has schizophrenia”

“mindfulness is usually not standalone treatment. It is a major component of treatment in some conditions, but you need to be multimodal and personalized to the patient's case”

“So absolutely, I'm taking people through mindfulness, contacting the present moment. I think that's absolutely step one, the ability to come to the present moment. You're not going to observe any information”

“these days to be honest with you I pretty much just give them the mindfulness handouts from the DVT manual and this is again not limited to patients who have a diagnosable personality condition or cluster B traits I just think it's a very good handout”

“So in terms of just the basics of what mindfulness is, I would literally just read with the patient mindfulness handout 1A, which asks the question, what is mindfulness, what are mindfulness skills, and what is the practice”

“I wouldn't do it randomly. I actually think that can be a little challenging, at least to start. All I want is for us to commit to one time a week where you're not going to be busy, overly distracted, or likely to be too upset”

“there's hundreds of different ways to do my - mindfulness, so you've got to pick one that works for you”

“Instead, we want to get people used to practicing it when they don't quote unquote need it. Right. And that's the purpose of me picking a very specific and short timeframe and having them try out different practices”

“You should follow up with the patient's experience of the mindfulness, what it was like for them when they tried, or what happened that caused them not to try, even if they remembered, or did they not schedule at all, do they keep a calendar at all, all the basic CBT homework stuff”

“When I explain things to patients, it needs to be super duper simple. You don't want to add all these other layers of Buddhist thought and your own experiences of mindfulness because it can be too confusing and complicated”

“people should get a general idea of what it is, hear about the perils and pitfalls, hear about why it's going to be helpful and what ways it might not be helpful and what the goals are”

“I think this is a practice that's really going to help you. The medications might help you somewhat, but I think this is really going to help you in the long run in terms of getting better”

“There are a lot of different ways you can do this. You can be active about it. You can not be active about it. All I need is something like five minutes once a week”

“Don't expect it to make you feel good, because if you do, that's putting pressure on yourself. And don't expect yourself to try it in a way and do it perfectly. Expect to fail”

“Judging yourself for judging yourself is a type of judgment too. Just notice that you're doing it and try to put your attention back on whatever it is that you're trying to pay attention to. That's all you have to do”

“It's practicing so that you can start to understand the nature of your mind and understand how it works. And then when you practice in just short bursts a little bit every day, you have a little bit more space to react to the stuff that comes up”

“is to practice when things are calm and easy so that it helps during the more stressful periods. If you only practice during the stressful periods, you're going to be too ramped up to really kind of get the benefits or see it work”

“before I check in on it, I always go like, and by the way, often most patients don't follow up my recommendation. So no worries at all”

“if somebody tells you that they did try it, I think it's very important for you to take a neutral and inquisitive stance to get their genuine experience of it, right? We want to review with the patient and make sure That there isn't some kind of a false sense that they had to have enjoyed it”

“Because frankly, at least the first time or the first few times, it works pretty well, grounding techniques and mindfulness, to escape panic or distress. It will stop working pretty quickly like any PRN if it's used that way”

“Because this is not something that you should be doing when you're totally upset, okay? If you're above like a 7 or 8 out of 10 in distress, There are different skills for that”

“What should mindfulness not be? It should not be unpleasant. Okay, it should not be an unpleasant experience. It should not be significantly effortful. It should not be a struggle of some kind”

“it's not an outcomes focused Practice. If you try to practice mindfulness with a particular outcome in mind, it will subvert the efficacy of the practice itself”

“I also want to give a caveat to the caveat that also just enjoying things is not mindfulness because I saw that a lot of just like people think mindfulness is”

“Nothing wrong with using a YouTube video or a You know, app that has mindfulness practices at the beginning to get a flavor of things. But ideally, you should be practicing mindfulness in a way that does not depend on a particular setting or external source”

“And really what we're looking for is capacity building and flexibility, right? You should be able to deploy a certain variety of experience or action for yourself when it is helpful to you, right”

“I just described like it's 4am um I've been sleeping for six hours and it actually worked really well. It helped me calm down, which is not the purpose of it, but it did work”

“i have seen a lot of good clinical improvement from people who sought out traditional spiritual practices engaging with the spiritual community finding safe and trusting relationships and support in that method um which was free to them”