Obstacles to mindfulness despite my need to learn
Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2016 2:34 pm
Hi,
I'm a consumer of mental health services who has been offered mindfulness in several contexts, including ACT therapy. I can see in theory how it might help me, if it loosens my attachment to the miserable "reality" I identify with through my habitual thoughts.
However I have consistently failed to get to grips with mindfulness, in large part I suppose because I am so attached to the supposed certainties of judgement and categorization of my experience.
In previous years I tried a formal sit down meditation routine, observing the flow of my thoughts and sensations. However I was hobbled by the recurrent thought that I was doing it wrong. For example, I was told I should be observing my breathing without changing it, but anytime I paid attention to my breathing I kept changing it to follow particular breathing cycles and guided visualisations I had picked up studying yoga.
I was tortured by the thought that I wasn't progressing - a judgement which is itself surely out of place in the wished for non-judgemental mindset. Thats sort of contradiction seems typical.
I have been offered supposedly less-demanding beginner approaches, such as my current psychologist suggesting that I respond to my distressing thoughts by imagining myself as watching them the way an elderly person might observe a child playing in the park - not engaging with them, nor judging, just curious and watchful. I have a vague idea of what that might be like, given my curious observation of things like the varying patterns of birds plumage.
However that child-scenario tool still is a non-starter for me, due I think to two "problems":
1. I am always self conscious that in only deploying this thinking mode whenever I identify a "neg" ( as I called distressing thoughts), I am already buying into a judgement and an intention to reduce those thoughts, which itself seems to contradict the detatchment which I am supposed to be applying.
2. I have no idea how I can manufacture curiosity and interest for thoughts that, as I imagine them, are essentially sentences. They are analagous to the small objects, e.g. a key, I was asked to handle mindfully in an ACT workshop. I quickly ran out of things to observe about them and felt silly waiting for some surprise to emerge from nowhere. A manufactured item like a key appears to me as a solid with texture and shape, and nothing more that is not part of it's designed form and function. Similarly, a thought has the function to encode propositional content and can be judged to be true or false. All I can do with it is toggle some assumption of which of those it is, or swap out words thesaurus-style. I imagine there is some other skeptical or experimental reflection you could apply to them, but that is probably no different to the tortured wrestling with my thoughts that distresses me.
So, is there some other way to get into observer mode, to detatch from the illusory reality of thoughts without simply dismissing them as mistakes?
Of even more interest to me than answers to these particular questions is, how can I find more ongoing help to answer questions like this? There are mindfulness courses where I am in Brisbane, but they seem to all cost big bucks. Is there such as thing as a free online mindfulness guru or mentor? Or does the essentially private nature of this practice mean I have to somehow change myself before anyone else can help me?
I'm a consumer of mental health services who has been offered mindfulness in several contexts, including ACT therapy. I can see in theory how it might help me, if it loosens my attachment to the miserable "reality" I identify with through my habitual thoughts.
However I have consistently failed to get to grips with mindfulness, in large part I suppose because I am so attached to the supposed certainties of judgement and categorization of my experience.
In previous years I tried a formal sit down meditation routine, observing the flow of my thoughts and sensations. However I was hobbled by the recurrent thought that I was doing it wrong. For example, I was told I should be observing my breathing without changing it, but anytime I paid attention to my breathing I kept changing it to follow particular breathing cycles and guided visualisations I had picked up studying yoga.
I was tortured by the thought that I wasn't progressing - a judgement which is itself surely out of place in the wished for non-judgemental mindset. Thats sort of contradiction seems typical.
I have been offered supposedly less-demanding beginner approaches, such as my current psychologist suggesting that I respond to my distressing thoughts by imagining myself as watching them the way an elderly person might observe a child playing in the park - not engaging with them, nor judging, just curious and watchful. I have a vague idea of what that might be like, given my curious observation of things like the varying patterns of birds plumage.
However that child-scenario tool still is a non-starter for me, due I think to two "problems":
1. I am always self conscious that in only deploying this thinking mode whenever I identify a "neg" ( as I called distressing thoughts), I am already buying into a judgement and an intention to reduce those thoughts, which itself seems to contradict the detatchment which I am supposed to be applying.
2. I have no idea how I can manufacture curiosity and interest for thoughts that, as I imagine them, are essentially sentences. They are analagous to the small objects, e.g. a key, I was asked to handle mindfully in an ACT workshop. I quickly ran out of things to observe about them and felt silly waiting for some surprise to emerge from nowhere. A manufactured item like a key appears to me as a solid with texture and shape, and nothing more that is not part of it's designed form and function. Similarly, a thought has the function to encode propositional content and can be judged to be true or false. All I can do with it is toggle some assumption of which of those it is, or swap out words thesaurus-style. I imagine there is some other skeptical or experimental reflection you could apply to them, but that is probably no different to the tortured wrestling with my thoughts that distresses me.
So, is there some other way to get into observer mode, to detatch from the illusory reality of thoughts without simply dismissing them as mistakes?
Of even more interest to me than answers to these particular questions is, how can I find more ongoing help to answer questions like this? There are mindfulness courses where I am in Brisbane, but they seem to all cost big bucks. Is there such as thing as a free online mindfulness guru or mentor? Or does the essentially private nature of this practice mean I have to somehow change myself before anyone else can help me?
