All right, we'll do a quick review of what mindfulness is. So we know what we're trying to be mindful of right? It's fully awake, and embodied awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment.
It has to do with focused attention, open awareness, as well as kind intention. So what skills again, it's what we need to do when we're practicing mindfulness.
All right, if you're in a DBT group, chances are it starts with a mindfulness practice. And hopefully, mindfulness is also something that you're starting to practice on your own. There are also a lot of opportunities to find mindfulness practices on the internet, and on apps.
And so hope you're going to try it using your what skills, okay, so what skills start with observe, okay, so when we talk about observe, in this context, we're talking about observing our experience at the level of pure sensation, okay, so when we think about our five senses, is using our seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, to observe our experience, and it's just kind of tuning in and noticing what's going on with our senses. So we can tune in on the inside and on the outside, so observing our surroundings, as well as what's going on in our body and our mind and our emotions.
The next what skill is describe, okay, so this is not a necessary step.
But sometimes, we choose to describe what we're observing, okay, so observing could be silent, it could just be like, if you were to notice what it feels like to sit in your chair right? Now, you could just tune into that without having to put any words to it at all.
But if you choose to describe it, you can choose to say things such as pressure, or heat, or something to that effect, whatever you had happened to experience sitting in your chair. All right, and the describe words, or objective words, they're not editorialize. They're not subjective. They're not judgmental. They're not, you know, kind of like, well, it feels kind of crappy sitting in this chair. Well, that's not really what we're talking about.
We're just talking about what are the senses feel like, right? Or if I notice a feeling, I might just say, Hmm, I noticed that sadness is arising. It's sadness.
So I'm not saying, Oh, God, I hate this feeling. It's terrible. This is so annoying, right? That's more of a judgment, I'm just kind of putting a word naming and noting, and there's an expression they use, sometimes name it, to tame it, that if we can recognize what it is we're experiencing, and put a word to it, or a phrase to it, sometimes it helps us to calm down, and it settles our nervous system a little bit, and we're a little bit better able to deal with it.
So that's one of the benefits of describe, we can also describe our surroundings, right? So describing things on the inside we're experiencing as well as on the outside.
So I can describe the people around me, or what I'm seeing in my environment, the, you know, nonliving things in my environment, nature. Um, if a person is yelling and screaming, I might just say, there's a person yelling and screaming.
I may not judge it, and say, Oh, God, who's that jerk who's carrying on like that, right? That's not a describe that's a judgment. A describe is just saying what the action is, or what I'm actually seeing. Okay? So, hope that makes sense to you guys.
After you, like observe and describe, the idea is to imagine that these thoughts and feelings are coming and going, Okay, because none of them are permanent. The awareness is permitted, but the things you're being aware of, are always changing.
And it's important to try to let them go and pass naturally without clinging to them because the clinging leads to more suffering.
So here's some images you could use to allow the things you're observing to just pass through your awareness easily. So one is you could imagine taking each thing you observe and just put it on a box and want to travel down a conveyor belt.
So if I have a thought, and just say, oh, thought, and just put that in a box and watch that thought float away, or if I feel that feeling and I say Oh, anger and just put that on a box and watch it float away. Okay. Or if you're more of a nature person, you might imagine that each refund a stream is a carrier of something that you're observing, like saying, oh, a person yelling and screaming, I'll just put that on a leaf on a screen and watch that pass away.
Okay, I'm an image that is also very popular is clouds in the sky. So your pure awareness is the blue sky. And the clouds are all the different things that you are observing. And just the clouds kind of move and change and pass through the same kind of thing, where you for the stuff that you're observing.
The third part of the what skills is participate. So participate is when you take your mindfulness, and you put it into action, it's hopefully that you'll put it into your everyday life.
So that mindfulness isn't just an activity you do for a couple of minutes in group or once in a while, as you go through your day, you do so with awareness and mindfulness, that whatever you're doing, you could do it mindfully.
Think about the activities you do, the time you wake up as you go through your day. You could brush your teeth mindfully, you could wash your face mindfully. You can shower mindfully, you can eat mindfully, you can walk mindfully, right, you can engage in conversations mindfully.
Whatever you're doing, you can do it with awareness and tuning into your sensory experiences, it sometimes helps to slow it down a little bit. Because if we're too much in a rush, it's hard to really observe very carefully, so you can do whatever you're doing on purpose, maybe slightly slower, and with awareness, and that will put you in the moment and maybe take you out of your head a little bit and kind of get you back at one with the activity.
This is a mindfulness skills, observe, describe, participate. I hope you give it a try. Next time you're practicing mindfulness, or if you want to give it a try.
All right, thanks, guys, see you next time!
