Hello,
And welcome to the session.
Today we're going to be exploring mindfulness through the lens of self-therapy.
The basic analogy will be this.
Your mind,
Your consciousness is the patient,
And you,
The observer,
Are the therapist.
And what you're going to do is just sit in silence and observe as your mind tells you things.
It might give you some thoughts,
Some emotions,
Some moods,
Some memories,
Some anxieties,
Some physical sensations.
And your job as the therapist is to simply give your mind the space to talk.
Give your mind the space to share and express itself.
And the way you're going to do this is by simply just observing what the mind is telling you,
Giving it space,
And then returning your focus back to the breath to allow the mind to give you the next piece of information it wants to share with you.
And remember,
Your job as a therapist isn't to fall in to the client's stories or emotionality.
They're not yours.
You can empathize with them,
You can observe them,
You can give them space,
But you're not going to get trapped by those thoughts.
You're not going to get attached to them.
You're over here,
And they're over there.
So I want you to take a calm,
Deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth,
And just settle yourself in a comfortable position.
And draw your attention to the breath,
Entering and leaving the nose,
Or your preferred meditation anchor if it's not the breath.
And what you're going to do is just give yourself a little intention here.
I'm going to observe the contents of consciousness as they arise,
But I'm going to do so whilst remaining detached.
Thoughts,
Moods,
Emotions,
Memories,
Physical sensations.
Indeed,
Anything that arises will be observed,
Accepted,
And then in their time,
Let go of.
And I'll return my focus back to my meditation object.
I'm going to do this for the rest of my day.
I'm going to do this for a couple of minutes.
The audio will go silent,
And then we'll check back in.
Let's begin.
Great work.
So how'd you go?
If you want to continue with this practice,
By all means,
Pause the audio,
Do it for a few more minutes,
And then restart the audio,
And we can continue.
I like approaching mindfulness from many different analogies,
Because it allows us to get a deeper insight into what we're actually doing here.
Because this is an internal practice,
Because I can't see what you're doing and give you corrections to make sure that you're practicing appropriately,
You have to be that person yourself.
You have to be sort of your own coach in addition to the player.
So there's a risk here that we're simply thinking with our eyes closed,
That we're quote unquote not meditating correctly.
So the way we address this is via analogy.
This analogy,
The idea of being your own therapist,
Is just one of the many analogies that I'll be using to explore mindfulness over the coming weeks here on Insight Timer.
And if it works for you,
Use it.
If it doesn't,
Discard it and try something else.
Remember our goal is to be mindful.
That is to accept,
Observe,
And understand the contents of our consciousness without judgment and without filter.
We're trying not to put labels on it.
We're trying not to judge it.
It's just like,
Hey,
This is what's appearing.
And you look at it and go,
Cool,
I'm observing that.
I'm seeing how big it is.
I'm seeing the impact it has.
I'm seeing it come and go.
I'm seeing the impact on my mind and how I want to be attached to it.
You're just observing the phenomena mindfully and then returning your focus back to the breath.
And as with everything,
If you do find yourself getting attached,
If you find yourself falling out of that therapist's role,
That's okay.
Just acknowledge that that happened and gently get back into the practice.
So with that in mind,
Have a great day.
This talk was taken from the book Mindfulness,
A guidebook to the present moment.
