Mindfulness Therapy

Meditating on your breath is the most popular mindfulness exercise. Sit in a dignified but relaxed way. Close your eyes. Simply focus your attention on how the breath comes in and goes out. Feel how it touches your nostril or mouth. Feel how your abdomen expands and contracts. Start with just several minutes. Slowly increase the length of your practice according to how you feel.
Remember, it is totally normal for beginners to lose focus or have distracting thoughts while meditating. That’s okay! It doesn’t mean you are a bad meditator or a failure, or mindfulness is “just not for me.” This is an opportunity to learn to be compassionate with yourself and be patient. Simply invite your attention back to what you are meditating on. If your attention wanders away, simply repeat the process.
For people with trauma history, breathing may not be the most suitable exercise. Some people may feel their body shuts down or they start to dissociate when they focus on breath. In this case, more active types like moving meditation or eating mindfully may be more suitable.

Vipassana, or insight meditation, is another powerful mind training originated from Buddhist tradition. The westernized version of Vipassana is often called body scan meditation. Through focusing your mind on the body, it helps you to experience the interconnection of physical sensations and the mind. Meditation is a journey of self-exploration. When reaching a meditative state, you would start to understand how the human experience of self is a construction of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. These things are experienced by me but are not “me”. A lot of human suffering comes from the ego’s identification with the body or feelings, and impulsively reacts to them. Freedom from suffering is the goal of Vipassana. By training the brain not to react to impulses from the body, the mind achieves peace and freedom.
To practice Vipassana, you need to sit at a quiet place in a relaxed way. Shift your attention through every part of your body from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Do it slowly and attentively. Stay at one place for one minute before moving on to the next. Simply observe the physical sensation without any judgment or reaction. You may notice subtle and coarse sensations. Sometimes no sensations – that’s okay too. With coarse sensations (e.g., numbness in the legs), stay there longer to observe if there’s any changes in that area. Keep equanimity while scanning through the body. It usually takes 20 min to get into a meditative state. Start from 10 min at a time, then increase to 30 min or even an hour when you are more advanced.

Another way to harness control over where you mind goes is to use compassionate statements and good wishes on yourself. Our mind is often very active ruminating over various things, jumping from one thought to another. When our mind gets stuck on negative things like thoughts of anger, questioning why someone has hurt me, fearful thoughts of what might happen in the future, we start to feel miserable. These feelings may compel us to act in certain ways, or keep us from focusing on things that make us happy and peaceful instead.
When you notice your mind is getting absorbed into a negative cycle like this, you can put a brake on it, and redirect it to focus on these positive statements: May I be happy. May I be in peace. May I be safe. May I be free from suffering. You can make up statements that you resonate with. Keep repeating these statements and let you mind solely focus on them. If the mind wanders, it’s okay. Simply bring it back to the phrases. In a few minutes, you may start to feel better.
When you practice enough self-compassion, you may start to extend these good wishes to other people around you. It helps you to foster compassionate attitude, and makes it easier for you to deal with difficult people in your life.