Mind-Body Awareness as a Therapeutic Approach

Awareness of the body and mind in its most general sense is about having the choice to wake up from a life on autopilot and being sensitive to the diversity of everyday experience. While we are practicing awareness, we can learn to collect ourselves and find flexibility of feeling, thinking, and sensing at the same time. We cultivate a nonjudgmental, respectful approach towards ourselves, others, and the environment. Nonjudgmental does not mean that we never have a judgement in our mind, but we try to be aware of our judgements. We decide not to believe a judgment fully. We don’t stick to it or express it immediately. We rather let our judgments pass as if they were clouds. Doing so creates space for an alternative response.

When we cultivate awareness of the body and the mind, the flow of energy and information enters our conscious attention and we can both appreciate its content and come to regulate its flow in a new way (Siegel, 2007). In the Mind-Body Awareness approach, what seems disorienting at first is that we focus more on the quality of the flow than the content. In Western culture we learn to identify with the objectives of our mind: For example, we think about a problem, sense being tired, or feel stressed. But we seldom are interested in the quality of the awareness of our problem, exhaustion, or stress (Bohm, 1996).

Mind-Body Awareness invites us to study this quality, and at the same time we learn to be less reactive towards the content of our perceptions. While cultivating awareness we explore what we feel, think, and sense, as we would observe any phenomenon. We let our focus move between the different aspects of our experience and notice their interrelation. We try to be patient, flexible, and accepting at moments of stagnation, insecurity, and disorientation. And step by step we realize that we are centered and connected and we get access to a state of just being. We experience the body as the center of existence, not as a focus, but as a reference point of being in the world (Hutchinson, 1994). In this state the focus can move freely and quietly. We talk of oscillating attention that moves back and forth. The metaphor I chose to illustrate this is the three-fold infinity sign, which lies sideways symbolizing the fact that there is no hierarchy among the three levels of perception.