Lesson 1: Safely Practicing Mindfulness
In this first lesson, we start with discussing how mindfulness can be applied in a safe way, leading to a improvement rather than a reduction of your participants’ well-being. We discuss four key ingredients of safe mindfulness practice.
- Know your participants
Knowing who will participate in your program is very important. It will not only help you to tailor your program to needs of your audience, it will also prevent you from including people in your training that you are not allowed to work with.
Although mindfulness has been associated with many positive effects, research also shows that mindfulness practice may have negative effects on well-being, especially for people with a clinical background. For people who have active symptoms of certain psychiatric conditions, it may make the symptoms worse or be unhelpful. This would include active psychosis, suicidal thoughts and feelings, high levels of unprocessed trauma, extreme anxiety and PTSD symptoms.
For instance, people with unresolved trauma, who have experienced painful events in their lives that were too difficult to fully let into awareness at the time,can become overwhelmed with the rush of previously blocked material that comes into awareness when practicing mindfulness.
For this reason, you should always have an intake meeting with participants to ensure that their current situation matches your personal level of expertise. If you are not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, you should not include participants with a clinical background. By doing so, you may worsen their situation.
To ensure you have sufficient knowledge on your participant’s background, we created an intake form for you that you can download in the downloads section of the website.
- A Clinical Expert as Backup
If you are delivering a mindfulness training program, we strongly advice you to contact a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist that can act as a back-up for difficult situations. Even when you carefully screen participants before admitting them to your training, participants may encounter serious problems like panic attacks or dissociation during the training that require expert treatment. In these cases, it is important to be able to send them to a skilled professional that can help them.
- Practice what you preach
In the first place, competent mindfulness teaching means that the practitioner has extensive meditation experience himself. You cannot effectively teach what you have not experienced yourself. Therefore, before teaching mindfulness, practice mindfulness extensively. Experience what it is like to meditate and to allow emotions to be present. Become aware of both the challenges and benefits of mindfulness practice. Otherwise, it is difficult to effectively guide participants and connect with their personal experiences.
- Use high quality instructions
The effects of mindfulness are strongly determined by the quality of the instructions. Make sure to instructparticipants in a way that does not create false expectancies about mindfulness:
-Mindfulness is not intended to be a blissful experience. The goal of mindfulness practice is not to eliminate negative experiences or think positively. It is important that participants understand that mindfulness practice may in fact intensify negative or unpleasant experiences. In fact, mindfulness is about learning to recognise, allow and be with all of our experiences, whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, so that we can begin to exercise choices and responsiveness in our lives.
-mindfulness is not a quick fix. In order for mindfulness to be effective, extensive practice is required
-mindfulness is not the only way to reduce stress or increase wellbeing, nor is it right for everyone. People should choose an approach that matches their interests and needs, whether it be mindfulness, physical exercise, cognitive-behavioural therapy or some other approach.
-striving to become “more mindful” is likely to create lower levels of mindfulness, because it involves a future mindset, aimed at achieving something that is not here yet. Mindfulness means connecting with the here and now and letting go of striving.