What Are Mindfulness Skills? (Part 1)
In this podcast episode, I’m addressing the question: What Are Mindfulness Skills? We’ll be covering a list of learnable abilities and traits we are developing through mindfulness practice. What are these skills, and why pay attention to them?
Episode Details:
A skill is something you deliberately train – it’s not just an innate quality, personality characteristic, or talent that you’re born with. We might also talk about some of these as “benefits” we gain from mindfulness, but thinking about it in terms of “mindfulness skills” reminds us that these outcomes are learnable, and that we can grow through our practice.
Learning Mindfulness Beyond Sitting Meditation
This topic is relevant to Mindful Movement because if we’re going to practice mindfulness beyond the traditional sitting practice, or in an alternative way to make meditation more accessible, we need to consider what it is that we’re attempting to cultivate.
What is the essence that the techniques are designed to teach us? Basically…how do we know we’re still practicing mindfulness?
There are many creative ways we can experience and practice mindfulness. I’ve heard many people say “running is my meditation,” or “I find mindfulness in cooking, or art, or knitting.” And I think that’s absolutely valid. Personally, I’m a big fan of practicing and teaching mindfulness through movement forms like Qigong and Yoga, and my hikes in nature are very connected to my mindfulness practice.
But, to use an activity (that’s not traditional meditation) to genuinely develop mindfulness, to truly progress and experience the benefits of practice, we need intention and some idea of where we’re going.
That’s where mindfulness skills come in. If we can identify some of the skills developed in traditional mindfulness practice, we can bring them into any meditation, movement style, exercise, creative activity, or daily life situation that we want. You can simply ask yourself: what are mindfulness skills I can bring to this moment?
And, ultimately, this is great for any mindfulness practitioner (even the champion sitters), because integrating mindfulness fully into day-to-day life is truly the goal.
What Are Mindfulness Skills? Here’s My List:
1) Being present (present-moment awareness)
2) Embodiment (being in your body)
3) Steady Focus
4) Ability to shift attention
5) Deep Listening
6) Intention
7) Non-judgment (suspending interpretation)
8) Being with emotions without getting lost in them
9) Decreasing Reactivity
10) Acceptance (allowing things to be as they are)
11) Recognizing impermanence
12) Observing thoughts and tracking thought patterns
13) Investigation
14) Relaxing identification with emotions and thoughts
15) Noticing habits that create more stress or suffering
16) Letting Go
17) Increasing kindness, compassion, and empathy
18) Cultivating appreciation and gratitude
19) Developing Patience
20) Nurturing Perseverance
In this episode, I will introduce the first nine of these mindfulness skills. The rest of the list will be covered in Part 2, coming out in a few weeks.
Just as a note, when I googled “mindfulness skills,” most of what came up was related to DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), which is a well-respected mindfulness-based therapy. DBT outlines a set of six “mindfulness skills” as an important part of their framework. But for our purposes here, I’m thinking about mindfulness a bit more broadly, as wisdom practice (connected to its Buddhist roots) that anyone might do to create a more fulfilling life.
I think this topic can help to flesh out our understanding of what mindfulness is, and why we might put energy into practicing it. When you see the scope of what we are developing in a full-spectrum mindfulness practice, you see that it’s not just another quickie technique, or superficial buzzword.
And, if you have another activity you consider your form of meditation – like running, or walking in nature, or knitting/crocheting, or cooking – I encourage you to reflect on which mindfulness skills you are developing. That way you can steer your activity towards a deeper and more expansive practice that truly gives you the benefits of meditation.
Resources and Links from this episode:
- This blog post, “When You Meditate,” by Jack Kornfield, well-known Buddhist teacher and psychologist describes many of the same skills and benefits discussed in this episode
- I mentioned during the episode that I highly recommend Oren Jay Sofer’s book, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Non-Violent Communication
- You might also be interested to read this blog post from the Secular Buddhist Association on Skillful Versus Unskillful Thinking
P.S. As I mentioned during this episode, there is a Moved To Meditate course coming soon! Ease In To Meditation: A Movement-Based Mindfulness Course will start on January 28th. With 8 weeks of do-able lessons, you’ll explore mindfulness techniques through movement FIRST…then learn how to apply them in meditation.
