I’ve just begun teaching a new class on Mindfulness at the Methodist Church and thought it might be appropriate to cover the topic in this column. The actual title of the class is: Rising Up When Reality Slaps Us Down: How to Keep Shining When the Darkness Comes. I am using a book by Russ Harris titled, The Reality Slap, How to Find Fulfillment When Life Hurts.
In promoting the class, I wrote the following: Life does not always work out the way we want. Sometimes reality slaps us with an unwelcome surprise. People let us down. Jobs are lost. Some of us struggle with illness or the death of a loved one. Sometimes we pursue a goal and fail to achieve it. When we feel slapped, slammed or crushed by pain and loss, how can we carry on? How can we find peace and hope in the midst of deep fear and sadness? What tools and methods are useful to move us toward healing?
The purpose of this class is to help students gain tools and learn methods that enable them to mindfully cope with life when it hurts. As we come to understand how avoidance and resistance strategies increase our pain and suffering, we can open ourselves to developing more effective methods of relating to our experiences. We can’t get rid of psychological pain. We can’t erase our emotional suffering. However, we will learn how using specific, science-based skills of mindfulness free us from our suffering and enable us to feel stronger, healthier and whole as we lead richer, fuller and more rewarding lives.
I chose to focus on this book for several reasons. The topic is universal. Each of us has experienced emotional pain. All our lives we have faced situations or circumstances that involved unexpected loss or unwanted stress. All of us know what it is like to not get what we need or want. When we pursue a goal and fail, we hurt. We all know what it means to lose. Each of us has likewise tasted the pain of receiving what we don’t need or want. When reality slaps, it stings.
Another reason I chose this book is that it is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an extremely effective mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapy that has transformed how psychologists like me help people struggling with depression, anxiety and various emotional disorders.
The final reason for this book is the author. Russ Harris, an Australian medical practitioner, turned to ACT to help his patients and discovered he possessed a unique ability to communicate the essence of this powerful methodology. Harris is the author of several excellent ACT books including The Reality Slap, The Confidence Gap and the international, best-selling book, The Happiness Trap (the source book for a previous class I taught).
What is ACT? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a revolutionary, empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility.
What is psychological flexibility? One of the ways that ACT has transformed our understanding of human behavior is that it assumes “that the psychological processes of a normal human mind are often destructive and create psychological suffering.” In other words, it is not “normal” to be happy or healthy. Instead, what is normal, common or typical for human beings is to struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings much of the time.
Steven Hayes, the principal founder of ACT, calls this “the ubiquity of human suffering.” With ACT, we are not aiming to make our clients happy. We are not interested in teaching them the value of positive thinking or reducing their symptoms of depression or anxiety. Instead, our goal is to help our clients develop psychological flexibility, which is the essential and necessary requirement for emotional health and well-being.
Psychological flexibility means “contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.”
This simply means minding our minds. Instead of getting lost in our thoughts, we can step back from them, notice how they help or hurt us and if necessary, “defuse” from them. Same with our feelings. Instead of getting swept away in a flood of strong emotion, we can learn to accept and allow them to exist as we hold them lightly. Rather than fight or resist our inner experience, we connect with what is most important or valued as we seek to live a life based on these core, vital values.
Mindfulness is not meditation. We can meditate mindfully but mindfulness is much more than a meditation practice. As we are defining it, mindfulness is a method of daily alertness or deliberate intentionality whereby we identify with the aspects of our conscious experience that notices and is aware of or observes reality as it presently exists, instead of thinking about, ruminating or struggling with it.
Harris writes, “Mindfulness is a mental state of openness, awareness and focus, and meditation is just one way among hundreds of learning to cultivate this state. Mindfulness is about waking up, connecting with ourselves, and appreciating the fullness of each moment of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn calls it, ‘The art of conscious living.’ It is a profound way to enhance psychological and emotional resilience, and increase life satisfaction.”
According to Harris, practicing mindfulness helps us:
- to be fully present, here and now
- to experience unpleasant thoughts and feelings safely
- to become aware of what we’re avoiding
- to become more connected to ourself, to others and to the world around us
- to become less judgmental
- to increase self-awareness
- to become less disturbed by and less reactive to unpleasant experiences
- to learn the distinction between ourselves and our thoughts
- to have more direct contact with the world, rather than living through our thoughts
- to learn that everything changes; that thoughts and feelings come and go like the weather
- to have more balance, less emotional volatility
- to experience more calm and peacefulness
- to develop self-acceptance and self-compassion