Mindfulness
One characteristic of the method that makes it unique is its use of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a special state of mind we use when studying ourselves.
Mindfulness is a state where you are relatively quiet, your attention
is turned inward and you are observing your own experience with a minimum
of interference. You don’t try to control your experience; you simply
allow it to happen and you observe it. This is not as easy as it sounds.
But, if you can do that, then you can discover little pieces of your inner
structure. To help you discover your inner world, the therapist suggests
doing little experiments which the client does while in mindfulness.
For example, I was lecturing once in Vienna to several hundred people. To demonstrate
this method, I asked them to become quiet and turn inward (mindfulness) and study
their experiences when I said to them, “You’re a good person.” The results were
these: About forty percent of the group felt sadness. Another twenty-five percent
felt relief. A few people felt happy. Some noticed that their chests felt warmer
and more open. Some had a thought or heard an inner voice which said things like,
“No! I’m not!” So you see, one little experiment showed something about people’s
inner structures. A simple experiment in mindfulness can do that.
If we help a client stay with her sadness, or listen to the voice
she heard, or to just stay with the experience that the experiment evoked,
memories may appear. When they do, they help the client understand her
reactions. They also help the therapist understand. Evoking reactions through
experiments in mindfulness gives
us a glimpse of the inner world creating those reactions.
Without mindfulness, it’s possible nothing much would be evoked. If you said,
“You’re a good person” to a person who wasn’t in mindfulness, wasn’t focused
on her own present experience, wasn’t allowing and observing without interfering,
she might casually reply, “Well, thanks!” If you asked it as a question (“Are
you a good person?”), you might get an equally casual, emotionless answer. (“Yes,
I guess so.”) No sadness. No relief. Without mindfulness and the intention to
study oneself, the automatic, conversational mind replies and nothing very informative
happens. But, with a little bit of care and relaxed concentration, we just might
learn something very important about the inner structure of the mind. That’s
the power of mindfulness.
With permission, excerpts
from writings of Ron Kurtz
Copyrights 2007 Ron Kurtz Trainings, Inc.
