At home in our bodies (interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Jeg kom tilfeldigvis over et svært interessant intervju fra 2002 med Jon Kabat-Zinn, som fokuserer på smertelindring, se http://www.bemindful.org/kabatzinnart.htm

Noen highlights:

Om smertens forskjellige dimensjoner: "There are really three dimensions to pain: the physical or sensory component; the emotional, or affective component, how we feel about the sensation; and the cognitive component, the meaning we attribute to our pain."

Om å endre sitt forhold til smerten: "You change your relationship to the pain by opening up to it and paying attention to it. You "put our the welcome mar.' Not because you're masochistic, but because the pain is there. So you need to understand the nature of the experience and the possibilities for ... learning to live with it," ... If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible."

Når smerten oppleves umulig å håndtere: "You have a number of choices. Let's say you have lower back pain. You can say, "I'm going to try to focus on my toes, even in the presence of back pain. The back's always there; I'll get to it sooner or later. Why don't I see if I can really learn to focus my attention where it's being asked to focus". Often, when you do that, the felt sense of the pain in the back lessens."
    But if the pain is too great, you can go to the region where the pain is and let the breath merge with it. Breathe in and feel the breath, or in your mind's eye see the breath moving down into the lower back. Then on the out-breath, as the breath lets go, see if you can allow the mind to let go. You're not trying to shut off the sensations from the lower back—just to experience the fullness of whatever happens as you let go.
    Then in the next moment, the sensations and the feelings and the thoughts might all come flooding back, and you've got the next in-breath to work with So it's a practice."

Om å observere smerten: "Basically, you're intentionally bearing witness to the pain rather than distancing yourself from it; we're not teaching mindfulness as a dualistic practice. Nevertheless, there's a sense that there's the pain, and there's the observing of the pain. It's important to understand that as an intermediate step toward ultimate liberation. It means that I can rest in awareness, then ask myself, "Is the awareness in pain in this moment?" And the answer invariably is, "As I look at it right now, the awareness of the pain is not in pain.'' When you realize you can rest in this awareness, the pain may be just as intense, but you're now cultivating equanimity and clear comprehension. You're seeing the pain as it is, as sensation. There is a knowing that it is nor pleasant. But the interpretation that the pain is killing me, or ruining my life, and all the emotions and stories that go with that, are seen for what they are. In that seeing, they often go into abeyance."

Om forventninger: "When you think that your practice should be working, then you've already fallen out of your practice and into expectations that the practice is going to achieve some kind of prefigured, desirable result. This need to get rid of is its own form of ignorance, and we need to look at our "I" statements. A worthy object of attention and inquiry is: Who is suffering? Who is in pain? We can ask that, but rather than coming up with an answer qua thought, we can drop into not-knowing and experience simply being aware."

Comments

[Lene Thomsen]

Dette er en rigtig interessant artikel, tak for det. I øvrigt har jeg lige stødt på et par meget interessante kurser i mindfulness. Der er bl.a. et kursus i stresshåndtering og i varigt vægttab og der er både mulighed for 1-dags kurser og længere forløb. Jeg har faktisk ikke vidst man kan tabe sig gennem mindfulness. Er ellers rigtig interesseret i mindfulness og praktiserer det dagligt. Så vil lige dele dette link med jer og håber I kan bruge det. Se linket her: mindfulness kursus