Practical and informative, this hands-on manual clearly depicts the relationship between mindfulness and compassion, demonstrating how one supports the other. The book offers a fresh perspective on mindfulness that resonates with a human approach and helps practitioners to validate their work by giving a sense of grounding and direction, and providing a safe, appropriate and transformative process in which to conduct inquiry. Including chapters on the meaning of Compassionate Mindful Inquiry and the Model of Inquiry, Atkinson facilitates transformational change and offers guidance for those incorporating mindfulness teaching into their own professional practice.
Based on an 8-week Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy programme, this guide addresses the increasing need for adapted mindfulness in the management of ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, Long Covid, and other chronic fatigue conditions. Using current understanding and theoretical approaches to Long Covid and ME/ CFS, this book allows practitioners to understand how they can adapt their teaching to accommodate patients with specific needs and challenges, including adaptations for brain fog, approaches to rest, movement, daily activity and accompanying difficult thoughts and emotions. Contributions from people who manage ME, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue through mindfulness are included alongside practical guidance and detailed week-by-week session plans whether that's in-person or online. Filled with helpful diagrams and illustrations, practitioners can use this guide to greatly widen the scope of who they can reach and gently empower clients living with often isolating conditions on how to apply this approach in the long-term to their everyday lives.
The Vagus Nerve in Therapeutic Practice describes practical, science-based techniques that can be used to improve vagal performance with the goal of restoring and maintaining mind-body health. Aimed at complementary medicine practitioners and holistic healers such as massage therapists, biofield practitioners, nutritional therapists, aromatherapists and energy healers, it explains how practitioners can adapt their modalities to stimulate the vagus nerve, together with other cranial nerves and the limbic system, to enhance their clients' experience and improve outcomes. The book provides a clear understanding of the importance and benefits of self-regulating the autonomic nervous system, focusing on the vagus nerve. This nerve controls the stress response, regulates digestion, modulates the immune system, and releases an anti-inflammatory neurotransmitter, acetylcholine; when it functions inadequately, all of these systems can be adversely affected. By learning techniques to stimulate the vagus nerve, practitioners can help those experiencing low-level inflammation and emotional stress, including those with chronic diseases. Each chapter provides practical, evidence-based methods that can be used to stimulate the ventral vagal complex, illustrated by a case history from a complementary medicine or holistic practice. The author addresses the anatomy and evolution of the vagus nerve, including its possible role in promoting social engagement, using the polyvagal theory as a model. The functions of major branches of the vagus nerve and other neighbouring cranial nerves are discussed in turn; in each case the mechanism by which neural stimulation improves relaxation and health is outlined, and a practical way to engage the nerve branch and limbic system is described with the help of a case study. An addendum includes an easily referenced summary of the exercises described throughout the book, as well as routines for utilizing combinations of the exercises on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This book will enable healthcare professionals to attain a solid grasp of the clinical significance of regulating the vagus nerve and provide them with simple ways to do it.
A comprehensive guide to mindfulness: its benefits, the science and how to use it to improve your relationships, work life and mental health. Mindfulness expert Dr Patrizia Collard outlines the principles of mindful living and how it can help all of us to improve our wellbeing. CONTENTS Chapter 1: Awakening to Mindfulness Including Understanding mindfulness, Opening up to a new way of living and Breaking habits with mindfulness Chapter 2: Relationships and Mental Wellbeing Including Mindfulness for secure relationships, Mindfulness & parenting and Improving relationships with all beings Chapter 3: Food and Sleep Including Mindful eating, Mindfulness for connecting with sleep and Meditation to reduce cravings Chapter 4: The Gifts of Later Life Including Mindful ageing, Inspirational elders and Connecting with loss Chapter 5: Your Ongoing Journey Including Mindfulness and invoking joy, Mindful art and craft and A mindfulness journey, week by week
Embodying mindfulness allows both therapists and clients to make the most of treatment sessions. More than just a guide to techniques and benefits, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of mindfulness meditation, and shows how to effectively incorporate mindfulness into every aspect of the therapeutic process. Mindfulness isn’t simply a therapeutic tool that can be used at a specific time. If you’re a psychotherapist interested in implementing mindfulness practices into your therapy sessions, you must first embody a mindful presence yourself. In Mindfulness Meditation in Psychotherapy, psychotherapist Steven Alper presents the mindfulness pyramid model, an easy-to-use reference approach for integrating mindfulness into the very fabric of your therapy sessions—in every action you take. A therapist’s mindfulness practice and the mindful activity during sessions forms the foundation of clients’ mindfulness practice. This practical guide will help demystify mindfulness meditation; elaborate on the psychotherapeutic benefits of practices such as body scan, breath awareness, sitting meditation, and lovingkindness; and offer helpful strategies for teaching formal and informal mindfulness skills to clients. This book conceptualizes and explores the applicability of mindfulness and delves into the many ways in which mindfulness can manifest in psychotherapy. This is a must-have resource for any therapist interested in honing their own mindfulness practice and incorporating mindfulness in treatment sessions.
This is the authoritative guide to conducting the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program, which provides powerful tools for coping with life challenges and enhancing emotional well-being. MSC codevelopers Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff review relevant theory and research and describe the program's unique pedagogy. Readers are taken step by step through facilitating each of the eight sessions and the accompanying full-day retreat. Detailed vignettes illustrate not only how to teach the course's didactic and experiential content, but also how to engage with participants, manage group processes, and overcome common obstacles. The final section of the book describes how to integrate self-compassion into psychotherapy. Purchasers get access to a companion website with downloadable audio recordings of the guided meditations. Note: This book is not intended to replace formal training for teaching the MSC program. See also two related resources for MSC participants and general readers, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, and The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, by Christopher Germer.
Mindfulness involves learning to be more aware of life as it unfolds moment by moment, even if these moments bring us difficulty, pain or suffering. This is a challenge we will all face at some time in our lives, and which health professionals face every day in their work. The Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living programme presents a new way of learning how to face the pressures of modern living by providing an antidote which teaches us how to cultivate kindness and compassion – starting with being kind to ourselves. Compassion involves both sensitivity to our own and others’ suffering and the courage to deal with it. Integrating the work of experts in the field such as Paul Gilbert, Kristin Neff, Christopher Germer and Tara Brach, Erik van den Brink and Frits Koster have established an eight stage step-by-step compassion training programme, supported by practical exercises and free audio downloads, which builds on basic mindfulness skills. Grounded in ancient wisdom and modern science, they demonstrate how being compassionate shapes our minds and brains, and benefits our health and relationships. The programme will be helpful to many, including people with various types of chronic or recurring mental health problems, and can be an effective means of coping better with low self-esteem, self-reproach or shame, enabling participants to experience more warmth, safeness, acceptance and connection with themselves and others. Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living will be an invaluable manual for mindfulness teachers, therapists and counsellors wishing to bring the ‘care’ back into healthcare, both for their clients and themselves. It can also be used as a self-help guide for personal practice.
Mindfulness involves learning to be more aware of life as it unfolds moment by moment, even if these moments bring us difficulty, pain or suffering. This is a challenge we will all face at some time in our lives, and which health professionals face every day in their work. The Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living programme presents a new way of learning how to face the pressures of modern living by providing an antidote which teaches us how to cultivate kindness and compassion – starting with being kind to ourselves. Compassion involves both sensitivity to our own and others’ suffering and the courage to deal with it. Integrating the work of experts in the field such as Paul Gilbert, Kristin Neff, Christopher Germer and Tara Brach, Erik van den Brink and Frits Koster have established an eight stage step-by-step compassion training programme, supported by practical exercises and free audio downloads, which builds on basic mindfulness skills. Grounded in ancient wisdom and modern science, they demonstrate how being compassionate shapes our minds and brains, and benefits our health and relationships. The programme will be helpful to many, including people with various types of chronic or recurring mental health problems, and can be an effective means of coping better with low self-esteem, self-reproach or shame, enabling participants to experience more warmth, safeness, acceptance and connection with themselves and others. Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living will be an invaluable manual for mindfulness teachers, therapists and counsellors wishing to bring the ‘care’ back into healthcare, both for their clients and themselves. It can also be used as a self-help guide for personal practice.
Integrative psychotherapy is a groundbreaking book where the authors present mindfulness- and compassion-oriented integrative psychotherapy (MCIP) as an integration of relational psychotherapy with the practice and research of mindfulness and compassion. The book elucidates an approach which is holistic and based on evidence-based processes of change related to the main dimensions of human experience. In this approach, mindfulness and compassion are viewed as meta-processes of change that are used within an attuned therapeutic relationship to create a powerful therapeutic model that provides transformation and growth. The authors offer an exciting perspective on intersubjective physiology and the mutual connection between the client’s and therapist’s autonomic nervous systems. Comprised of creatively applied research, the book will have an international appeal amongst psychotherapists/counsellors from different psychotherapy traditions and also students with advanced/postgraduate levels of experience.
Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Inquiring Deeply provides a refreshing new look at the emerging field of Buddhist-informed psychotherapy. Marjorie Schuman presents a cogent framework which engages the patient at the levels of narrative, affective regulation, and psychodynamic understanding. Blending knowledge of contemporary psychoanalysis with the wisdom of Buddhist view, she examines how mindfulness can be integrated into psychodynamic treatment as an aspect of self-reflection rather than as a cognitive behavioral technique or intervention. This book explores how mindfulness as a "self-reflective awareness practice" can be used to amplify and unpack psychological experience in psychodynamic treatment. Schuman presents a penetrating analysis of conceptual issues, richly illustrated throughout with clinical material. In so doing, she both clarifies important dimensions of psychotherapy and illuminates the role of "storyteller mind" in the psychological world of lived experience. The set of reflections comprises an unfolding deep inquiry in its own right, delving into the similarities and differences between mindfulness-informed psychotherapy, on the one hand, and mindfulness as a meditation practice, on the other. Filling in an outline familiar from psychoanalytic theory, the book explores basic concepts of Self, Other, and "object relations" from an integrative perspective which includes both Buddhist and psychoanalytic ideas. Particular emphasis is placed on how relationship is held in mind, including the dynamics of relating to one’s own mind. The psychotherapeutic approach described also delineates a method for practicing with problems in the Buddhist sense of the word practice. It investigates how problems are constructed and elucidates a strategy for finding the wisdom and opportunities for growth which are contained within them. Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis demonstrates in clear language how the experience of Self and Other is involved in emotional pain and relational suffering. In the relational milieu of psychotherapy, "Inquiring Deeply" fosters emotional insight and catalyzes psychological growth and healing. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians as well as Buddhist scholars and psychologically-minded Buddhist practitioners interested in the clinical application of mindfulness.
