Mindfulness-Based Therapy
Mindfulness-based therapy draws on the practice of paying attention to present-moment experience with care, curiosity, and a particular quality of attention that is closer to allowing than to evaluating. The practice has a long history that long predates clinical psychology, with roots in Buddhist traditions, contemplative practice across many traditions, and indigenous wisdom about presence, awareness, and the cultivation of attention.
The contemporary clinical conversation about mindfulness has often borrowed from these traditions without fully acknowledging where the practices come from. At MLC, we treat mindfulness as part of older, deeper, often non-Western traditions that have been doing this work for thousands of years.
The clinical research on mindfulness, while imperfect and culturally specific in its design, does indicate that consistent practice can support a range of important capacities, including reduced reactivity, improved emotional regulation, better sleep, reduced rumination, and an increased capacity to be present with difficult experience without being consumed by it.
What is happening underneath these effects is something like this: a great deal of our suffering comes not directly from what happens to us, but from the layers of reaction, interpretation, anticipation, and resistance we add on top of the original experience. The original moment is often manageable. The layers of mental activity built on top of it often are not. Mindfulness practice slowly helps us notice the layers, recognize them as additions, and develop a different relationship to them.
This is not about being calm. Mindfulness practice does not require you to feel a particular way. It is about being present to whatever is actually happening, including agitation, rage, grief, restlessness, or boredom.
Mainstream mindfulness has often been packaged in ways that strip the practice of its context and reduce it to a stress management technique for productivity. However, mindfulness, in its deeper traditions, was never primarily about feeling better. It was about waking up to the nature of experience, developing the capacity for experiences, and participating in larger contexts of community.
We also hold honestly that mindfulness is not a substitute for working with conditions that should not be tolerated. The work of being present with what is can be misused to encourage acceptance of what should be changed. We do not use mindfulness this way.
What this work can look like at MLC:
- Drawing on mindfulness practices that fit your particular life, drawn from traditions you have a relationship with where possible
- Cultivating the capacity to notice what is happening internally, including thoughts, emotions, sensations, and patterns, with less reactivity
- Working with the way your nervous system responds to particular kinds of activation, building the capacity to stay present when staying present is what is needed
- Using mindfulness to support trauma work, parts work, and somatic work, where the capacity to be with what is arising is foundational
- Integrating mindfulness with movement, breath, and embodied practice rather than treating it only as a cognitive exercise
- Honoring the contemplative traditions that this work is drawn from, including supporting your own connection to your tradition of origin or to traditions you have built relationship with through practice and study
The therapists at MLC who integrate mindfulness do so with respect for its origins, attention to its limits, and care for the way it is held in relationship to other approaches.
What mindfulness offers, at its best, is a different way of being in your own experience. Not a better one, in the sense of being calmer or more productive. A truer one, in the sense of being more present to what is actually happening in your one life. We are honored to support that work.
