mindfulness: why is works, even when you don’t know why it works!

I was recently talking with a colleague about mindfulness. My colleague works for an agency that specialises in delivering a service for those folks who have learning difficulties-sometimes this is known as intellectual or cognitive disability. The agency had just finished delivering an 8-week mindfulness course and the results were very pleasing; a significant amount of the participants reported feeling calmer and more self-compassionate, more grounded than they ever have been before. The participant’s size was quite small, so we might be better to consider any thinking around this to be tentative at best, yet it might allow us to consider why mindfulness works, even when-as a participant-you don’t know why it might work, since this was the feedback given in a number of cases.

It might be useful to begin by reflecting on why psychological or talk therapy works. The classic (but not the only) model is the client/therapist model that’s been around for over a hundred years: the client talks to the therapist and the therapist listens, and (depending on their approach) might offer reflective feedback with empathy that allows the client to process at depth what they are thinking about. But what happens when the client is not “psychologically minded” as this was called in an agency where I worked? Usually they are referred onto another service, and there is a covert sense that not to be psychologically minded, or in some way cognitively impaired, lessens the chance for healing.

Yet, in mindfulness there might be something else happening.

What we know in mindfulness is that there are three stages:

1. Recognising and settling unsettled mind
2. Self-acceptance and self-compassion
3. Embodiment

What we begin to realise after (sometimes after prolonged practice) is that our thinking mind with all of its categorising and analysis often gets in the way: we are so busy thinking, thinking, thinking that effectively we can’t see the wood for the trees. So, it is crucial in our practice to let the thinking mind settle (sort of, go off duty) and reach past it.

One the best supports for this is the breath and the body: simple breathing; say allowing the breath to breathe in to the count of 4 and then out again creates a small miracle, where we activate (without sometimes knowing it) our parasympathetic nervous system and relax, the relaxation allows us to both meet our experience in a calmer and kinder manner (self-compassion) which in turn promotes greater openness and allows us to drop down into our bodies, getting a felt sense of our experiencing, reaching the “true you” that is a living, breathing, embodied self.

Probably one the most extensive writings on just this can be found in Reginald Ray’s book “Touching Enlightenment”.

This might explain why mindfulness works, even when you don’t know why it works: it’s actually not about “knowing why” it is, in truth a kind of limbic resonance which at best cuts through the thinking and gets straight to the core of luminous selfhood: our embodiment.

What do you think?

What do you feel?

What do you sense?