Hi, folks, today I'm going to go over the what skills,
These are literally what you do in order to be mindful, you can only do each one of these one at a time.
The first skill is observing. And if I had to sum this up into one word, I would sum it up into noticing is what observing is you can notice the environment around you, you can notice what's happening inside your body. And in your experience. The reason why we do this is twofold. The first of those is because a lot of times, folks walk through life with their metaphorical eyes closed. So we're so busy responding and reacting to whatever life throws our way, that we often don't give ourselves the space to notice sort of what's happening in a situation or why we might know what's going on for us internally. The other reason is that we know that just by observing, we can change behavior, this is why each of you is keeping a diary card, right, because just the act of recording and noticing behavior results and change without any other skills.
In order to observe you quite literally are going to try and observe with your five senses. So noticing what's happening, what you see, hear, taste, touch, smell. Also, you can direct your focus inward to try and notice physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, urges, etc. This is a skill that is often difficult for folks, but is completely doable. Your goal here is to actually not apply words or labels to experience. It's literally just to notice, which is why often this skill happens very briefly. And you'll notice that you're sort of moving back and forth between observe and describe specifically. Okay.
The last thing that I will say about this particular skill, is that you have two goals here that might depend on sort of your go to strategies with life, you're going to try and avoid pushing away experiences, as so many of us do when painful emotions or memories come up. And you're also going to try and avoid clinging to certain things, which we often do around worries that we have, where we just keep thinking and thinking and thinking over over a given scenario as if that's going to change the outcome. Or when we're in the positive experience, like not wanting to let it go. This often shifts us out of a mindful state.
For example, it's the Sunday afternoon phenomenon, where on Sunday afternoon, you so so want the weekend to keep going that you're already dreading it being over, because here you are, with only a few hours left. Okay. So let's shift into describe with a reminder that we're going to do practice exercises of each of these, because talking about it actually doesn't particularly help. One learn mindfulness.
Describe is the step where we literally put words, on to a given experience. We do this for two particular reasons. First of all, when we put words on an experience that allows us to get feedback from the community as a whole. So if I got information incorrect, right, I'm like, what's the scenario where this might happen? I'm sitting with a group of friends. And I noticed that when I was speaking about a struggle that I had, that someone else looked away, and I interpreted that as them like snapping me or something like that, if I let if I discussed that and identified that to the rest of my group of friends, they could then give me feedback if in fact, they knew that at that moment, this person had just gotten gotten like an SOS text from somebody, right.
However, I would say the arguably the more important reason why we describe is because it helps us to differentiate between what is observed and what is not observed.
So I'm going to give you a scenario here. scenario is you are at home, dealing with a screaming infant, you have tried everything in the world that you can think of to help soothe them and nothing is working. Now, pre mindfulness practice, you might take this set of facts that you just observed. And describe that as I'm being a failure. However, that is not using the described skill.
You can only describe what has been observed. And what has been observed here is that your baby is not responding to your attempts at soothing.
This is important because we often respond to these thoughts like I'm failing as a mom, as though they're facts, when in fact, they're the farthest thing from it. Hope that that example makes sense.
And so oftentimes, by actually describing the facts of a scenario, it results in our decreased emotion, as well as more information about a given situation. So how do you do this?
Literally, you are just trying to put words on an experience sticking to facts only, again, you cannot observe what has not been described. So for example, you cannot observe the feelings of other people, you cannot observe the intentions of other people, you cannot observe the thoughts of other people, you also cannot observe the future.
So if, for example, I got a bad mark on a quiz or a test, I cannot observe and describe the fact that I'm going to fail and drop out of school, right? Because can observe that haven't lived it yet. This helps us just by trying to stay in the present, know what is and isn't true. And what is and isn't sort of the byproducts of our brain coming up with all of the random stuff that our brain likes to come up with.
So finally, we want to hit on participate. And so this, I would say, is the most abstract of these three skills. And when we're talking about participating, what we are literally talking about, is throwing ourselves wholly with all of our awareness into the present moment moment. This is the goal of mindfulness skills.
And I guarantee you that there have been moments in your past, where you have fully been present, maybe it was the first time that you held your baby, or while you were saying your vows on a wedding day, maybe it was a particularly like joyous afternoon, I'm playing with the bubble machine with the kids or in a crisis that you were experiencing where you were all in focusing on exactly what needs needed to happen.
This particular skill is important for lots of different reasons. But we focus on it primarily because it's associated with optimal mental health. People feel competent, and they feel in control when they're fully participating in a given experience.
Now, how do you do this? That is a different question. I'm going to sort of give you some examples of what the DBT book offers. But ultimately, it comes down to a choice where you're saying I'm going to fully bring myself in and commit to this given moment, even if it's only for a few minutes.
Immerse yourself in the present. Throw yourself completely into activities engaged, completely attend to what's happening between you and others. Let go of self consciousness, abandon yourself to the moment, concentrate fully on what is happening right now. Act intuitively doing just what's needed, go with the flow and respond to the spontaneity.
So as you can see, all of this is really abstract. And, like I said before, ultimately participating comes down to a decision that you make to focus your attention in on a given experience and stick with it. And when your mind wanders away to other things to notice if that happens and bring yourself back. All right. More practice soon.
