Resources
To support you on your journey
We have gathered a wide variety of resources to help you with your practice of mindfulness and to support you on your path to well-being. The guided meditations and handouts can be especially useful in mindfulness-based therapies.
These mp3s can be helpful additions to therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).
This mp3 presents the fundamental practice of being present and stable.
Source: Integrative Health Partners
Mindful breathing is helpful in settling the mind.
Source: Melbourne Mindfulness Center
A good introduction to mindfulness.
Source: RMIT University Counselling Service
A mainstay of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for depression.
Source: Integrative Health Partners
A short meditation on the breath.
(5 minutes)
Source: UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
Guidance in mindful breathing
(15 minutes)
Source: Melbourne Mindfulness Center
Guidance in dropping the self-defeating struggle with anxiety.
Source: ACT for Anxiety, www.actforanxiety.com
Helping to develop affect tolerance and willingness to have our feelings.
Source: ACT for Anxiety, www.actforanxiety.com
This is a classic image for how to relate to thoughts.
Source: ACT for Anxiety, www.actforanxiety.com
A meditation to help you learn a mindful attitude toward thinking.
Source: ACT for Anxiety, www.actforanxiety.com
A guided meditation to help change your relationship with your thoughts.
Source: RMIT University Counselling Service
A brief meditation in mindfulness of the body.
(4 minutes)
Source: Melbourne Mindfulness Center
Mindfulness of the body.
(16 minutes)
Source: Melbourne Mindfulness Center
Mindfulness of the body.
(20 minutes)
Source: UCSD Center for Mindfulness
Body scan is an essential practice from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
Source: Integrative Health Partners
A guided meditation in loving kindness.
(15 minutes)
Source: UCSD Center for Mindfulness
Loving kindness meditation.
(23.50 Mb, 17 minutes)
Source: UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
Mditation on sounds, body experiences, and loving kindness.
(18.39 Mb, 12 minutes)
Source: UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
Metta is the practice of loving kindness.
(4.33 Mb, 3 minutes)
Source: UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
Mindfulness can enrich our everyday activities.
Source: RMIT University Counselling Service
An introductory exercise in mindfulness.
Source: Melbourne Mindfulness Center
Instructions in mindfulness meditation.
Source: RMIT University Counselling Service
A twenty-minute guided mindfulness meditation.
(17.87 Mb, 20 minutes)
Source: Integrative Health Partners
Basic mindfulness meditation instructions.
(24.09 Mb, 20 minutes)
Source: UCSD Center for Mindfulness
A short meditation to help come into the present moment.
(3 minutes)
Source: UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
A simple meditation timer, with bells.
(20 minutes)
Source: Integrative Health Partners
A simple guide to meditation in motion.
Source: RMIT University Counselling Service
Getting a bigger perspective on your experience.
(11.93 Mb, 10 minutes)
Source: UCSD Center for Mindfulness
Poetry can express the mindfulness experience with a faithfulness and elegance that transcends any instruction manual! Enjoy these poems we have collected. We hope they inspire your own mindfulness practice.
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things
This is the best season of your life.
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up and take that in,
That wind that lets us live.
Breathe before it's gone.
This piece of food cannot be eaten
nor this bit of wisdom found by looking.
There is a secret core in everyone not
even Gabriel can know by trying to know.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
Don't make any sense.
This we have now is not imagination.
This is not grief or joy.
Not a judging state,
Or an elation, or sadness.
These come and go.
This is the presence that doesn't!
What else could human beings want?
When grapes turn into wine,
They're wanting this.
When the night sky pours by,
It's really a crowd of beggars,
And they all want some of this!
This
That we are now
Created the body, cell by cell,
Like bees building a honeycomb.
The human body (and the universe) grew from this, not this
From the universe and the human body.
This is how a human being can change:
there's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races-the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you; that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall.
Now we will count to twelve And we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
Let's not speak in any language;
Let's stop for one second,
And not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
Without rush, without engines;
We would all be together
In a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
Would not harm whales
And the man gathering salt
Would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
Wars with gas, wars with fire,
Victories with no survivors,
Would put on clean clothes
And walk about with their brothers
In the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
With total inactivity;
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single minded
About keeping our lives moving,
And for once could do nothing,
Perhaps a huge silence
Might interrupt this sadness
Of never understanding ourselves
And of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive.
Now I'll count up to twelve
And you keep quiet and I will go.
An image about practicing meditation that may be helpful is that of standing at a railroad crossing, watching a freight train passing by. In each transparent boxcar, there is a thought. We try to look straight ahead into the present, but our attachments draw our attention into the contents of the passing boxcars: we identify with the various thoughts. As we attend to the train, we notice there's supper in one boxcar, but we just ate, so we're not pulled by that one. The laundry list is the next one, so we reflect for a moment on the blue towel hanging on the line to dry, but we wake up quite quickly to the present once again, as the next boxcar has someone in it meditating and we recall what we're doing. A few more boxcars go by with thoughts clearly recognized as thoughts. But, in the next one is a snarling lion chasing someone who looks like us. We stay with that one until it's way down the line to see if it got us. We identify with that one because it "means" something to us. We have an attachment to it. Then we notice we've missed all the other boxcars streaming by in the meantime and we let go of our fascination for the lion and bring our attention straight ahead into the present once again.
We stick to some and we don't stick to others. The train is just there - and the silent witness who's standing at the crossroads also seems to be there. Those are the first stages of trying to be mindful, trying to stay in the here, and now.
Then, as we're a bit more used to being aware of the contents, we start noticing the process of the train going by-just boxcar after boxcar-and our attention doesn't follow every stimulus: we don't keep getting lost down the track in the past or anticipating what's coming from the future. So, we're looking straight ahead, not distracted by any of the contents, when all of a sudden, one of the boxcars explodes as it goes by. We're drawn out into that one, we jump into the action in that boxcar. Then we come back with a, wry smile full of recognition that it was just an image of an explosion, just a boxcar thought. And, again, we face straight ahead with just the process of passing boxcars, when there we are beating our spouse in one of the boxcars. There's all kinds of stuff in the mind. And we're going to follow it, to be pulled by it, until we start seeing the impersonal, conditioned nature of the contents and recognize the perfect flow of the process itself.
Then, we notice as we look straight ahead that we're starting to be able to see between the cars. And we begin to see what's on the other side of the train, what is beyond thought. We experience that the process is occurring against a background of undifferentiated openness, that, moment to moment, mind is arising and passing away in vast space.
As we experience the frame of reference in which all this melodrama is occurring, it begins freeing us from being so carried away - even by fear. We start seeing. "Ah, there's the exploding boxcar trick again," or "There's the angry boss one again." Whatever it is, we start seeing it as part of the process. We see it in context. The small mind that identifies with all that stuff starts becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, starts encompassing even itself in a mind so vast it has room for everything and everyone, including the train, and the observer. And, then, even that fellow standing at the crossroads watching turns out to be just the contents of one of those boxcars, just another object of mind. And awareness, standing nowhere, is everywhere at once.
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what will be, darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn,
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
These handouts and worksheets can be helpful additions to therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).
A brief and surprisingly comprehensive description of mindfulness.
Source: Centre for Clinical Interventions, www.cci.health.wa.gov.au
Letting go" is a fundamental skill in all therapies.
Source: Centre for Clinical Interventions, www.cci.health.wa.gov.au
This is a fundamental practice of being present and stable.
Source: Centre for Clinical Interventions, www.cci.health.wa.gov.au
This is an essential feature of ACT.
Source: The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety by John P. Forsyth and Georg H. Eifert / New Harbinger Publications 2007
Useful in ACT, this is one of several aids that will help to clarify your values.
Useful in ACT, this is one of several aids that will help to clarify your values.
Useful in ACT, this is one of several aids that will help to clarify your values.
The FFMQ is one of the most comprehensive instruments to measure trait mindfulness.
The precursor to the FFMQ, it is still used in mindfulness research.
A classic self-report measure that investigates our lapses in mindfulness.
A helpful worksheet for MBSR, MBCT, and anyone interested in developing a regular meditation practice.
Helpful in our Mindful Eating classes.
To record pleasant experiences in MBCT and MBSR.
To record stressful experiences in MBCT and MBSR.
A worksheet to help you remember to be mindful throughout your every day life experiences.
Helpful papers by members of our staff, and links to Amazon.com to purchase some of the books we recommend
The advent of the relational perspective in psychoanalytic theory has opened up exciting new prospects for integrative psychotherapy. My own integrative model draws on self psychology and attachment theory for ideas about development and treatment, but also posits the need for active techniques at times to help with troubling symptoms. In addition to using interventions from behavioral and cognitive behavioral traditions, my treatment approach has been evolving to include a variety of mindfulness based strategies. In this article I focus on interventions I use most often to help patients with two major domains: self regulation (which includes affect management and perspective on the self), and self-initiated behavior change. Case examples illustrating the interplay of symptom-focused work and more dynamic exploration are provided.
Attachment theory is well positioned to serve as a foundation for assimilative psychotherapy integration. It has an exceptionally strong empirical base and provides a life span developmental framework often absent in current treatment models. Attachment theory focuses on the need for proximity to a sensitive caregiver in childhood who provides a sense of security and a safe base from which to explore. Affect regulation and relational behavior in later life are greatly affected by the vicissitudes of attachment relationships, with significant implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy. Attachment theory should help bridge the current gap between researchers and practitioners because it underscores the centrality of relationship in the therapeutic process but possesses a long tradition of empiricism. I propose three criteria that a foundational theory requires at this time and suggest that attachment theory satisfies them with its breadth of explanatory power, strong research base, and potential for integration with a wide array of other methods.
Early psychoanalytic perspectives were characterized by an emphasis on purported unconscious processes that contraindicated direct interventions with symptoms. However, the modern relational psychoanalytic approach offers a sophisticated base for the assimilation of action-oriented techniques. I provide a rationale for including a direct focus on symptoms in some treatments and argue that symptom intervention alone will be insufficient in many cases. My integrative model permits direct work with symptoms as well as an appreciation of their biopsychosocial etiology within a particular context. Symptom-focused dynamic psychotherapy is informed by current relational perspectives including attachment theory and self psychology. Action-oriented techniques from the cognitive– behavioral tradition may be incorporated on the basis of the patient’s needs and the intervention’s usability within a particular therapeutic relationship. Integrative treatment fosters the development of a consolidated and integrated self and promotes secure and balanced relationships with others.
Symptomatic disorders such as substance abuse, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety states can cause significant life impairment in patients. The author proposed that an optimally responsive, analytically oriented treatment for an individual with symptomatic distress may involve the use of active symptom-focused techniques. Reduction of symptomatic problems strengthens the self and facilitates deeper levels of self-exploration and therapeutic involvement. Techniques originating in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral orientations may be implemented in an analytically informed treatment and adapted accordingly. Current psychoanalytic models such as self psychology and some other relational approaches that emphasize the importance of empathic appreciation of a patient's perspective and optimal responsiveness to the individual can encompass such an integrative approach.
The developmental insights of attachment theory as applied to children and adults suggest that insecure attachment correlates with relational difficulties over the course of time. Specifically, individuals with an avoidant attachment style who have been rebuffed by caregivers in childhood will be defensively constricted and unable to love in adulthood. These patients present particular challenges in treatment because they have become organized around avoidance of affect and relationship. Theories of treatment and technique that seem related to the successful resolution of such difficulties are discussed. Curative factors include a focus on defenses against relational longings, interpretation of and provision for certain selfobject needs, and a relatively high level of therapist self-disclosure. It is suggested that an integration of the findings of attachment research with relational theories that focus on treatment has potential to advance psychoanalytic thinking.
The emergence of a relational perspective in psychoanalytic thought suggests the need for new paradigms of symptom formation. In addition, biopsychosocial data on the etiology of a number of specific disorders have been accumulating. Self psychology is proposed as a relational model of psychopathology that can be incorporated into a biopsychosocial paradigm of symptom formation for Axis I disorders.
Four specific pathways to symptom formation are outlined. The first consists of a self-state of impending fragmentation that is then warded off through involvement with a substance or activity, as in addictive disorders. The second denotes a state of fragmentation without a behavioral means of self-restitution other than avoidance, seen in anxiety disorders. The third involves the use of a symptom as a compromise formation among conflicting impulses as a result of psychological trauma, as in dissociative and somatoform disorders. In the final pathway that I outline, symptoms such as depressive states and work inhibitions result from an internalized conflict between maintaining needed relationships and pursuing self-differentiation. Both internal conflict and developmental deficit are central in the genesis of symptomatic disorders.
This article describes a treatment approach for the symptom management of bulimia that is a synthesis of various techniques, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, response prevention, relapse training, and psychodynamic therapy. The model has been a useful teaching tool for both staff and patients in both group and individual formats. In addition to describing the treatment model, this article briefly addresses some of the challenges of integrating behavioral and psychodynamic interventions in the treatment of this patient population.
A review of Psychology Moment by Moment: A Guide to Enhancing Your Clinical Practice With Mindfulness and Meditationby Elise E. Labbé (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2011).
A review of The Zen Impulse and the Psychoanalytic Encounter by Paul C. Cooper (New York: Routledge, 2010).
A review of Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism by Andrew Olendzki (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010).
A discussion of mindful eating in relation to bariatric surgery.
Zen meditation, or zazen, has attracted the interest of many psychotherapists. The teachings and practices of the Soto Zen tradition are understood as encouraging important areas of both psychological and spiritual development. Zen, like the relational psychoanalytic theories, encourages its practitioners to become aware of the fundamentally distorted aspects of an overly individualistic view of human experience. As a spiritual practice, zazen increases the practitioner’s tolerance of the Wholeness that Buddhists refer to as Emptiness. As a psychological practice, it helps us to be more flexibly and intimately present with our patients. An effective therapeutic process, even of the most secular type, will often contain elements of the meditative process of zazen, and failure to actualize this in psychotherapy can have a negative impact on our ability to understand and help our patients.
Kwok, Yenni (2005). “Head Space” (an interview with Roger Thomson). South China Morning Post, July 15, 2005.
Barbour, Cary (2001). “The Science of Meditation” (an interview with Roger Thomson). Psychology Today, May/June 2001.
If you would like to read more about mindfulness practice, we highly recommend Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Wherever You Go, There You Are.
An excellent and sensible approach to eating that does not rely on dieting.
Albers, Susan (2003). Eating Mindfully. New Harbinger Publications (Oakland, California).
Susan Albers' approach to mindful eating is very similar to our own.
There are many web resources that can support your mindfulness practice. Here, from both near and far, are a few of them.
This blog contains reflections on mindfulness, psychology, and mindful living. It is an attempt to encourage all of us as we practice mindfulness and participate in mindfulness programs at Integrative Health Partners.
Information about the Millennium Park Zen Meditation Group, sponsored by Integrative Health Partners.
Lots of resources on mindfulness research and practice.
Resources for mindfulness research and practice.
Mindfulness in Australia.