TheMHS Conference: Mindfulness Workshop

This afternoon I attended the Mindfulness Workshop run by Oli Doyle. The workshop was a practical expoloration of the role of Mindfulness in mental health services from brief to long term interventions.

The following is a snapshot of how the workshop went – overall it was a great combination of some theory with practical exercises that the room particpated in – it was a welcome moment from a hectic schedule and I think all participants (it was overflowing with many seated on the floor) found it extremely valuable.

Oli begins by discussing three key areas: thoughts, feelings and urges- he says mindfulness can help you deal skilfully with challenging times and thoughts.

He discusses the way people deal with stressful thoughts and painful thoughts and many times this is with self medication such as alcohol or tobacco or self harm etc…

Mindfulness can help empower people to change relationships with their thoughts feelings and urges. He discusses the use of a ‘grounding’ exercise which can be used in extreme situations of flight/fight.  He explains that mindfulness is not about getting rid of unpleasant thoughts but experiencing them with openness not being scared by them – but sitting with them.

We all start with some simple breathing exercises being aware of our surroundings and breathing.

We then move to a painful thoughts exercise where participants were asked to think of a stressful thought and repeat it for 30 seconds – we all then discussed how we felt about that – people felt teary, breathing was shallow and some felt difficulty in focusing on that thought. We then moved to repeating ” I am having that thought that … (a negative scenario)” – this made people feel more distant to that idea, it seemed slightly less painful. We then moved to the thought ” I notice I am having the thought that……(negative scenario)- once again the thought was more diminished.

In another scenario we were asked to think again about the painful thought BUT we had to visualise the thought being said by a cartoon character ie your thought could be ” I am a lousy partner she hates me” or ” I will never be good at my job i am silly”. People discussed which character some said characters from the Flintstones others thought of the voice of Homer Simpson – we all agreed it did in fact made it sound quite silly when it was put in this context. 

Oli spoke about changing the way we process thoughts (ultimately these become feelings and then urges – and possibly actions) – and how we can develop new pathways in the brain.

He discussed the approach of asking people to think of their top 10 most crippling thoughts and go through the above exercises every morning to diminish them.

To finalise the session a participant Thomas went through a role play of how a mental health worker would talk them through some of the practice/s.

All in all it was a most worthwhile workshop – very interactive, loads of excellent questions and a packed house to boot! next year we might need to get an auditorium – well done Oli.