#4: The HOW Skills of Mindfulness

Would you like to introduce a mindfulness practice into your daily routine? Today, Ed joins Marielle once again and they continue talking about the mindfulness skills in DBT. In today's episode, they discuss what you actually do to practice mindfulness in the DBT framework. Listen in to find out more.

In the last episode, Marielle and Ed discussed the 'what' skills, or the things that you do, in order to practice mindfulness. These are observing, describing, and participating. Today, they will be talking about the 'how' skills, which are essentially how you observe, describe, and participate, and also the qualities that you want to bring to the way that you observe, describe, and participate. Tune in now for more!

Show Highlights:

• There are three 'how' skills. They are non-judgmentally, one-mindfully, and effectively.
• Talking about doing things non-judgmentally.
• How the 'how' skills deepen the practice of mindfulness when we're observing, describing, or participating.
• How our judgments can get in the way of our being in the moment.
• Learning to accept each moment like a blanket spread on the lawn can help us to observe without judgment.
• Why our judgments tend to create a lot of emotional suffering for us.
• Ed discusses the judgments and the resultant emotions that come up for him around rain.
• What happens when Ed is able to recognize his judgments, put them to one side, and focus on what's actually happening.
• Ed has found that practicing non-judgmental mindfulness around rain has decreased his reactivity towards rain.
• Noticing when you're judging and not judging yourself for the judging.
• Looking at toxic self-judgment that really causes so much emotional pain.
• Many judgments are based on inaccuracies.
• Judgments don't help to change behavior.
• Discernment is being able to acknowledge things that are helpful or harmful, and things that might be safe or dangerous, without judgment.
• In trying to be non-judgmental, we are trying to be factual.
• Practicing one-mindfulness is about just focusing on the thing in front of us.
• How focusing on one task at a time can lead to increased productivity.
• Being fully in the moment and practicing being one-mindful is really worth the effort.
• What it takes to become effective.
• Effectiveness is really about doing what works and playing by the rules.
• You need to have goals in order to be really effective.
• When we get stuck in a place of anger or hostility, we lose sight of the longer-term goals. Mindfulness gives us a moment to cool down some of the intensity of the emotion.

Links and resources:

You can find us online at https://bayareadbtcc.com/

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Please note that questions, and this podcast in general, are not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.