Title: | The Crucible of Your Own Experience: Reflections in Dialogue on the Foundations of Mindfulness, Its Clinical Applications, and the Importance of First-Person Experience in Science, Medicine and Psychology.
Health professionals are increasingly making use of mindfulness in different aspects of their work with people in the fields of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. This dialogue aims to inform and support health professionals utilizing mindfulness or thinking about doing so to reflect on the essence of mindfulness-based work and its origins.
We will explore the creative interface between learning from one's own personal experience in bringing mindfulness to every aspect of one's life including formal practice, and finding appropriate ways and vehicles for guiding patients and clients in the cultivation of mindfulness through a range of what are now being called mindfulness-based interventions. One of the key features of mindfulness that allows it to catalyze learning, growing, healing, and transformation across the lifespan is a willingness to turn toward rather than away from (through experiential avoidance, denial, and maladaptive coping behaviours) the actuality of what is happening in the present moment when it is frightening, unpleasant, and unwanted. In this spirit, mindfulness work invites us to make use of everything that arises in our lives, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and allow it all to cook in the crucible of first-person experience, letting everything become your teacher, and putting the lessons learned to good use in authentic and imaginative ways. |
