The power of being present

I’ve been listening to Prof Kevin Vowles recently, as he presents his approach to pain using ACT. He made an important point about mindfulness that resonated with me: it’s that when learning to be fully present, it’s not how long we stray from our point of focus, nor even how many times we come back, the learning is that we can come back. Again and again and again. There are arguments about what mindfulness is, and I’m certain these will continue, but for the purposes of this post and for people just learning mindfulness, I’m defining it as the deliberate practice of attending to a focus (this could be a single point of focus, or it could be broader – the practice is about being deliberate and self-regulating where attention is being placed), and ‘orienting’ towards sensory experiences in the moment with curiosity, openness and willingness to accept what shows up. This is a definition broadly adopted from Bishop et al., (2004). A review by Leca and Tavares (2022) looked at mindfulness for people living with fibromyalgia and found, albeit with reservations brought about by study design, that mindfulness does have promise for this pain problem. They used fairly stringent criteria for selecting the studies included in their analysis, resulting in only seven eligible studies, from an initial 160 results. What they found was that mindfulness helped participants experience better quality of life, and this was influenced ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: ACT - Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Chronic pain Coping strategies Professional topics Research hypnosis mindfulness Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs