Getting Started with Mindfulness in TF-DBT
United States Department of Homeland Security
Key Points
- Learning to become mindful involves expanding awareness in physical, internal, and external experiences.
- Mindfulness practice starts with learning to attune to your body.
- Mindfulness expands when you attune to your mind.
- Mindfulness expands further when you attune to everything in life.
- Unresolved trauma manifests somatically.
- Healing starts with mindfulness of the body.
Materials Downloads
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Transcript
Greetings and welcome to the third video in this module. In the previous video, we summarized the main components of mindfulness as awareness, acceptance, and action. In this video, we will discuss the concept of expanding awareness, and in particular why mindfulness training usually needs to start with awareness of the body itself, and especially in the case of trauma survivors. So, let’s get started.
There are three basic categories of experiences. The first category refers to physical experiences, in other words, things we experience in our own physical bodies. And mindfulness practice usually needs to start there, mindfulness of the body itself. A second basic category of experiences is whatever’s going on in our heads, in other words, thoughts and feelings, urges, etc., our psychological experiences. And then from there, the final category of experiences refers to everything else, anything that’s happening in the outside world so to speak. And mindfulness training usually needs to take place in that basic sequence, starting with mindfulness of the body, and then mindfulness of the mind itself, and then from there mindfulness of everything else.
Muesse, M. W. (2011). Practicing mindfulness: An introduction to meditation. The Teaching Company.
So why is that sequence so important? Well, for starters, we need to learn to be mindful of the body itself because if you think about it, we could only be mindful through the 5 senses plus the felt sense. That’s where we’re getting our information from, the 5 senses, and all of our other body sensations. And where are those senses or where are those sensations located? In the body. So how can we be mindful of anything else if we are not first and foremost mindful of the body itself? Think of the body as our mindfulness machine. We must first be mindful of the mindfulness machine, because it’s then through the body that we can be mindful of everything else.
Muesse, M. W. (2011). Practicing mindfulness: An introduction to meditation. The Teaching Company.