Mindfulness and Psychotherapy by Laura Fasano, MA , LMHC

Mindfulness is simply being aware of where your attention is from one moment to the next, with gentle acceptance. Nothing is rejected. Mindfulness is mostly experiential and nonverbal ( i.e., sensory, somatic, intuitive, emotional) and is developed through practice.

Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness uses present moment awareness as the primary vehicle to investigate into the source of one’s suffering. In this therapeutic approach, a basic assumption is that we are fundamentally whole. Dis-ease is seen as a separation from this wholeness. Tensions created by this internal split may manifest as disease in one or more realms of our being: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

People often come to my office with a simple wish to feel better. In this desire to feel better, our inclination is to push our difficult experience away. Isn’t this seen as normal? Indeed, we all want to avoid pain. Yet this very act of unwittingly cutting parts of ourselves off is what exacerbates the problem. We split off from our original wholeness because, in our innocence, we don’t know any other way.

Using mindfulness as a “solution” to our perceived problems, then, is to stop running and to look directly into the heart of the matter. Through quieting the mind and feeling into the body we can begin to discover those split off places and therefore, quite naturally, begin to heal them.

Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness is a process of letting go with awareness into the yet revealed truth of one’s experience. This may sound simple, but it is not necessarily easy. Letting go into the unfamiliar can be difficult. What we encounter on the journey inward is the fear, rage, grief, etc., that was too much to feel when it happened. The journey of coming home to ourselves necessitates becoming intimate with these unfelt emotions.

So, why would we go here, to the places we’d rather not face? What usually happens is that the opportunity catches up with us! Life becomes unbearably difficult, painful, or simply unsatisfying. When this happens, we have two options: to either wake up or go to sleep. To take the inner journey, or numb out.

If we choose to take this inner journey and explore our repressed feelings within the safety of the therapeutic connection, all the way back to the source of our pain and fear, we can heal. Our sense of who we are expands, and we feel more alive and engaged with the world. Learning from all experience, life becomes the great adventure.