Letting Go Archives - Mindful Happiness

May 26, 2016 By Admin

Meditation on the Feeling of Letting Go

Meditation on the Feeling of Letting Go – Pacification!

Pacifying the mind is a desired outcome of regular, stable meditation practice. Pacification may be done via meditating on the breath, general mindfulness awareness, vipassana, and various other forms of meditation. However, the wise mind skill of “letting go” of unhelpful, negative, and harmful thoughts and emotions may be more difficult for many people, even many meditators. In this post I hope to teach you how to LET GO. Since letting go is much more than a cognitive action, it is necessary to examine other human processing channels – especially sensation, body movement, and emotion. “Monkey Mind” can be pacified! Pacifying “monkey mind” when it contains strong negative objects of awareness will require a bit more practice and determination. Discernment of finer details in thoughts, sensations, body movement, and emotions will be necessary. Let’s begin.

Begin with a comfortable but functional meditation posture.
Pay close attention to your breath just as it is. Do not try to control it.
Now slowly begin to slow and deepen your breathing, noticing breath passing in and out of the nostrils, the chest area, and how your lower belly moves in and out.
Continue with abdominal breathing as long as it does not cause the opposite effect – making you anxious.
Now become aware of your mind, and the thoughts that are passing through it right now. Practice bare attention without making any evaluations or stories about the thoughts. Just let them pass.
Check your personal stability in posture, breath, and clear seeing regarding the coming and going of your thoughts. Still no judgments or analysis – just moving thoughts like a leaf in a stream.
At this point make a conscious effort to produce a negative thought you would rather not have in your mind. Just notice it! Drop judgment and the need to respond to the thought. Just allow it to be.
Notice that it tends to produce unwanted sensations and/or emotions – feeling associated with negative thoughts. Just notice. No need to respond.
It is important that your realize just how easy it was to intentionally produce a negative thought in your consciousness. Yes, we have automatic negative thoughts, and we have intentionally created negative thoughts. Both are unhelpful, unwanted and uncomfortable. The important thing is that thoughts – like breathing – can be under both voluntary and involuntary control. Positive thoughts are the same way.
Now give yourself a SUDs score (0 to 100) regarding the negative thought. The higher the score on Subjective Units of Discomfort, the stronger the unpleasantness is.
Let’s practice. Make the negative though more clear in your mind, then let it go. Just use your intention to let it go cognitively. Add sensation: get the thought going again, and feel it in your body. Intentionally let it go, and focus on the subtle change in sensation. Do it once again, but this time focus on the emotion the negative thought produces in your body. Focus on the thought; let it go, and notice the subtle emotional shift. Let’s add body movement to this process. This time let the thought go, and make an arm gesture as if gently flicking the thought away. If it helps use both arms at once.
Now practice it all at once. Produce the thought. Intentionally let it go cognitively, and notice the subtle shifts in sensation and emotions. Add you arm flicking movement. Really get into letting it go, over and over again. Do it one more time. Include cognition, sensation, emotion and the body movement. Now give yourself another SUDs score from 0 to 100 to see if the overall discomfort has been reduced.
Practice this skill often!!!!! If you relapse into autopilot mind, STOP and intentionally make a new thought.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

CLICK HERE or any image below to Order

Meditating in the Gap of Nothingness The Buddha taught about your four best friends, that is how the body changes physiology when you sit, stand, walk/move and every time you are lying down. Modern Western neuroscience now supports this statement of 2500+ years ago. Thich Nhat Hanh added the importance of your breath, walking meditation, […]

The Principles of Nature and Natural Healing This is an advanced post on Eastern views of healing. From ancient shamanic traditions all the way to today’s AMA approved procedures in energy medicine, healers have been trying to discover and integrate the foundations of nature into healing. This reality exists from shamanic rituals all the way […]

Practice Approaches to for Mindful and Enhanced Emotion Regulation Brought to us by way of The Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont Mindful Approaches for Enhanced Emotion Regulation; here are some approaches to practice. 1)In some ways you could understand the progression from auto-pilot mind to greater stability and equanimity of […]

Helping Professions and Emotional Balance Helping professions must practice to achieve emotional balance. Working conditions for the helping professions have become more and more difficult over time, especially with the advent of so called “helpful technologies” and ever-increasing governmental/funding requirements for documentation. When I started in the (behavioral health) field of clinical psychology and addictions […]

The Great Mother of Gratitude Meditation Sit in silence and take a few very slow, very deep breaths in and out. Relax within your personal comfort with eyes opened or closed. If you prefer your eyes to be open, hold you head level and gently gaze down a few feet in front of you. Continue […]

Review: Deepak Chopra’s Idea’s on ” The Future of God” Part 2 of 3 In part 2 of this 3-part series, I will discuss the role played by consciousness in various levels of spirituality. In the beginning, there was the word. The word is sometimes associated with pure consciousness, since without consciousness there cannot be […]

Intervention Skills to Calm Your Anxiety It is estimated that approximately 40,000,000 American suffer from an anxiety disorders, especially generalize anxiety and panic disorder. Sometimes general “talk therapy” fails to help improve your condition; you may need cognitive-behavioral therapy with research-based mindfulness skills or dialectical behavior therapy. CBT, MBSR, ACT and DBT are the evidence-based, […]

Risks and Solutions for Compassion Fatigue Perhaps nothing more than compassion fatigue causes more helpers to prematurely exit their fields. First responders are generally seen as the most at risk for compassion fatigue (and possibly PTSD), followed by emergency room medical staff. A third group, medical and clinical staff working with high risk terminally-prone patients is […]

Concentration Vs Mindfulness? Many people new to meditation often confuse the differences between mindfulness or accepted bare attention to whatever arises in the moment and concentration or strong penetrating awareness on one thing without distraction. Concentration is a more intensely focused and engaged form of mindful attention. Concentration is sustained, powerfully focused, one-pointed attentional awareness. […]

Meditation on Gratitude – Why it is so Important The daily rapid vibrations from our fast-paced and sometimes dangerous world may impact us in ways that make unhealthy norms of being. The struggle to feel good enough, to have enough, to be somebody, to keep up with the raging ads about what you need NOW and […]

Preverbal Trauma – Therapy Problems A. R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC Preverbal trauma (hereafter PVT) is one of the most pervasively troubling human conditions. PVT occurs when a preverbal child is exposed to parental, caretaker, or other forms of abuse. This abuse may be sexual, physical, or emotional. This form of abuse is so destructive because […]

Pursuit of Happiness – Mindful Happiness Gilbert, a professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, implies that we make mind-errors in our search for happiness. Happiness is a core human emotion, most often activated into consciousness via the midbrain reward centers and dopamine activation. Perhaps our hardwired brains are made to […]

“Ignorance” of Requirements Could End Your Clinical Career Recently various insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare fraud cases have been in the national headlines. Although these fraud cases grab headlines, the truth is that many clinically licensed helpers still do not understand clinical/legal documentation requirements. In Buddhism, “ignorance” gets in our way; we never approach true liberation […]

Mindful Leadership Skills: How to Lead in Wise Mind Ways Researchers dealing with leadership skills have noted several acquired characteristics of effective leaders. These same skills may be used in spreading “the word” about how mindfulness and wise mind practices reduce stress reactivity, enhance compassion, and expand the possibilities for human happiness, inner peace and […]

Advanced Buddhist Practices Abiding in Emptiness The various impediments (enemies) to abiding in emptiness are noted below. We have strong attachment to objects of mind and our sense door pleasures. We experience strong desire and cravings as our norms. We over-attach to forms of affection. We may become stuck in grief related to our experienced […]

How Most People Learn in Psychotherapy It is highly important that clients learn from their therapists. In most cases this includes alternative ways of thinking, emoting, and behaving. So what can we learn from educational research on how people learn? Of course we all know it begins with a solid therapeutic alliance – the […]

Gurdjieff’s The Fourth Way Meditations: A way of Being and Knowing Although Gurdjieff developed a whole way of being and knowing, including attentional practices, dance/body movements, group processes, and meditations here I will focus only on some of the suggested meditations. In particular, I include the meditations noted by his primary student (J. DeSalzmann, 2011). […]

Self-Help Journaling – Two Methods Generally there are two forms of self-help journaling: writing about worries and concerns OR writing about joy and happiness. In my more than 35 years of clinical experience I have not found the former to be very helpful. Most people stuck in negative mood states are not easily able to […]

Mindful Movement as Part of Practice Mindful movement is an accepted part of regular practice. Such practices as walking meditation, more vigorous yoga asanas, qi gong, and tail chi are all part of this respected mindfulness tradition. Here I will introduce you to a very simple pre-meditation movement sequence. Hope you practice it very soon. […]

Making the Best of the Holidays Thanks to Sounds True, we have many good suggestions for making the most of the holidays. It is a norm for the holidays to be happy and joyous, and it is a norm for many people for the holidays to be filled with emotional and behavioral challenges. To reduce […]