Mindfulness Is More Than A Set Of Techniques

Thank you to Danny for this wonderful piece. Danny agreed to write a blog for us a little while back, and I had kind of forgotten about it until it landed in my inbox a few days ago. I really enjoyed this as a piece, and it has made me reflect on my own practice. In future I am definitely going to ask myself more questions before I meditate – I really think that this will enrich my practice.

Mindfulness Is More Than A Set Of Techniques

In recent decades mindfulness has grown in popularity. It has been shown to help improve psychological wellbeing and reduce stress. Indeed, mindfulness has become something of a buzzword amongst psychotherapists and other mental health professionals. When I first began training as a psychotherapist I was somewhat surprised to learn that mindfulness was so widely adopted outside of the Buddhist context which I knew it from. It’s wonderful that mindfulness is being taught in clinical and secular contexts. After all, mindfulness is universal because it is has to do with our capacity for awareness, which is something we all share as human beings.

However in secular contexts, at least in my experience, there can be a tendency amongst those people teaching meditation to portray mindfulness as merely a technique or set of techniques. Whilst technique is certainly part of practice, I feel that to understand mindfulness as merely being about technique or as something that is reducible to a set of techniques is a limited and limiting attitude to hold in relation to your own mindfulness practice.

One of the first questions I ask my clients who come for personal meditation coaching is “What is your heart’s deepest wish?”. I ask questions like this because in supporting someone to develop or deepen their practice I need to have a sense of why they meditate at all. If all I were to offer when clients came to me was a list of mindfulness techniques I would be missing something far more important than the meditation practice; I would be missing the meditation practitioner.

Similarly, in terms of your own mindfulness meditation practice it’s helpful to have a clear sense of what truly matters to you and how your practice is connected to your values. When you have this kind of personal understanding in relation to your practice you develop a level of autonomy and trust in your practice, and yourself as a practitioner that will enrich your life because you’ll be able to relate to your practice in a different way than if you saw your mindfulness practice as merely a set of techniques.

If we become too caught up in technique, we can easily loose sight of something far more important than technique; why it is we are practicing mindfulness mediation to begin with.

“Why am I practicing?” is a valuable question to ask yourself, not just once when you first begin to meditate, but on a regular basis as you continue to practice. Reflecting in this way helps make your practice personally meaningful. While other people can offer instruction on how to practice, and indeed this is how we learn to meditate, nobody else can tell you what your values are or why you should meditate. Why we meditate is personal to each of us and will probably change over time. Reflecting on what it is we are doing and why we are doing it helps keep our practice vibrant and valuable.

Danny Ford is a meditation teacher and trainee psychotherapist with a private practice in Leeds. He has been practicing Insight Meditation in the Buddhist tradition for five years and facilitates secular meditation classes at Jamyang Buddhist Centre Leeds. For more information about Danny and to listen to a podcast of guided meditations please visit