Mindfulness is an evidence-based approach that is accepted and taught across the UK by organisations such as the NHS. To become more mindful is to become more aware of the present moment, seeing things more as they actually are rather than always seeing things through the lens of habitual judgement and opinion. Being able to do this is an important part of high quality rapport-based communication practice.
The practice associated with mindfulness is usually called meditation but this does not mean that practitioners need to follow a religion. Over the past 30 years a lot of recognised research has developed mindfulness as an evidence based practice. One of the most instrumental people behind this work is Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His 8-week mindfulness based stress reduction programme is now taught in over 30 countries and is delivered by mindfulness schools that can be found in many towns in the UK and also to both patients and staff through the NHS. The accessibility of these courses means that it is now possible to study the mindfulness skill outside of the context of religion, for example Buddhist meditation.
My background with regards to mindfulness is through the Chinese health skill of qigong and tai chi. After working at Woolley Wood on a Wednesday, I teach the traditional Chinese skills of Wild Goose Qigong at my weekly evening class. I have studied this skill since 2001 and I love the relaxed flowing movements of the exercise routines. An important part of the skill is meditation and I find that the benefits of this mindfulness practice make a difference to many aspects of my life including my rapport-based communication practice. What follows is my interpretation of Kabat-Zinns attitudes of mindfulness which he details in the his book ‘Full Catastrophe Living’. As soon as I read this essay I saw the connection and thought it would be worth writing about these attitudes in the context of rapport-based communication practice.
Mindfulness attitudes and Rapport-based Communication
1.Non-judging
in order to see a person’s in the moment interests and behaviour as an offer or opportunity for interaction, we need to separate our judgements and opinions from our observation of the facts of what is happening. For example, when we reflect on video during mentoring at Woolley Wood, the most frequent feedback is that an assumption was made about the meaning behind a child’s behaviour. An example of this happened once when a child was stacking jigsaw pieces on a table. The teaching assistant I was mentoring sat next to the child and showed him how to fit the pieces together after which the child promptly stood up and walked away. I explained to the staff that the child was actually playing the game of stacking or making a tower and the teaching assistant had assumed that the jigsaw pieces must used only for the purpose that they were originally intended i.e. by laying them flat on the table and making a picture by fitting the pieces together. To me it seemed that the child walked away because the teaching assistant did not see things as they really were but instead responded to their assumptions about why the child was playing with the jigsaw.
The problem here is that it is very easy to make an assumption about what we see without noticing it. When we begin to pay attention to this quality of our mind it is common to discover, as Jon Kabat Zin notes, that we are making these assumptions all the time as we constantly generate judgments about our own experience. Almost everything we see is labelled, categorised by the mind and these judgements can come to dominate our awareness. In contrast, mindfulness is about paying close attention to the present moment-to-moment experience and, as best we can, not getting caught up in these ideas, opinions, like and dislikes. This orientation can allow us to see things more as they actually may be rather than through our own distorted lens or agenda.
Coming back to rapport-based communication we can see that, in the above example from Woolley Wood, a more mindful approach may resulted in the teaching assistant calmly observing the child stacking the jigsaw pieces and seeing that he/she was doing exactly that – stacking pieces. An offer by the staff member could therefore have been to sit and join in with the stacking rather than the what she did in the example which could been received as a demand: correcting the child and showing him how really to play with a jigsaw.
Does this mean that making judgements about the child’s behaviour is wrong? Not at all. We need to make in-the-moment judgements and decisions frequently; the obstruction to our practice is the habitual making assumptions and reactions. In contrast to this, our aim is to be aware of when we are making an assumption and to knowingly make judgements about what we see.
Reference
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York: Bantam Books.