In honour of Star Wars day (May the 4th be with you!), FLEX will be featuring a look at mindfulness trainings in popular culture throughout the month of May. We will start off the series with some trainings from one of the original pop-culture Mindfulness gurus, Yoda.

Named must your fear be before banish it you can. - Yoda (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980).

Many people mistakenly believe that mindfulness practice and mediation is about clearing your mind of strong emotions. This would suggest that there is some active attempt to suppress or push away these types of thoughts. Placing too much active energy towards any aspect of meditation is really the opposite goal in mindfulness and will undoubtedly lead to frustration (just another emotion to attempt to gain control over!).

Instead, mindfulness practice has a lot more to do with simply observing one's emotions as they rise and fall during a formal meditation practice or less formally when we go about our day. Being able to simply observe these emotions can be facilitated by labelling. Recognizing that something is simply a positive or nourishing thought, a negative or depleting one, or by a more specific label (e.g. a judgement thought, anger, or fear) allows us to step away from the emotional experience itself and facilitates an observer role. With no real effort, this can lead to eureka moments that can consciously guide our future behaviour (e.g. Hmm look at that. This happened and then I felt this way), may allow one to step out of a chain of strong emotions, or may simply prove to be just an interesting exercise in knowing oneself a bit better.

Join us back here in a few days with a few more wise teachings from Yoda or feel free to contact our team to discuss how Mindfulness training may also be able to help you manage strong emotions.

- Michael

Art Credit: Navdeep Raj (San Jose, CA - http://bit.ly/1ewNXSJ)

FLEX Psychology is proud to announce that Denyse Brushett, M.S.W., RSW., has recently joined our treatment team and will be offering psychotherapeutic services for individuals and groups at our Thornhill/Toronto-North office.

Denyse is a respected therapist and educator who integrates traditional western therapies with mindfulness based practices. She is available to work with adolescents and adults who may be struggling with anxiety, depression, psychosis, trauma, and gender based concerns. She also runs workshops and trainings in Mindful Parenting, Mindfulness and Adolescents and has facilitated the Mindful School curriculum with elementary and high school-aged students.

Having seen the results of Denyse’s work as both a therapist and educator, it was my pleasure to welcome her to our collaborative treatment team at FLEX Psychology. She brings years of unique experience to our office and will undoubtedly increase the wellness of our clients for years to come.

Michael Decaire, M.A., C.Psych.Assoc.
Clinical Director, FLEX Psychology

Mindfulness is about being in the moment. A great deal of the tension we experience arguably comes from when we are stuck in the past (e.g., regret; rumination) or when we are over focusing on the future (e.g., worried and overwhelmed).

One of the risks is that we do not fully let go of previous moments and we move onto the next one. Before we know it, we have chained together dozens of "moments" and the stress of each of these, which was not very big at the time, has culminated into something much larger.

We've been working with some of our clients on the idea of transitions. Examining the number of transitions once faces in a day is quite telling and allows us to recognize when a pasts moments baggage can start impacting the present. Brief meditations and body scans can help to transition into awareness in the morning and into rest when we go to sleep.

Throughout the day, shorter mindful "moments" may be of benefit as we take a few breaths as we move from one task or activity to the next. Consider focusing on your breath for a few moments and simply counting when you have completed each inhale and exhale without having your mind wander. Try to make it to three without losing your focus and ruminating on the past or worry about the future. If you do not make it to three, start over. Do not judge yourself, even I have trouble getting to three every so often.

This little activity can help you come to new tasks and new interactions with fresh eyes and your full focused attention. Why not try it between job tasks or before lunch.

Coming from school or the office can be one of the biggest transitions in our day. Bringing the days baggage home can harm our self-worth, our relationships, and may derail us from getting things done that we need to do (e.g., homework or housework). Below, I've included a guided meditation to walk you through a small lesson and practice in being in the moment and transitioning well.

A very enlightened 17 year old once shared with me a metaphor that he felt described his sources of tensions (I'm paraphrasing as I did not anticipate the enlightened moment he was about to share with me):

"I have spent much of my adolescence sitting on a bus, either looking out the back window ruminating about where I have been or out the front window worrying about where I'm going. Mindfulness meditation has taught me to look out the side of the bus and simply experience where I am now."

The more you get into the concept of mindfulness the more that metaphor will really mean to you. I do not know if he came to that thought himself or if someone had shared it with him, but it is a remarkable statement none the less and really captures how failing to be in the current moment in time means we are often being driven by tension or stress about the future or suffering regarding to the past.

Below is a brief 5 to 6 minute breathing and focusing meditation intended to take you out of the past/present and into the moment. After you've tried this, why not try moving onto something you want to get done, by working on it one step (or present moment) at a time, moving forward by simply acting in the moment.

Mindful.org is a non-profit online resource for the mindfulness community. It is a secular resource that includes a number of fantastic and brief reports relating to how individual's can incorporate mindfulness into their life in different ways. While I was aware of the website, I was unaware that they had launched a traditional paper magazine.

Now in it's second issue, "Mindful" is a reasonably priced magazine examining how the practice of pausing (through meditation or other means) and then acting in a manner that facilitates the ability to fully leveraging your brain in a focused and strategic fashion can impact peoples lives in a multitude of ways. The magazine is like Psychology Today without all the flash and noise (which is a very mindful way to present itself). If you are interested in how to incorporate mindfulness into your life it is worth a read. Subscriptions are available in print here and for iPad here. 

Almost everyone I assess complains of having a bad memory. While legitimate impairments in acquisition of memory (more of an information processing deficit) and retention (that's pretty rare actually) exist, clients are rarely complaining about forgetting something from the past. Generally people forget and get in trouble for failing to remember to do things in the future. Essentially we are talking about forgetting to not forget to do something. It is as much an mechanism of attention and is referred to as a prospective memory failure.

Wired Magazine had a nice little brief on this (click here) and talked about the use of "geolocation" reminders to prevent you from making these errors. Maybe now you won't forget the milk.

Mindfulness meditation, relaxation therapy, and even some martial arts begin and end with taking a controlled, slow, and deep breath. What's the big deal?

There is a long list of research regarding what the breath does for the body (beyond just allowing us to exist). Of therapeutic interest are the links that breath has with many aspects of our physiological stress response system. When we get stressed out we become increasingly driven by our "fight or flight" system which is driven by our sympathetic nervous system. This response increases our blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate in order to protect us from threat.

This was a pretty useful evolutionary construct when we were dodging lions and other large meat eaters tens of thousands of years ago. These days the system is rarely that helpful and, even in times of threat, a system that we can control will usually lead to a better outcome (the US military is doing some really cool experiments hacking into this system through breath and meditation).

While we may not necessarily be able to bypass the sympathetic nervous system immediately, we can learn to take control of these systems fairly quickly and somewhat unconsciously through practice. One of the key aspects of this is breathing. Slow and deep breaths have been shown to stimulate an opposing "para"sympathetic nervous system reaction. This is the one that calms us down.

Think of the sympathetic system as the gas pedal where we decide to race away or crash into a threat at high speed. The parasympathetic system is the breaks where we slow down for a second and act in a smart way to solve our problems.

Essentially, when we are being driven by our sympathetic system we are functioning at a pretty basic and not especially strategic part of our brain (the amygdala to be more precise). This system derails our ability to self-direct ourselves and usually means we act on instinct. If we can bypass that system we can leverage our more evolutionary advanced frontal lobes. This part of our brain allows us to better inhibit our instincts and move forward in a smart and self-directed way.

Another example, ever gotten into an argument or fight with someone and said something you did not mean that did not resolve your issue at all and perhaps made things even worse for you? Have you walked away, calmed down, and realized how you could of  approached the situation differently and better conveyed your thoughts?

That first system is the sympathetic the second is the parasympathetic, which we can give a boost too by taking a second to breath slowly and deeply. So take some old advice. Relax a bit and take a deep breath. Then decide what to do.

Need some help playing inside your brain and nervous system? We can help you think FLEXibly. Give us a call.