Practising mindfulness training helps identify, live with and reduce difficult, painful feelings, thoughts and sensations. It enhances wellbeing.
These can be things like recurring feelings of inadequacy, anger or fear or impulses such as the need to gamble, drink unhealthily or take illicit drugs.
Mindfulness training has its origins in ancient Buddhist meditation practices. Since the 1970s, many Buddhist meditation techniques have been embraced by Western psychology.
Psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness in this way: “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” ¹
Research on the neural perspective of how mindfulness meditation works suggests that it exerts its effects in components of attention regulation, body awareness, emotional regulation and change in perspective of self. ²
People who practise mindfulness can develop a sense of mastery over their thoughts and feelings. They learn to be able to have some agency over them. It is a self-empowering process.
Some of the benefits for participants in The Buttery Private who learn to practise mindfulness techniques include:
- learning how to focus one’s attention on the task at hand rather than having a wandering mind and not doing any one task well;
- being “in the now” and not being side tracked by unhelpful thoughts or impulses;
- mastering the non-judgemental observation of external and internal stimuli as they come into play and exert an (often unwelcome) influence.
Participants in The Buttery Private program can achieve measurable results from working in a group or in a one-on-one setting with highly experienced counsellors who are well-versed in mindfulness training and other proven psychological techniques.
(1) Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
(2) Hozel, B.; Lazar, S.; Gard, T.; Schulman-Olivier, Z.; Vago, R.; Ott, U. (2011) . Perspectives on Psychological Science 6.