Liana Taylor Buddha in the Boardroom — 2008-11-07

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. Liana Taylor brings Buddhist teachings on mindfulness into dialogue with contemporary psychology in this 110-minute interactive talk. Starting with the three marks of existence—suffering, impermanence, and interdependence—and the four noble truths, she moves to how modern Western psychology has adapted mindfulness practices for clinical and organizational settings. She guides the audience through a meditation exercise that moves sequentially through sound, breath awareness, and body sensation, then introduces four major mindfulness-based therapeutic models: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s for chronic pain); mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT, adapted for recurrent depression); acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, which uses cognitive frameworks and values-based exercises); and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT, designed for suicidal behavior and borderline personality disorder). Throughout, she emphasizes that mindfulness in Buddhist practice differs from how psychology uses it—Buddhism seeks deep absorption states and insight, while therapeutic mindfulness trains pragmatic awareness of thought patterns and emotional reactivity. The talk is pitched at professionals and those new to both meditation and psychology.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2008 11 07 Buddha in the Boardroom 07-11-08.mp3

UUID: b57521b7-144d-416c-b8da-e0ce00b6156a

Teacher: Liana Taylor

Collection: Liana Taylor Buddha in the Boardroom (Liana Taylor)

Date: 2008-11-07

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~15,520

Lindsay. Welcome everyone. There are a lot of familiar faces here so it’s nice to see you and a few new faces so that’s nice too. And some of my nearest and dearest are here too. So that’s good.

There was something I wanted to start with. Some of you who know me will know what’s gonna happen now, and the others who don’t, just very gently put up your right hand. Everybody, up. Reach out very gently to someone near you. Tap them gently and say, could you just make sure that your mobile phone is turned off?

This evening’s talk is about or talk interactive conversation that we’re going to have is about mindfulness approaches used in psychology and how psychology has adapted some of the mindfulness approaches. Before we start that tonight I’d like for us to start to get a sense of who is here so who what sort of kind of background we’re from and things like that. So the first thing I want you to do is choose one person you don’t know, if there is anybody in the room you don’t know, introduce yourself to them by name, talk with them about how it is that you found out about this evening and what is it that made you come to this evening’s talk? And you’ve got about four minutes for the both of you to talk. So find someone now.

If you’re odd in numbers, find a threesome and to talk more quickly or say less. You don’t know, so you might need to get up. And just bring your attention back into the room. And I hello. I would have liked to have said to you, didn’t need to share any of that, so you could be as honest as you felt like being honest in your little peers.

And as we go through the the evening, I’ll let you know when I’m gonna expect you to share something so you can make choices about what you do and don’t say at any given time. The next thing I’d like to do is start to get a sense of where you all are in terms of your understanding of Buddhism or your experience of Buddhism, meditation, psychotherapy, coaching, whatever else to whatever degree. Now I want you to know that there’s no right or wrong here. I also want you to know the thought police aren’t gonna be here, so nobody’s gonna be checking you out if you tell the truth or if you don’t tell the truth. So you can kind of say what you want, really.

And I just want to say that by way of not generating any kind of nervousness about where you place yourself in this story. So you can do what you like. You may want to be helpful in terms of understanding, or you may just make some other choices, and all that’s okay because nobody’s gonna say anything. What I’d like to do first, especially when I find my notes and remember, is to get everybody to stand up in a moment, not just yet, but in a moment. And I want all the people to stand over that side of the room who are working with other people in kind of organisational or coaching type contexts.

Contexts where it’s an active part of their work to do the work with other people and to facilitate other people’s development and growth. So in a moment, not just you, you’ll be standing over there. Yeah. You may be alone or you may be with a bunch of people. I don’t know yet.

And you can choose to go where you want. Then I want the people to come out here in the center who whose whose work in the world or who are not working in the world is not in any way specifically related to the development of other people. So you be working with other people and by chance what you do affects the development of other people but it’s not specifically about that. Your people are in the center and over that side I want all of the people who are involved in therapy, counseling, the kind of more healing professions. Now I totally understand that some of you will belong to all three all at once and some of you might not belong anywhere, but I can’t figure all that out in detail.

So you just choose where you want to be. So everybody up now and start moving over there. The people who are coaches and working in organisational contexts without facilitating growth but not so much counselling. The counsellors, the therapists, the healing types and everybody else kind of here. Remember to put yourself where you want.

Okay so as a clinical psychologist it’s relatively unusual for me to be working with a group where that is the smallest group. Quite refreshing in some ways isn’t it? It says something nice about the world. Nice that you’re here but also nice that everybody else is here. That’s really cool.

Okay so for those of you around the room these are terms that some of you will know and many of you won’t. If you don’t know the terms just move to that side or if you know the terms but have never had any involvement or reading with ACT which is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy just go to that side of the room. If haven’t had anything to do with ACT and you don’t know what it is or you haven’t done any reading. If you’ve done a lot of training in act and you’re really skillful act practitioner, stand on that side. And if you’ve had some reading, some more reading, some more working, or you’re just fundamentally very confident, somewhere in here.

Those of you who don’t know anything about ACT this will be explained later I’m just trying to get a sense of who the group is so I know what I’m saying to everybody. ACT is acceptance and commitment therapy. It uses as the foundation for the therapeutic model mindfulness so that’s why we’re talking about it tonight. Okay. So what about mindfulness based stress reduction otherwise known as MBSR?

Same story. If you’ve done some training in it and you’re a skillful practitioner in MBSR, stand over that side of the room. If you don’t even know what it is, never heard of it, or have heard of it but haven’t done any reading or anything about it, stand stand over this side and then everybody else find yourself through the way. MBSR, mindfulness based stress reduction. Can I ask a question?

Your diagnostic programming covers so much but they use different language in. It’s a different kind of They’re using a different model. MBSR is a very specific model and so I act so yeah thank you. Does reading count? Reading puts you somewhere in this sphere.

Okay so nobody’s done the full on MBSR training and is a practitioner. Mindfulness based cognitive therapy which is the next development on from MBSR. Those of you who have are well trained in MBCT over that side. Those who have done some training just in from the edge. Those who have done some reading or some workshops in here, and those who don’t know what on earth I’m talking about or do know what I’m talking about and wish I’d get on to tell you what it is, stand on that side of the room.

Oh, so there’s not a lot of change. Okay. And what about DBT? DBT stands for? What were you thinking?

I was asked to set up a meeting for a group of people performing it. DBT group. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. With a name like that, you know, you’d have to be in a highly functional state to remember the name and I have to have a computer in front of me to remember how to spell. Okay, so not many people have done much in DBT.

That’s that’s the kind of least. And that’s probably the most it’s the most what’s the word? Narrowly specified in terms of who who it works with. Okay. So we’ve got some good understanding there.

Thank you. Now before you sit down, what I’d like to do is ask you in terms of Buddhism. Those of you who have been engaged actively in some way or another, you know, as we do sort of really engage for three weeks and forget it for three weeks and then back, whatever. And for sort of ten years or more engaged somehow or other in Buddhism on that side of the room. Those who have never read a Buddhist book, don’t know anything about Buddhism, and are just interestingly here on that side of the room, and everybody else somewhere in between.

Part where body isn’t it? So I’m not over here. You’re not alone, Nanette. Thank you. You might be next time, but not this time.

Okay, and there some people over that side. And what about meditation? Now, of course, meditation’s a word that has been around for a long time in Anglo Saxon culture in in English usage, and it has meant different things at different times. And the meaning of that keeps changing. Here we are in Buddhist house, and I’m talking in a series called Buddha in the Boardroom.

So obviously, I’ve got a bit of a flavor of the kind of Buddhist sense of how the word meditation is used. Nonetheless, in terms of what I’m meaning just now by meditation, those of you who have in any tradition or form practiced meditation in any kind of, you know, thought about it, constructive, consciously chosen kind of way at different times in your life for for a period of, you know, five years or more. Can you stand on that side of the room? And those who have never done any kind of meditation at all on that side of the room and everybody else somewhere in the middle. How interesting.

Isn’t that great? I mean, it may not be great for you because you’re in the middle of it all, but I’m kinda watching the shifts and changes. Those that have never looked at Buddhism but done quite a lot of meditation, those that have done a lot of meditation but don’t know about some of the other traditions. Interesting mixes. Okay.

That’s great. I’m really pleased to see it. Go back to seats. Seat are we about to go? Any seat you like.

So I’ll start to explain all this writing on the board in a minute. So you don’t need I’m sure some of you will be rushing to read it, but you don’t need to rush through to read it because we’ll be going through it quite slowly in the process. Tonight’s talk is about how mindfulness and specifically mindfulness from the Buddhist tradition. Mindfulness doesn’t only come from the Buddhist tradition. What’s more, it’s a word that’s used commonly in our language these days, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the same as what a Buddhist might mean by mindfulness.

What’s more different? Buddhists mean different things or at least seem like they do. So tonight’s talk is about how we use mindfulness in and how psychology has adopted mindfulness. And oftentimes I’ll do this talk to a lot of therapists. So I’ll start with therapy and then look at why therapy got to a place that they wanted to or psychology for that matter wanted to bring mindfulness in.

But my heart is much more with starting with what matters to me which is where mindfulness comes from and how then we adopted that into psychology initially in the kind of healing aspects of psychology and then eventually to organizational and coaching aspects and things like that in psychology. So some of this is a repeat little bit little bits you’ll recognize those of you here in the last couple of weeks. We start out with Buddhism. Three marks of existence in Buddhism are that suffering exists. Suffering is just, you know, like all of the words, there’s translations from the traditional texts.

So, essentially, it means dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction of all kind ranging from, oh, you know, I’ve got a hair in my tooth to, oh my gosh, you know, my best friend’s just had a car smash. So, you know, dissatisfaction exists in the world. It’s one of the marks of existence. Impermanence. Nothing exists for everything forever.

I live. I die. My hearer’s this color. It’ll change. It’s this long.

It’ll change. My kid’s alive, she’ll die one day. This room is here, it’ll be gone one day. You know, this paper’s here, it might be lost tomorrow. Impermanence, everything is impermanent.

So that kind of recognition. And the third one is no self, which I explained the other week that in my simplified understanding of no self, that nothing exists in its own right independently of everything else. So I exist in the way that I am right now because of all the conditions that came before, and I’ll exist how I am in five minutes time because of all the conditions that came before that. I will never exist. No emotion I have, no feeling I have, no bodily experience I have, no thought, or any of you will exist independent of the conditions that came before it.

Okay? So nothing exists independently in its own right. So everything is interdependent. Now in terms of looking at psychology and the people who work using Buddhist tools and psychologists, many psychologists, myself included, use these three marks of existence, some basic kind of reality checks for people. We may or may not talk about them in terms of this is Buddhism, but we certainly might sit talking with people about things like dissatisfaction exists.

If we’re going through life hoping that every moment of life is one hundred percent happy, we’re kind of looking in a deluded way at the world because one hundred percent of life is not happy. Things change and there is loss, there is sadness, there is pain, there is suffering. Just even starting to get a handle on that concept that suffering exists is a really useful concept to bring into any psychological endeavour both with an individual and with an organisation and with cultural groups. Things change. There is suffering.

There is suffering. Things change, and that none of these things exist in their own right. Obama didn’t get voted in just because of Obama. He got voted in because of a whole lot of conditions that came before it. So these three marks of existence of Buddhism are some of the just even those concepts are useful in any kind of endeavor with other people.

The next thing, as I said last week, we were talking about no. A week before, we were talking about the four noble truths. Four noble truths are the basic teachings of Buddhism. Many of you here already know that. Basic the four noble truths, basic truths.

First is that there is suffering. Same as one of the marks of existence. Second is that there are causes for suffering. Third is there is freedom from suffering. And the fourth is the Noble Eightfold Path is the how manual for to gain your freedom from the causes of suffering.

Okay? Feel free to put up your hand if there’s anything you wanna ask along the way. When we look at the causes of suffering, and we were talking about this week when I gave a talk about Taming Self Doubt and Other Fictions of the Mind, that we look at three common responses we have to experience. We have attachment that we wanted. We have aversion, and we don’t like that.

Get away from it. Let’s drink. Let’s go do something else. Let’s ignore it. You know?

And we have delusion. Let’s just not see things as they are, or we’re not able to see things as they are. So these are seen as the three causes of suffering. I also talked last week a little bit about most people have tendencies. Most of us have personality tendencies.

Of course, knowing our tendencies is really useful because that’s where all our strengths come from. That’s where our skills come from. It’s also where some of our difficulties in life come from and in terms of Buddhist theory that some personalities have more of a tendency towards these than others. Person with this kind of tendency will look at something and move toward it. So if it’s something they like they’ll tend to move toward it.

If it’s something they don’t like they’ll still tend to move toward it. I don’t know if any of you in the room know those kinds of people, you are yourself or you know those kinds of people, who when there’s something really great that is out there in front of them, they go charging for it all kind of excitement and blazing ahead. Do know people like that? Some of you. They’re those same people.

When there’s a difficulty ahead they’ll also go charging toward that to see that they can sort it. Yeah. So it’s just a movement toward. There’s real value and strength in those qualities and there are also some limitations to those qualities which are kind of obvious that sometimes you move towards something before you even know what you’re going to be coming across. Sometimes you can be so enthusiastic about it you don’t actually get to see the problems that might arise.

Sometimes you can get so attached to an idea that there’s a lot of loss when you lose it and there’s a lot of trying to avoid loss in that process. Aversion this as a general tendency I don’t know if you or any of the people you know, have that tendency when something comes up in front of them that they kind of step back and look. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s something wonderful and exciting and possible or whether it’s a drama, but there’s a slight step back and have a look. Any of you know anybody like that? Yeah.

Some of you know people like that? Okay. So there’s the tendency there. Now the value of that is they get to sit back and pay a bit more attention to what what the possibilities are in front of them before they enter into something. The disadvantage is sometimes they miss out on doing things and sometimes they’re slow and and unnecessarily cautious.

The third type. These are the people that tend to see and you may know somebody like this tends to see something in front of them and stand there and think, oh shit, shall I do this? Shall I do that? If I did this, this would happen, but if I did that, that would happen, but maybe I’ll do this and maybe I’ll do that. Oh, I don’t know what to do.

Does anybody know anybody like that? Okay so these are some of the natural tendencies that we see in personality style. When I’m working with people I use many personality typologies but having this this is very basic kind of view of things and it doesn’t cover all situations and I don’t want to encourage any of you to box yourselves but to notice your own tendencies I’m definitely this one and a bit you know not so much these days because you know health and life have taken their toll but certainly you know I was foolish enough when I was traipsing around Asia when I was in my early thirties with my ten year old. I mean, was great traipsing around Asia with a ten year old for six months. It was a great experience for her.

But, certainly, when I was in Java and knew that there was a a volcano that I could climb up early in the wee hours in the morning and see the sunrise and the volcano, I’m like, yay. What a cool thing to do. You know? Go off, stay with all the other backpackers from around the world. You know?

Get up at two o’clock in the morning. Start walking at three o’clock in the morning. Right up to across the Cal dera right up to the top looking down. This is just so cool. Really love this.

You know? I want to go climbing down inside. I mean, it’s bubbling sulfur. I want to go climbing down inside because I’m a bit like this, but somehow rather the fact that I’ve got a ten year old with me and I somehow don’t think it’s safe for her, I resist the temptation to go climbing down inside, which turns out to be extremely lucky because in that whole process, I’d forgotten about the fact that I’m asthmatic and I’m allergic to sulfur and this thing’s spewing sulfur. Now, you know, only a person who is kind of, oh, what a cool thing to do, could possibly just seem to forget that they’re allergic to sulfur and they might in fact bring on asthma attack.

And so whilst I chose not to walk down the path because I couldn’t walk down inside, I decided to walk down the side of the, you know, the the actual fallings out of the of the volcano. So I spent three hours climbing down the side with a French friend of mine kind of looking around very concerned, and I had a very great time. But, of course, by the time I was halfway back across the calderas looking for some Ventolin. Anyway, just one story of a person with a personality like this. Sorry.

I I might be a bit of a this these these models, are they just simply models that sort of I mean, the first of all, obviously, from Buddhism. Yep. Is this one a Buddhist model that you’ve kind of put on? Is it similar to one of those DBT No. No.

No. It’s a straight out of Buddhism. Some people will interpret this differently, but certainly this is straight out of my teacher’s teaching. So in Buddhism, when you look at the four noble truths, the second noble truth is there are causes of suffering. The three causes of suffering are attachment, aversion, and delusion.

And within the Buddhist teachings, it talks about there are personality types that move more towards this, more towards this, and more towards that. So I’m kinda talking about it in lay terms, but that’s straight out of the Buddhist teachings. Does that answer your question? Yep. Okay.

So, again, it’s another it’s a it’s a small way that I talk about the Buddhist teachings in when I’m working with people and the tendencies of some individuals to do this and some organisations have habits of doing these things. It’s fine to have those tendencies. The task is to have enough awareness of what are the advantages of those tendencies and what are likely to be the fallout of those tendencies. Can I just check? Is there any air movement in here?

Can we have I mean, I’m not hot or cold. It’s just still are other people finding this? Yeah. Right on the side here. Yeah.

There’s breeze. Oh, there’s breeze. Oh, there’s breeze breeze coming from the window. Pity about the noise, thanks, Jampa. K.

So when we go back to the four noble truths, these are the three aspects, the causes of suffering. The fourth noble truth, the noble eightfold path, which is the how to excuse me. This is the how to manual, how in my view, how to have a good life. Yeah? The noble eightfold path, which I’ve written here, these are the eight aspects.

One two three four five six seven eight eight. I’ve missed something. Oh, where is it? One two three four five six seven. Can you see what I’ve missed?

Livelihood? Action. Action. Where’s my text? Something I haven’t done quite right there, but, anyway, check that later.

So these are the these are the eight aspects of PATH. And these eight aspects of PATH, these are the kind of eight aspects of your life that you need to pay attention to in order to live a skillful, joyful, happy, useful life. These eight aspects of PATH are divided into three higher enlightenment trainings. The higher enlightenment trainings are discipline, ethics and wisdom. And we mentioned this in the first week when we were talking about the getting of wisdom and cultivating disciplines that cultivate the possibility for more wisdom.

And in the Buddhist tradition, in these three areas, these are the aspects of path that we move toward. Now all all traditions of Buddhism, all these all these things are, you know, part of the standard teachings in Buddhism. In Tibetan Buddhism, they also have the fourth higher enlightenment training, which is Tantra. And Tantra is about weaving. Weave it’s a bit interesting.

I’ve had my own teaching but here am I in a Tibetan Buddhist Centre and they’ll have different ways of teaching this no doubt but anyway. Tantra is the weaving of the thread and so tantra is the practice they’re practices that support the weaving of the threads of all of these together. And so it’s how do you not only work with each individually, but work them together. And so there are whole lot of meditation practices that support that. I understand that in the West, tantra has kind of been taken taken on as some sort of titillating sexual activity absolutely but actually you know you’ve only got to be mindful in sex and sex is a whole lot better than when you’re mindless so you’ve only got be mindful in anything and it’s a whole lot richer than when you’re not so you don’t need tantra for that for that to be obvious.

But, anyway, we won’t talk about we won’t be talking about tantra tonight. So mindfulness mindfulness and concentration are two dominant forms of meditation we use in Buddhism. All of these others are about developing ethics in the world and about developing wisdom, about having the right intention, having the right view. Right view includes seeing all these things clearly. Right mindfulness and right concentration.

Right mindfulness is what we’re talking about tonight. Right concentration. These are both forms of meditation. When I teach people about meditation, oftentimes they’ll think of meditation as that state of nirvana or that state of nothingness or I don’t know what are some of the other things that those of you who either don’t meditate or when you first started meditating, what did you think meditation was gonna be? Relaxation.

Relaxation. Yep. Switching off. Switching off. Yep.

Going blank. Blissing out. Blissing out. Yep. They were the kind of standard things you thought of of meditation.

Now one of the things that interests me about meditation is that a lot of those things happen as a result of meditation. Like, you might become relaxed because of meditating. But in the Buddhist tradition, becoming relaxed is not the purpose of meditating. It’s not necessarily what you’re aiming for. It may result, but it may not, because meditation is about being more aware.

Sometimes what you become aware of isn’t that pleasant or is surprising or shocking or scary or interesting. And so that’s not always relaxing and doesn’t always let you bliss out. When we look at these two different types of meditation, concentrated meditation is what we use to concentrate our mind. So we use an object to concentrate our mind on. And there are fundamentally six different types of objects.

I mean, are many, many types objects, but you could look at them in six different categories. The first one being breathing. So focus either on your breath, just the movement of the breath in your body, or you work with the movement of the breath in your body. So let’s just for a moment go into meditation, and we’ll we’ll try a few of these out. So if you could take a a sitting position for meditation, those of you who prefer to sit on the floor, then do.

If you’re in a chair, sit upright. So you signify to your body that you’re sitting in a dignified position wanting to meditate. If you’re in a chair, make sure your backside is well back in the chair so that your pelvis is tilt just a little bit forward and that your spine is upright so that your sit bones are supporting your spine. Right. Just shake your hands from side to side if you’re not used to meditating especially because when people meditate, sometimes they try and get a very cool posture and absolutely strain their shoulders in the whole process.

So unless you wanna spend your whole meditation watching all the pain that you’re creating in your body, relax your shoulders. Let your hands do this. Move them at the elbows and just flop them in the lap wherever they sit. And wherever they sit is where they sit. K?

So rock your body from side to side. It’s just making contact with your body and loosening up your body, allowing those movements to get smaller and smaller until your body finds its own balance point. Rock your head from side to side. Only do that which is okay for your body, by the way, allowing those movements to get smaller and smaller until it too finds its own balance point. Tuck your chin in ever so slightly so the back of your neck is open.

Rest your tongue and your jaw. Relax your shoulders. Relax your belly. And open up to all the sounds around you, listening to sound just as sound. Listening to the sounds in the room.

Listening to the sounds outside. Listening out as far as you can. Just listening to sound as sound. Allowing yourself to rest in the sensation of sound as if you’re resting in a huge sphere of sound that gently surrounds and supports you, nourishing you. And now come into an awareness of the breath as it comes into the body through the nostrils of the mouth.

Just noticing slightly cooler breath in and slightly warmer breath out. If thoughts arise as they do, just notice them. Let them go and bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath through your nose or your mouth. On the next breath in, notice the movement of the chest with each breath in and each breath out. Noticing the rise of the chest with each breath in and the fall of the chest with each breath out.

Nothing else to do right now. Just noticing the movement of the breath in your chest. Noticing the movement of the sides of your ribs with each breath in and each breath out. If thoughts arise as they naturally naturally do, that’s what minds do. Just notice them and very gently bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath in your chest and the sides of your ribs.

And now moving your awareness to your belly, noticing the rise and the fall of your belly with each breath in and each breath out. If thoughts arise, just notice them. Let them go, and bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath in your belly. And letting go of the awareness awareness of the breath. Come into noticing any of the sensations you can notice in your head and your face.

Noticing any tingling, any tension, places of warmth or coolness, any other sensations that you’re aware of, Your whole face and your head. Nothing to change. Nothing to fix. Just noticing the sensations that are there. Bring your awareness down through your neck and into your shoulders.

And then down both arms all the way from the top of the arm, down through the elbows, the wrist, the hands, and the fingers. Just noticing any of the sensations that are there. Places of comfort, places of discomfort, places where you don’t notice anything at all. Letting go of the awareness of the arms and bringing the awareness right back up to the shoulders and then down through the chest and the upper back, the whole rib cage, lungs, heart region. Just noticing whatever sensations you’re aware of and also the places you’re unaware of anything.

If you notice your mind being agitated or thoughts coming, just notice that that’s what your mind is doing and gently bring your awareness back to the sensation upper body. Taking your awareness down through your waist to your lower back. So you’ve covered the whole length of your spine, to your hips and your pelvis. And then down through both legs, just noticing the sensations all the way from the top of the legs, down through the knees, calves, ankles, feet, Just noticing. Nothing else to do right now.

Just being present with the meditation. Letting go of the awareness of your legs and just resting your awareness in your whole body, noticing any places of particular discomfort or tension. And as long as it’s comfortable for you, resting your awareness in a place of discomfort or tension. Just noticing whether there’s heat or cold. With a sense of movement or stillness, A sense of tightness or solidness, spaciousness or looseness.

Noticing whether the sensation stays the same or whether it changes. And then on the next breath in, imagine following the breath down into that area of discomfort as if you’re breathing in nourishing breath into that area. And as you breathe out, just imagine breathing out of your body through that area in whatever way your imagination imagines this. So breathing in all the way down to the area of discomfort and then breathing out through that area of discomfort. And then letting go of your awareness of that area, coming back to your awareness of the movement of the breath in through your mouth or nostrils and out again, noticing the cooler breath in and the warmer breath out.

Out. Becoming aware again of the sounds around you, the sounds in the room and the sounds outside. Becoming aware of your hands and your lap and your backsides on the floor, on the chairs, and your feet on the floor. And as you’re ready, allow yourself to come out of the meditation and your eyes to open. You might like to stretch.

And I’d like you to find someone in the room to talk to about what that experience was like. And regard you may have liked it, you may have not liked it, you may have felt confused, you may have nodded off, you may have had a lot of pain whatever your experience was was just fine. Your mind might have been racing with well for goodness sake will you hurry up and get over this or please don’t end please don’t end I don’t it doesn’t matter what your experience was. It was your experience. So choose someone in the room, preferably someone you don’t know very well.

So it means moving, getting up now, and finding someone. And you’ve got about six minutes to talk with them about what you remember of that experience. Whatever you remember. Off you go. Everybody up and move.

Moving. Moving. Go. You’ve got about six minutes, and I’ll let you know halfway through. And as you’re ready, just wind up that conversation and come back into the large group.

And so very, very briefly, what were some of the experiences you had during that meditation? Sounds good, you two. Meditating for a long time, and I was just really surprised at how I actually felt a bit nauseous Uh-huh. And really unsettled Yes. With meditation.

Yep. And I don’t we Yes. Usually have that experience. It’s one of the things about meditating. You know?

Like, meditation is about taking the blinkers off and seeing what’s there. And sometimes what they’re what’s there is a bit of a surprise. And this was surprise. And, yes, there are a whole lot of ways you could interpret that, but I won’t do that right now. Anybody else?

What was your want to share their experience? You don’t need to. See that looking? Okay. You were just sharing that it was very hygienic and healing and lovely to actually go in and come out through the same door, if you like.

Yes. That reverse process. Yes. It’s very lovely. Yes.

Just so that you know, that’s a process that I learned from my teacher, both in meditate my meditation teacher, but also from my NLP training. I did my first NLP training in ninety three, and I repeated my training last year, believe it or not. And that whole process of going in one way and coming out the other and I do all of my meditations like that and even the MBCT classes and that is not MBCT tradition. But whatever your practice is, to have a habitual practice of moving in and moving out, your body just gets really used to it. So it knows where where you’re going.

Thanks for that. One of things that we’re doing, all of the things that was a fairly short meditation, and it was a kind of mixture of a few things, but all of those were a part of concentration meditation. In concentrated meditation, we’re teaching the mind to focus. Yeah? So we’re giving it an object to focus on.

We started with where did we start? Moving the body. We started with sound. So sound is one of the objects that we can focus on. That includes mantra and things like that.

We were just using the sound in the room. Sound is often a useful thing to focus on because it’s a wonderful anchor, and there’s always sound. So you can always use an sound as an anchor to focus on. After sound, we went into the movement of the breath in the body. So we’re looking at breath in the body.

When we when we focus our mind on the movement of the breath in the body, we’re teaching again. It’s another object for us to focus our mind on, to learn to still our mind. And the more we habituate distilling our mind to particular objects, that builds a neuro neural pathway in our mind that we get very used to. So for those of you who have meditated for a long time, you’ll have your own way. But for me, it’s and that breath just, you know, taps into a whole neural pathway in my mind that kind of says, go into this place, and kind of I’m there fairly quickly.

It doesn’t always happen, but it often happens. So we can habituate that process in ourself. We’re also teaching our minds to focus. And so a lot of us are more capable of teaching our dogs to sit still than we are of teaching our minds to sit still. Yeah?

And somehow or other in our culture, we seem not to see the value in this because we’re so busy getting engaged with the way our minds run around. It’d be like watching a puppy dog go mad, you know, as if we pay attention to that all day. But we watch our minds do that all the time, we engage in it. And so concentrated meditation, one of the purposes of concentrated meditation is to help us teach ourselves to focus our mind, and we have different objects to do that. And different objects are much easier for different people.

I find the breath really easy. I used to hate sound. I hate mantra, but now I lots of tantric mantras to practice. I actually really like them because of that kind of other emotions that they have compassion and beauty that they evoke in me. Visualization is another example.

We didn’t do that today but many of you would have had visualisation and visualisation you can use as external or internal. A candle, I’m sure most of you have watched a sunset or a water glistening on a leaf or the look on a baby’s face or the look on your face if you’re still in love with your lover. You know, those things that we just have this visual cue that our mind just goes still and we’re just completely focused. Yeah? So both external and internal visualizations.

And either something real or something created. Some Tibetan traditions, certainly mine, we have images of Tibetan deities in order to visualize on them to create certain effects and to work with. In other Buddhist traditions, don’t use the deities, and they don’t use visualisation in those same ways. But they might be focusing on a coloured rock or seeing internally. You know, see if you can imagine a blue triangle or something like that.

So there are different ways we use visualisation. Again, we’re training our minds to focus. We’re doing other things too. Too. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But one of the things we’re doing is training our mind to focus. And we’re seeing, if we’re paying attention, the ways our minds you know, I don’t know if it happened to any of you when I was asking you to focus on a particular thing that all of a sudden, you you’d noticed that your mind had wandered off into some conversation somewhere. And so for some of you, I don’t know if that ever happens to any of you, happens to most of us, we start to notice the regular tendencies of our mind and what our mind does, and that’s mindfulness. We’re mindful of where that goes. Then we bring it back to the focus to teach the concentration.

In this one, we also did some very slight movement of the body, you know, when we’re looking at the movement of the ribs. So we’re watching the breath in the body, and we’re watching the movement of the body with the breath. And we did a bit of a a very light what we call body scan checking out the sensations in the body so that’s one of the body movement type meditations. There are many others surfing yoga tai chi the whole range. Contemplative meditation is another meditation.

I always talk about when I teach this the difference between concentration and contemplative meditation. I don’t know about any of you, but when I was fifteen years old and trying to find my way, I went off to Catholic Mass with my Catholic friends. I was not Catholic. I actually knew nothing about Christianity or God or anything like that. I wasn’t raised a Christian.

But nonetheless, I thought it would be really cool to believe in God, and I’d like to. And I wanted to belong to a community because I thought that would be cool too. And Catholic church, my friends went there number one, and they all played at the rock mass. And I, you know, fifteen year old long hair hippie girl, you know, playing my guitar. So I went off to rock mass with sister Janet Mead.

Do any of you remember her? So I can guarantee you, our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. It’s funny to sing this in a Buddhist place. Anyway, now I can guarantee that that was not a contemplation for me.

I had you know, I knew all the words. I could sing them off pat, but it was just music to me. So for me, when I’d sing that, that’s more like a sound meditation when I was singing because it meant nothing to me. If I sang those words these days and I wasn’t singing in front of an audience, I’d actually contemplate the words. The same as if I was saying, may I be well, may I be happy, a very traditional Buddhist contemplation.

So we can see that the one thing could be used as a sound meditation or contemplative meditation. So there are many contemplative meditations in Zen tradition. They use kans as contemplations, and there are many other contemplations in in in various different aspects of the Buddhist path. And then there are the chakras, which are the energy centres in the body. They actually differ from some of the Hindu traditions to some of the Buddhist traditions, but nonetheless the different energy centres through the bodies and how we work with those in meditation.

I typically do that within the context of tantra practice, but that’s how I know it beyond that. I’m not particularly familiar with the way the Hindu people use chakras. One of the purposes of all this is giving ourselves an object and different objects that work for different people at different times to learn to train the mind to focus. The other part of that is that in that process, we go into and can focus more and more we move into a more and more absorbed state. Some of you will have had that experience and some more naturally have it than others.

Some of you will have that experience where your thoughts start to slow down. Did anybody have that experience? Some of you? Some of you will have that experience where sort of thoughts start to slow down till there’s kind of no thought. And as you’re as you’re going in there and there are stages of that.

There are, you know, formed stages and unformed stages of what we call the absorptions. I won’t go into all the details today. But And they’re kind of different stages of different states of a kind of meditative state. Now I was having a conversation with Barbara, my Anthropocophist friend, night. I’ve had conversations with Quakers and various other people over the years about what they do with meditation.

Interestingly, of us have paths but a similar type of thing, something to focus on, a sound, an idea, an object, a visualisation or whatever, and we move into the absorptions. As we move into the absorptions, some people come into that place of stillness and people experience that at a certain level of absorption in different ways, certainly that’s where some of the bliss states come. That just experience of bliss, I’ve certainly heard people talk about that as enlightenment, which is an interesting way to talk about it. That state of bliss, that state of union, luminous connection with everything and everyone. It’s also around about that same place is where some people feel like they’ve got ants crawling all over their bodies.

Going to some of those absorptions you can have all sorts of imagery opening up and all sorts of other experiences opening up as well. So that’s a journey through the absorptions. Now this is while this is the the learning to concentrate is particularly useful to train the mind in psychological endeavour and the more you move into this it tends to be relaxing except if you’ve got a very rich inner world and all manner of things can open up and if you don’t know what’s going on that can be somewhat unsettling for people who are unfamiliar with that kind of territory. Mindfulness is about watching it’s like having a focus that’s a moving focus. It’s about paying attention to all the different things that are going on.

And Mindfulness, as it’s used in psychology, is not necessarily opening up to insight in the inner world in the way that the Buddha opened up. The Buddha went into quite a deep absorption and opened up to pure awareness at a deep level of absorption and was mindful of all the things that was going on there. In the psychology tradition we use mindfulness much more to notice what is actually happening in our body from moment to moment, what is actually happening in our mind, what happens when we something is really stupid and we judge it and we don’t like it? What do our minds do? What does our body do?

And then how do we behave in the world as a consequence of that? And is that wise? Does that serve us? Does that serve the people around us? Does that serve the planet?

And so mindfulness as it’s used and adapted into psychological traditions is very much this mindfulness of watching the tendencies of the mind, the tendencies of emotion. And that’s the kind of mindfulness I’ll talk about in a little while in terms of those four traditions that I talked about when we first started this evening. Are there any questions or comments once we’ve got to here? Going for a break in a minute. No?

Okay. Let’s have a tea break for ten minutes. I’ll see you all back in here in about ten minutes. We’ll have a look at how psychologists have used mindfulness in their traditions. Those of you who want this information, this will be written in more detail in a more linear fashion in the handout, and I’ll give you the piece of paper for that a bit later.

So, yeah, you you don’t need to write it down all the all the necessary not the chitchat in between but all the necessary bits and pieces are there I haven’t put the quotes for where all this information is from but you can find it all in the sutras the sutras are the basic text sutras sutras depending if you look at the part anyway, you don’t need all that detail about two different traditions that two different languages that Buddhism came from. Now in terms of psychology, there are four there are many different ways people have used mindfulness meditation in psychology but the four main streams that have had a lot of research and are just becoming more and more popular are these four here mindfulness based stress reduction, mindfulness based cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy and dialectical behavior therapy. So mindfulness and and they were developed for slightly different audiences and there are different things about them. Mindfulness based stress reduction was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 70s and he’s a scientist and he came from a Buddhist background, Vipassana background just debating how much anyway he came from a Vipassana background and he started working with a lot of people with pain problems and health problems they were his main concerns.

He started working with people in a hospital where the people had been through the pain clinic done everything they had with meds could get everything they could lay their hands on to help with their pain predominantly pain and chronic health problems and you know they could go no further there was nothing else the medical model could offer them but these people were still suffering. As we say in all traditions you know pain is inevitable in life but the emotional kind of suffering that goes with it is optional and so some of the Buddhist practices are about lowering that suffering here. So over a number of years John Cabot Zinn was working in the hospital in University of Massachusetts and he developed eventually wrote this book ‘Full Catastrophe Living’ how to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation. And so that was his first major text. He’d written another one, but that was the first major text outlining this eight week program that he did.

He developed an eight week program that he’d see people for a couple of hours a week in a group for eight weeks, and then they’d have a one day silent meditation retreat all based on mindfulness. He’s made his books even twice as so. Yes. Yes. And he’s written books with some of the other people too.

I’m just checking my notes to make sure I’ve written said everything I want to say. The importance of the work in mindfulness I think in using meditation in these ways was to develop sufficient concentration you know like with focusing in mind so that you could start to pay attention to all the things that were going on. The point of mindfulness was not to go deeper and deeper into absorptions and to get into that kind of blissful state or have all these inner experiences opening up even though that sometimes did happen. The point of the mindfulness meditation was to become acutely aware of your experience particularly your experience of your body, emotions, what your mind was doing in order that you develop a really high degree of acceptance for whatever is going on. So if it’s painful, well it’s painful.

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t help the situation to react to our pain because as soon as we start reacting negatively toward our pain we’re generating more suffering for ourselves. I’ll talk a little bit more about this in a moment. Developed this. When he first started, he wanted to call it mindfulness space suffering reduction because, you know, it comes from a Buddhist background.

This is the nineteen seventies. There’s no way you could say something like that in the nineteen seventies. Way too wanky, hippie, Buddhist y, wasn’t going to get away with any kind of title like that. Stress was the in thing. It was getting bigger and bigger and so he just called it mindfulness based stress reduction.

The interesting and that one small unfortunate thing about that over time is that people think it’s only about mindfulness stress reduction and that it’s not about dealing with emotional suffering or other other forms of, you know, mental health problems, and it is about dealing with those things too. It’s about dealing with reduction of suffering but he called it mindfulness based stress reduction. The advantage of that is that there are a lot of people who would go to mindfulness based stress reduction whereas they wouldn’t go to something that says reduce your nutty thinking, lower your anxiety levels, stop panicking, get out of your depression. A lot of people wouldn’t go to a course called that, but they’ll go to mindfulness based stress reduction. So it has its advantages.

That’s the seminal text. The next few lot of people that came along now oh sorry. The people that teach mindfulness based stress reduction are expected to have both a mindfulness practice of their own, so a history in mindfulness practice like a daily practice. Anybody who learns MBSR is expected to have a daily practice of meditation and a daily movement meditation practice, so yoga or tai chi, something like that. An ongoing teacher of their own, they’re expected to do at least one seven to ten day silent retreat a year and they’re also expected to have mental health qualifications, all physical health qualifications.

So in terms of the training and the kind of practitioners, if they’re properly trained, that’s the kind of background. So there’s a real strong emphasis in MBSR on the actual meditation practice. Participants in the course are encouraged to meditate daily for, you know, half an hour to forty minutes so it’s quite a practice of developing your practice. Is it being taught here in Australia? MBSI, MBCTs.

I’ll go on to talk about how they link okay in the the late 80s there were so that’s that’s mindfulness based stress reduction slightly unrelated to that in the late 80s 80s the American Psychological Association went to three of the most prominent psychologists in the world dealing with discovered about depression, know, for those of you who are into psychology, was that you know CBT, cognitive behavioural thing, was the big thing at the time and in fact still is because it’s the easiest thing to research and so it’s the easiest thing to get results about. It doesn’t, in my view, make it necessarily the best thing, but it’s certainly the most well known and it’s got the most favor in the world for dealing with depression. What they discovered was anybody had an episode of serious depression. I don’t mean garden variety depression like we all have when we have flat days, miserable weeks, you know, people that we’re getting annoyed with, you know, kids being grotty, whatever. I mean, you know, serious clinical depression.

That for fifty percent of all people that have one episode of serious clinical depression, they would have more episodes. Once you’ve had two episodes of clinical depression the research was that you were seventy to eighty percent likely seventy to eighty percent of those people were likely to continue to have more episodes of clinical depression. So that’s pretty major because serious clinical depression, we’ve got a room this size. At least probably a quarter of the people in the room have had a serious clinical depression or at least you know someone who has. So it can be pretty debilitating both personally and financially in the world.

So these three guys were asked to deal with this problem of recurrent depression. At the time they were thinking CBT was the perfect answer for getting people out of depression. I don’t actually agree with that but you know at the time that was the thinking. And so these guys started researching what they could do to improve things. They came across Jon Kabat-Zinn’s program MBSR and so they all went along and they did the eight week course and I thought this is really cool we’ll go home and write about this and we’ll write it up and we’ll add some of the CBT exercises to it the cognitive behavioral therapy exercises which are about self mastery and managing to create pleasure and, you know, possible positive things in your life, you know, and a little bit of psychoeducation about the nature of depression so people understand it.

So we’ll add a bit of that. We’ll add it to the MBSR. We’ll mix them together, and we’ll teach that. Very cool. They were all really happy about this so they go off and start teaching it and they get sort of mixed results and they do this for about I think it’s about a year and they can’t figure out why they’re getting mixed results.

So the three of these guys go back to the UMass where MBSR has been taught they go to a class taught by Melissa Blacker. Melissa Blacker is second in line to Jon Kabat-Zinn she’s taken over from Jon Kabat-Zinn. I taught with her in Australia earlier this year and Melissa tells the story and John tells the story and it’s very very funny listening to two different sides of the story, especially since they didn’t know the story each. Melissa Blacker is in the class. I don’t know if it’s the first or second day of the class, but it’s a little way into the class.

And the three guys are in the class. They go out of the class at the end of the class. They walk down the hallway into John Cabotzin’s office from which they do not emerge for five hours. In that five hours, Melissa starts thinking, oh, they’ve gone down to talk about how the class was. After the hour, oh, they’re taking a long time.

After a couple of hours, you know, her mind’s, you know, on automatic pilot with all the kind of negative possibilities. By the time five hours is up, she’s not only sure that she’s gonna be sacked. She’s sure that she’s never gonna work again, and she doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to her. That was Melissa’s story. It was so funny hearing you tell her.

In their their book, which they wrote when they put this together, these three guys, these three psychologists, they talk about how on this particular day, they went to the class. They’re in the class, and the penny dropped. The penny dropped that they can’t you can’t just take this stuff and teach it like you’re teaching a bit of theoretical information. You actually need to embody this practice. This is a practice you need to live yourself and that dropped.

The penny dropped for all three of them. Fairly conservative, very well known professionally around the world psychologists who were all realizing that if they wanted this to work they had to go and learn to meditate and do it regularly like daily and that was just so far out of left field for you know mainstream professional psychologists in in that period of time that it just was a bit radical. So they spent five hours in John’s office talking about all of this and how they put it together. It wasn’t actually for a long time, Yeah, like more than I actually can’t remember now. Told this story to to Jenny, I’m sure, earlier this year.

Melissa told me this story earlier this year, but it was a long time, like a year or two later when Melissa found out that because she’d never read this book when she found out that they in fact, you know, in there telling him bad stories about how bad her practice was. In fact, this was the pivotal moment where it dawned on them. They needed to embody this practice. So the three of them went away and developed their own meditation practice. They put the program together, they adjusted a few things and they developed this program which is in fact not very different from the mindfulness based stress reduction.

There are some differences in that it was put together for a clinical population initially so people with depression certainly later on a whole bunch of other people but initially for people with depression. The people who went to the class initially had to have already had more than one episode of depression. It was initially for a little while it was thought that, you know, if you went to one of these, would make your depression worse, but it’s a bit like the meditation, you know, when you actually look at yourself, you actually get to see what’s there, and sometimes you’re lot less happy than you realize you are. So it’s not making you depressed. It’s just making you see how depressed you already are or unhappy or whatever garden variety, you know, dramas going on inside of your experience.

So they developed this program. It’s an eight week program. Everybody who went through a program like this they had to have initial assessment so they had to do a whole lot of you know psych screening just to assess them and they did a whole lot of measurements all the way along to measure how they’re going so a lot of research done on this program. So over time it became very popular and over time more and more people trained. Again like the MBSR tradition, MBCT teachers have to have their own meditation practice most of them come from some sort of Buddhist background.

Well, all of them do or have engaged in that. They all have to do their own seven to ten day silent retreat a year. They have to do lots of training within the tradition. In this field they have to have a mental health background not just a health background or mental health background they have to have some training in CBT in order to put these two things together. In order for the fact that when you’ve got people in a class from a clinical population you might have people going into a kind of psychotic episode episode or regressing into trauma and bringing up a whole lot of stuff you know a whole lot of stuff can happen when you’re in meditation and even though what you’re trying to do is teach this kind of mindfulness of watching what’s going on at a not too deep level it doesn’t change the fact that some people can go into these quite deep absorptions and all manner of interview experience can come up and people can feel like they’re you know hallucinating or having a psychotic episode in fact people do have what looks like a psychotic episode.

If you don’t have the training as a meditation teacher, you don’t actually know what to do with what might look like a psychotic episode. And sometimes that means that person ends up in hospital pumped full of drugs that I actually need to have because the teacher didn’t know how to handle the experience. So not meaning to scare you, but, you know, you’re opening up the mind. So it’s big territory that you’re dealing with. Now over the years, this this became more and more popular, so there are teachers all over the world.

This is the thing that I teach here. Well, mostly I teach these days, don’t teach very many client just client groups. I teach other professionals this around Australia. I think it’s just a gift to the universe, and I’m very glad that they put together these skills in a structured way so that it’s kind of really easy for me to teach and replicate and do it over and over and be getting very familiar with. The difference between this and the MBSR, the main difference initially was the population so they’re particularly for clinical depression but you know if you’re dealing with chronic pain they’ve all got depression not too many people are in chronic pain and that don’t have a certain amount of depression or anxiety but this is where the focus was.

So this is now you know all over the world and yeah I’ll come back to a bit of that in a little while. Both of these traditions are about establishing awareness about exactly what’s going on becoming more and more skillful about the subtle interplay the rise and the fall of our emotions of our thought processes understanding the automatic thought process that just take us off into nowhere line. I’m sure some of you or at least people you know will have had experiences where you perfectly find one minute someone says something in particular or something in particular happens and you’re just kind of lost in this inner drama of oh my god you know catastrophizing and this is never going to get any better how did I ever think I was going to do so or whatever your version of that automatic pattern is. So it’s very very much addressed to us learning to understand those things and develop a different relationship with those experiences so we’re not trying to stop the experiences we’re not even trying to challenge which is what you do in cognitive behavioural therapy. We’re actually trying to understand them, let them be there, kind of like, you know, a stormy day when you go and play tennis.

You might not like it, but you might as well just let it be there and wait for it to pass or do something constructive with the day. So it’s teaching you that kind of approach to your inner world. And we were talking about that last week when we were here, Taming Self Doubt and Other Fictions of the Mind. The difference is there’s a really specific psychoeducation around depression which in my experience kind of there are very few people who haven’t found that particularly useful. There are very few people I know even those that have never really had anything that’s really looks like clinical depression.

There are very few people I’ve ever met who haven’t found that bit of education really useful so I’m very happy to use it. About three hours of difference and there are specific exercises in this course that are about learning to nourish ourselves, developing wise action plan for our lives for, you know, when we get little triggers, you know, those times when we start getting wobbly, but we don’t notice we started to get wobbly last Tuesday until it’s Friday night and we’re hitting the alcohol or the porn addiction or the gambling or the food or whatever it is that we do when we’re hitting the skids with ourselves. So you’ve got blank faces in the room so I don’t know if you ever hit skids but some of us So that’s the mindfulness based cognitive therapy. With the clinical population there’s always pre interviews, assessments, there’s often a bit of education about this as a training not a therapy group in that you’re training your mind you know you’re not there it’s a real difference you’re not kind of there to be telling your stories you’re there to be able to watch your mind, to tell the stories, choose to maybe refocus on your breath rather than tell the story to yourself and wind yourself into the drama again.

So it’s a whole shift of gear. The next model is acceptance and commitment therapy. Now this was started by Steve Hayes, a really nice guy, really smart guy from America. He came more from the kind of alternative background than from the psychology background and this was his first main book in this field he’s reprinted this recently and done an updated kind of slightly different version and ACT ACT uses a lot of the thinking like the cognitive understanding of mindfulness so that cognitive understanding that you know — that the experience you have when you’re out on the cricket pitch and you know you’ve got your friends you’re playing a bit of cricket with each other, and someone hits the ball and you’re out in the field and you’re about to catch it and you’re watching and you’re watching and you’re watching and you’re watching. And then all of a sudden you think, holy shit.

What if I miss this? People think I’m an idiot. I should be able to catch this. Oh, last time I didn’t catch it. And what do you do?

You don’t catch the ball. Because at first, your awareness is on the sensory object out there. And when your awareness is there, your whole awareness is there. The moment your mind starts to take over and you don’t know that it’s taken over, where is your awareness? Yeah?

So you drop the ball. So it’s just one of those one of that little conversation. Act the ACT commitment therapy community are a very generous community, therapeutic community. They’ve done a lot of work. They publish a whole lot of stuff for free on the web.

Nanette has done a lot of training in ACT and has access to a lot of this material. I’ve done a fair bit of training in ACT too for that matter but they have a lot of tools and way of talking to people about helping people understand why you might have a decentered approach to your experience, why you might what the value is in starting to recognizing start to recognize your thoughts as mental events rather than believing them, your emotions just simply as events that you might want to do something right wise with rather than indulging in them and stuff like that. So ACT does certainly some meditations of various kinds. They certainly do a breathing space. They have particular mediteachings where you really get a cognitive handle on this thing of this is just your experience happening to you and you can start to have a different relationship to that.

ACT also spells out has some exercises that spell out very clearly your values based in the world. So what matters to you? Have exercises for you to look really clearly at what your values are, what you value in life, and for you to be able to see how some of these automatic processes really interfere with you living the life you most value. So there are a lot of exercises around that. People that teach ACT or ACT therapists coaches and ACT workers in organisations do not have to have a meditation practice and some of them very proudly say they don’t have a meditation practice.

I can guarantee you most of the people from MBSR and MBCT think that that’s a bit of a problem with the ACT people. I, on the other hand, think what ACT people have developed is just so profoundly useful in any context where someone coming to meditate is not what they’re going to do. So it’s better that you give them the cognitive tools and shorter tools to work with than not give them anything at all. Let me check my notes. You know the different traditions use a lot of different language.

MBSR and MBCT kind of rely on insight in a way because if you sit if, you know, if you’re meditating forty minutes a day, you really do start to get to understand the contents of what happens in your mind and your body if you’re actually doing mindfulness meditation. So the insight arises that you actually just start to see these patterns over and over again. So it becomes obvious in a quite organic way. Alright. You know, every time I get really irritated with that, then my stomach starts to hurt.

Then after that, I wanna clock out, and I just get really bored, then I stop meditating and I got you know like you just start to see those things after a while because you know forty minutes a day of meditating you get to understand the contents of your own mind and body. So they rely on insight. ACT and DBT are much more clearly articulate and point those things out to us so they have exercises and models and little maps that point a lot of that information out more clearly. ACT talks about values and committed action, they talk about avoidance. The fundamental themes in all of them are similar it’s just the approach is a little bit different and the target population is a little bit different and who can teach them is a little bit different.

ACT started out being used in clinical populations but it’s become very popular in organisational settings and there’s a lot of research on that. This is one of them, ACT Mindfulness at Work. And there’s a guy called Gordon Spence who did his doctorate in the area of ACT in organisational settings and he’s now doing a whole lot of work in Sydney. So there are a lot of people who are using this model as a model for working with organisations and with people in organisations for behaviour change in organisations. The other person in Australia who’s very popular, some of you will know him, is Russ Harris.

Any of you know Russ? Lovely guy. He was over here recently, and I had a lovely photo with him. He’s he’s a GP, and he he actually does come from a meditation background himself, but he doesn’t teach MBCT or MBCT or MBSR. He teaches ACT, and he does a beautiful job of it.

He’s got a a really beautiful presence. Hundreds of just really interesting stories that really get into people’s minds about like the hobo story, those of you here last time, and various other stories that really get into people’s minds about, right. You know? I think I’m so justified when I’m angry here, and I feel quite right about complaining about this. But, actually, I’m starting to realize if I the longer I stay justified about being angry here and really tell myself that I’m right here, the more I realize that I’m so busy being angry and pissed off and justified, then I’m actually missing out on what I really value in life.

Yeah? So and and so that’s his book, and I really I actually I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t actually read his whole book. The other model is DBT. DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan and I can’t remember is she’s does anybody know she’s psychiatrist rather than psychologist sorry it’s a few years since I first studied it and dialectical behavior therapy, and that’s very similar along similar lines, but it was developed for dealing with people who had suicidal behavior or personality a borderline personality disorder. Anybody in the room know about borderline personality disorder?

People. In psychology, in clinical psychology, clinical abnormal psychology, in the ways that only clinical abnormal psychologists and such like could pathologize people, we have this thing called personality disorders. In personality disorders, you know, there are personality traits. In fact, we’ve all got them. Everybody in the room’s got personality traits.

And when you sit with a bunch of people, you can have fun talking about it, really. And that we’ve all got tendencies, you know, when life gets really hard. Some of us have got a tendency to dependency, of us have a tendency to chaos you know as life’s getting hard we just get more chaotic. Some of us have a tendency to kind of sociopathy you know just not caring about people. Some of us have got a tendency to really avoid everything so there are all these tendencies yeah.

So in the cycle abnormal psych tradition they’re these psychic personality disorders they’re not exactly considered a clinical disorder depression so it’s not considered an illness it’s more considered a personality style and like I said we all you know some of us you know I won’t get you to do this but really we could stand in room okay all the paranoid people go over there and all the avoidants you go over there and all the dependents actually, you stand next to the avoidants. That will cause them you know? All the all the schizoids come over here. And so, you know, we could divide us up. And I can guarantee, unless you’re being completely dishonest with yourself, in which case we know which category we put you in, you know, you’ll belong to one of those categories because we’ve all got those tendencies.

Yeah? The difference between us having those personality pathologizing tendencies and us having disorder is that if we’ve got a disorder it kind of makes us dysfunctional and what is more that any one of us who you know most of us consider ourselves functional most of the time but some of us know that we’re not always functional and sometimes for longer than others for those of us who have periods where we’re not very functional these tendencies get right out of hand yeah if they get right of hand it’s called disorder at that point yeah so borderline personality disorder is actually called borderline believe it not stupid naming because the psychiatric manual that was developed to name all these disorders and there are now about four sixty something I don’t remember how many there are psychological disorders that you can have a label of. In the personality disorders, there were seven. In the second edition, which was nineteen sixty eight, which they revised twice because during the meantime, they stopped having homosexuality disorder because, you know, there was a whole lot of outcry by all the homosexual psychiatrists about that. And so that was actually revised, and it was revised again.

I can’t remember what the second revision was about. And then in nineteen eighty one I think it was the third edition came out and then in nineteen ninety something or rather and I can’t actually remember all this but I was around for all these things and the fourth edition and now there’s a fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders so in between the second edition and the third edition in the second edition there were seven different types of personality disorders and I can guarantee we’ll all fit there somewhere we’re just on the low end hopefully on our good days and our bad ends and we might be pushing the top end of dysfunctional and in the next the next one what they do is collapse two of them because they said two of them were so close that they you know that people were borderline between one and the other so in the whole next edition for the whole new generations, they call it borderline personality disorder. And so everybody has to actually understand the history before they understand what it was borderline between. Nonetheless, borderline traits are inclined to be a bit chaotic, inclined to have trust issues, inclined to self harm when things get really bad.

Commonly they’ve had really serious trauma in childhood or at least experiences their psychology has carried with them is traumatic. So in life when you know when they’re triggered back into those memories they can get into quite a bad place and there’s often quite a really negative view about themselves there’s often a mix of ways of dealing with emotions in there that I won’t kind of go into all the details here. And so, you know, they’ll do a lot of the borderline personality people will often be cutting or, you know, have any number of other ways to be self harming or moving towards suicide. Mind you, quite a few people in the room here would have had your ways to think towards suicide, but a borderline personality disorder, that kind of trauma of their early experiences takes them there more easily. Yeah?

So DBT was specifically developed for people with borderline personality disorder and or suicidal behavior, you know, suicidal behavior, like, usually more than once. In DBT, it’s a very structured program, and I have a client who was in the DBT program in she did the MBCT here with me and she I encouraged her to move to Sydney and she got into the one year DBT program over there which is fantastic. It’s just fantastic. In the DBT program they kind of teach four basic behavioral model skills models and one is mindfulness and mindfulness is core to all of it you need to have the mindfulness in order to be able to see what’s going on. The other three models are emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness and distress tolerance.

Now all of those three things naturally improve with insight usually in here but they’re not explicitly talked about but because they’re explicitly a problem with people with borderline personality disorder when they’re in their kind of worst phases or with suicidal behaviour they’re explicitly talked about and because people with this have often got that really triggered trauma history, they can be really very fragile and really easily tipped into that fragility in a bad place. The year long training is a whole retraining of their psyche so that they come to a much more place a much greater place of self acceptance and generosity to themselves. Again with DBT people who trained in DBT have mental health background mental health training background. They like the ACT people they don’t have to have an ongoing meditation practice while people in DBT are given small meditations to do they don’t have they’re not expected to do forty minute meditations a day like these people are. So there’s a slightly different flavor of their approach to it and they’re useful for different reasons.

And there are very few DBT programs in Australia because they’re expensive and they’re long term. They’re so much cheaper than the in and out of hospitals, carting off with ambulances, drama that happens, and the absolute trauma that happens with people that are, you know, have that kind of level of trauma in their life that lends them to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis. So actually it’s probably economically cheaper to put them in a year long program than it is to deal with all the drama over the years. In Sydney they’ve actually got that and around the world they have that in different places. There are not a lot of trained therapists around, not very skillful ones anyway.

Though someone I met here tonight said she was getting together a DBT group. I was asked to Yeah. Get together a group of people in southern mental health environment Who wanna do DBT? Who want to bring it in for them. So fantastic.

Especially if they can do long term. Because I’m Is that a live in thing or a once a week thing? Usually, it’s a once a week thing. There was a program in Sydney about a decade ago that was a live in program. I don’t think that it’s going anymore but there are two programs in Sydney at the moment that are week by week for a year and the whole day and just the funny way that funding is sought they actually sought funding for half a day for like half of that time and they couldn’t get it so they then put in an application for a full day a week for a whole year and because a full day a week they got seen as hospital patients and they could just these people could they’re literally booked in as hospital patients one day a week so they got funding for that so just so that you know that if you don’t know the person and her name’s Judy who runs that program.

Smart woman, nice woman. She’s doing well with my client. So talk to me about it afterwards if you want to. So now the one thing that’s really interesting about all of this well, there are many things that are interesting, of course. But in two thousand what are we now?

Eight. Two thousand and seven in July, there was a huge cognitive behavioral therapy conference in Barcelona in Europe. And one of my colleagues went to this conference. You know, cognitive behavioral therapy, for those of you who know, is a relatively conservative best in psychology. I mean, it’s the thing that’s most popular and most known and most funded.

Doesn’t make it the best, but it’s the most known, most popular, most funded, and people think it’s the best. This was the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, you know, the World Conference in Barcelona. When my colleague got there she discovered that nearly half of the research papers that are done in all of the mental health fields presented at that conference involved one of these, all mindfulness based. Because the effect of doing this kind of work on people’s mental health is just so profound and so life changing and transformative that, you know, economically and socially and emotionally like it’s just proving of such value in those contexts so it’s a lot of research in all those fields. I’ve got a couple of minutes to go.

Whilst it started with you know so called stress reduction reduction so called CBT for depression, ACT for kind of people in general and ACT people work a lot with trauma victims and DBT for suicide and personality disorder what they’ve discovered is now that a lot of people who are doing MBSR and MBCT particularly MBCT because they’ve got mental health backgrounds have done a lot of research in a lot of other areas so for obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorders, torma. I can’t there’s just this huge long list out on there’s a list on my website so if you want to have a look at the research I think it’s up there at the moment. There’s a list of all the research articles up there and what they’re discovering is that it’s really useful in all these areas. People are using this in combination with the therapeutic models they’re already using and getting much more ongoing results because people are starting to understand their experience in a way rather than being caught in their dramas all of the time. The one other thing that’s really interesting about the training is that when people go to an MBCT class, if they go for depression for example, then their mind is focused on all the aspects of depression and how that flavors through their experience.

And they’ll notice at the end of that, they really get a different relationship to their depression and different handle on the things related to that. And whilst it does have some generalizing effects on the rest of their life, you know, calmness, kind of general, greater sense of self acceptance, it doesn’t necessarily stop their gambling or their bad eating behavior or all the other things that, you know, happen in their life. And so what they’re discovering is that just that simple practice of focusing on one area when people come to a class that’s the area that they really improve in and so now when I run a class I say that to people because I’m mostly running it for professionals and so I say to them, you know, it’s experiential training so you do your own work with yourself in order to understand it. I encourage them to really focus on a particular area in their life that they want to get a bit of a handle on or have a different relationship with and work with that. And if at some later time they want to get a different relationship with something else then come and do the course again.

And that’s what I encourage people to do so that’s how it’s used. And the other thing that’s happening now is in the last two or three years I’ve moved from in my clinical world I’ve moved much more into teaching other therapists and practitioners because this is the work I do and I teach meditation and it all goes together well. The other part of my work is leadership development which is kind of what we’re here for is looking at leadership development and what we know notice that gets in the way of you know good leadership are all the psychological things that happen for people their inability to make decisions, inability to stay calm, their ability to respond rather than react and so these tools are profoundly useful and so a lot of the people that I’m working with in executive coaching I use all these same skills perhaps with a little bit different language around them. So that’s, I think ah, one other thing. Just want to come back to this notion of that’s all I have to say about that just at the moment.

I just want to come back to this notion of meditation, that when you go into a group, people will come into a mindfulness class with really different ideas about what meditation is. And sometimes they’ll you know, that that there’ll be a jar between their expectation and what’s happening so sometimes it can be really useful to explain what you’re meaning by meditation and it’s also really useful for you to understand what can happen in the absorptions because you might be teaching someone a fairly light mindfulness meditation but if they have a natural tendency as some people do to go into the absorptions and they go into an experience they don’t know how to handle and they don’t know how to interpret then you want to know what to do with it. And for all of us and this was the conversation I was having with Barbara last night that for those people who move into these absorptions the experience is not that dissimilar across traditions cultures religions all that kind of stuff what’s different is when you come out of how you interpret what that experience was. And so you want to have some way of working with that if you’ve got people who are going into that place when you’re doing mindfulness training.

So any questions before we finish? Well, then that’s me for this evening. I hope you’ve had a nice evening. Hope it’s been useful. Ah, I know something.

Just hold on a sec. There’s a handout somewhere that gives you the link to go on the website. If you want to get this is written out in a kind of several page format. So if you want that, I’ll find the piece of paper, and you can take one with you. And go on to the website and get a copy for yourself.

Thanks very much.