A Path to Mindfulness Through DBT

In Spring, 2017, while getting a mindfulness “booster” for myself and for my meditation practice at an all-day silent Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) retreat at The Center for Mindfulness at UMASS Medical School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, I was introduced to a poem entitled “The Way It Is” by William Stafford (1914-1993) that brought clarity to my own personal path to mindfulness.

The first 2 lines of the poem are as follows:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.

Hearing this poem was a catalyst for a well-deserved, long-overdue, moment to pause to reflect back on how I got to this very moment in my journey of mindfulness that began fourteen years ago in the Fall of 2004 in an outpatient Dialectical Behavioral Therapy group for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

I was 27 years-old at the time, and in my first full-week of my second-year internship as a Master's level social work student.

As part of my internship, I had been assigned to a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (or DBT) group to learn how to co-facilitate a weekly 90 minute Skills Training group with a senior clinician named Mark, who had been trained in this form of treatment for BPD, offered at a local Community Mental Health Clinic where I was doing my practicum.

I remember feeling nervous as I sat down for the first time amongst clients who had already had checked in with the therapist and the group about their progress and challenges with  discontinuing behaviors like non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal thinking, and using alcohol to numb, escape or avoid their own exquisite sensitivity to their emotional landscape.

But then, Mark began to talk to the group about something called “mindfulness,” and I was brought out of my own self-conscious internal dialogue, and into full, present attention.

It started simple enough: Mark asked the clients to bring their attention to one particular melody in a piece of familiar classical music. 

He used words and phrases like “observe,” “non-judgmentally,” “one-mindfully,” and “turning the mind,” to describe what quality of attention the group members should bring to the activity, and amazingly, all of the clients seemed to know exactly what he meant.

This simple exercise became my very first experience with mindfulness, and I distinctly remember having these two after-thoughts:

1.) “This is amazing!” and

2.) “This makes total sense.”

Since 2004, William Stafford’s “thread” of mindfulness has continued to weave in and out of DBT as I have worked in a DBT Program for nearly a decade.

The thread has also thickened with new colors weaved in from MBSR that I first took as a class in 2014 and then steeped into further with the Teacher Training Pathway at The Center for Mindfulness, and then added new dimensions with 5-Day Silent Mindfulness Meditation Retreats at The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and The Garrison Institute in Garrison, NY as well.

And now, at this point, mindfulness is so thoroughly weaved into both my professional and personal life in such a beautifully-complicated way, that I would not be able to un-do it even if I wanted to.

(I don’t.)

But why does any of this matter?

Why does it matter where we started our mindfulness journey?

 

 

What I realized is for me, like Dr. Marsha Linehan who created DBT and noted in an article in Mindful Magazine in June, 2011 in an article entitled: “Linehan Turned a Struggle Into a Therapy,” that the roots of my mindfulness practice being originally based in my offering of DBT to clients with BPD has absolutely informed the way I think about and practice mindfulness meditation.

You see, I am becoming part of a third generation of Western mindfulness meditation practitioners and teachers-in-training who’s roots in mindfulness are completely secular, and originally rooted almost exclusively in healthcare, which has unquestionably contributed to my particularly broad and egalitarian sense and a sensibility of mindfulness which I know is objected to by many.

But as Mr. Stafford writes:

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

So in the end, I think there must be both acceptance and flexibility about our path to mindfulness, but most certainly: awareness.

Perhaps you too might reflect on the roots of your own mindfulness meditation practice and how it has informed your practice as well.