Mindful Social Work

D​‌‍‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‍‍‍​escribe how you have incorporated mindfulness (or another non-Western intervention) into your own life and into work at your social work site. On what basis do you know that this intervention is helpful? Resources Mindfulness in Real Life It is critical that before you start applying mindfulness techniques in working with clients, you have some grounding in mindfulness yourself. It can be easy to perceive mindfulness meditation and its action-based applications – e.g. mindful walking, mindful eating – as an escape from anxious thoughts. Certainly, by living in the present one can take a break from preoccupation with the past and the future. However, the true power of mindfulness lies in getting to know one’s thought patterns by observing them impartially. Otherwise, one is using present-focused awareness as an avoidance strategy and perpetuating one’s habitual ways of thinking that contributes to existing problems. This is not to say that there is no value in teaching clients how to shift their attention to the beauty of the moment. It’s just important to recognize that mindfulness goes deeper. If we are going to reach this deeper level of mindfulness with our clients, we need to be able to speak from experience. This is qualitatively different from most of our training. While our own mental health is of course essential to being able to help others, there are rarely explicit guidelines for improving it. We are encouraged to engage in self-care, including therapy when we recognize self-defeating patterns or see that anxiety or depression is interfering in our ability to learn and work effectively. But with mindfulness, the more we practice and experience what it’s like to sit with our experience, both comfortable and uncomfortable, the more we can accomplish three important goals Goal #1 – Mental Health Goal #1 is your own mental health. Experiential avoidance has been theorized to lie at the root of many mental health disorders (Hayes, 1999). When we flee from pain, we create suffering. How? On the anxiety side, we stoke that anxiety by teaching ourselves that we should be afraid of our own internal experiences – our guilt, our worry, our anger, our shame, our sadness. We learn to live in fear of ourselves, and by avoiding through distraction, addiction, intellectualization, and other defenses, we only escape that anxiety momentarily. Wherever we go, there we are. On the depression side, we can’t be selective about which internal experiences we try to escape from. When we lose our capacity to feel emotions we label as negative, we also lose our ability to feel joy, love, compassion, and excitement. This is partly because emotional numbing becomes a familiar place for our minds, a default state. The loss of feeling also comes because so many of our meaningful experiences have duality built into them. If we are attached to someone and enjoy feelings of love and affection, we are bound to feel sad when they suffer or when they go away. Goal #2 – Courage Goal #2 is courage. When we learn to be okay with not being okay, we can be courageous as social workers. We can talk about difficult topics with our clients and colleagues, we can receive feedback without becoming defensive, we can confront injustice without fearing for our egos. Being grounded in a mindful approach to life allows us to be aware of what is happening inside us, even when this doesn’t fit with our image of ourselves. Goal #3 – Let Go of Attachments Goal #3 is letting go of attachment to goals. This does not mean we stop making efforts on behalf of our clients and their communities. It means that we come to accept that we can’t impose our ideals, our agendas, or our timetables on life. We remain steadfast in our values and accepting of the process. By understanding the vast web of interconnectedness through meditation we become humbler in seeing our part in that web, which gives us patience. This also applies to our own progress in living a mindful life. We know that like our clients, we are on an endless journey and can never say with honesty that we have “arrived.” If we do treat mindfulness as a way of life rather than a tool to be used, we gradually embody that accepting, peaceful presence that does more to convince clients of the value of mindfulness than any explanation. We provide a real example of how to be in the world, and we also benefit by becoming more closely attuned to our clients’ experience and the flow of the helping relationship. In so many ways, mindfulness becomes infused into our practice no matter what specific methods we are using. Loving Kindness Meditation The other, more recent application of Buddhist philosophy and practice is compassion-based, also known as loving kindness or by the Pali word metta. The core idea here is that we can teach clients to go beyond the confines of their preoccupation with self and show them how to allow in the suffering of others. By learning to connect their own suffering with universal suffering, they both reduce the sense of isolation they feel, and experience freedom from that suffering by placing the happiness of others at the center of their values As you can imagine, one must be careful with this practice because it could easily be misunderstood as a directive to not be assertive or set boundaries with others. For this reason, the practice often begins with one’s self. The key to understanding this practice is that it is primarily experiential rather than cognitive. We learn to open ourselves to imagining the suffering of others in a palpable way, sometimes visualizing it as dark smoke th​‌‍‍‍‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‍‍‌‌‌‍‍‍‍​at we take into our hearts. In the pause between inhaling and exhaling, that dark, compressed smoke is transformed into spacious, bright compassion and is breathed out toward the sufferer with the silent words, “May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.” Now that we are integrating these perspectives and methods into Western psychotherapy, there is a distinct danger that in the wrong hands they will do more harm than good. For example, a victim of intimate partner violence may use loving kindness to forgive her abuser and continue to expose herself to escalating attacks. Be sure too that you have your field instructor’s blessing and that they are familiar enough with mindfulness or compassion-based meditation to provide supervision on how to integrate these methods into your work with clients. As a social work student committed to social justice, you may be wondering: By embracing the idea that all suffering comes, ultimately, from our own minds, aren’t we in danger of minimizing the social and economic inequalities that create real burdens for people from oppressed and marginalized communities? How in fact do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory explanations for human problems? In truth, there is no contradiction between cultivating equanimity and acting for social change. When we see more clearly, we act more clearly. In fact, one of our jobs as social workers is to help our clients stay with their compassion and desire to reduce suffering in their lives and the lives of people they care about. When we are not used to feeling, letting in what is really happening to us and to others can be overwhelming. Many oppressed people have become emotionally frozen as a defense mechanism, and mindfulness and compassion are ways we can help them thaw. Still, clients may question what mindfulness or loving kindness meditation have to do with everyday problems like feeding the family or reintegrating into society after prison. You can often build a bridge by encouraging present awareness in the process of conversation, without labeling it as a meditation practice. “As you picture yourself in this job interview, being asked what you’ve been doing for the past five years, what thoughts and feelings come up? As you observe these thoughts and feelings coming and going, and don’t react, what happens?” When the connections between internal awareness and effective action are clear to us, we can help make them clear to those we serve. Indigenous Cultures and Healing Bringing healing traditions and their underlying worldviews into social work practice is complicated. We don’t want to appropriate cultural practices that should be protected from being misapplied or co-opted. We can’t easily embody the spirit of non-Western praxes without being grounded in those cultures. Yet it would also be a loss to ignore the perennial wisdom that provides important lessons for modern, Western disconnectedness from nature and each other. Being a globally aware social worker includes experiencing other cultures, especially those that are most different from Western cultures, as deeply as possible. Many of us do not have the opportunity to travel to other countries and live there long enough to be influenced in our worldview. For example, the Peace Corps offer avenues for cultural immersion, but those of us who live in multicultural communities can also cross into other worlds. If you have clients who are first generation immigrants from Kenya, for example, can you ask them to invite you to some cultural experiences in their neighborhood? Can you discuss in depth what they learned as children and teens about core issues: parenting, partnership, community, responsibility, birth and death, the roles of women and men, the relationship between the living and the dead, the past and the present? Asking such questions may not only educate you and help you do a better job of integrating Western and non-Western modalities. Such questions may also heighten your clients’ cultural self-awareness and access to internal and community resources. We’ve placed a strong emphasis on mindfulness as the most accepted and studied non-Western approach to mental health currently practiced. We’ve also touched on principles to use when bringing indigenous worldviews to bear on client problems and explored case examples to show two principles. First, by understanding ways that a cultural group has been colonized and oppressed, we can help clients recontextualize their problems and reclaim their sense of agency. Second, it may not be necessary to try to replicate traditional healing methods, especially among members of cultures straddling Western and indigenous worlds. Instead, we can humbly learn about the ways that non-Western communities are organized and help them repair rifts in the social fabric using their own sense of collective responsibility, as embodied in their own frameworks of meaning. This approach broadens our definition of empirically supported interventions to include more qualitative, grass-roots research into socially constructed realities, rather than the top-down Western mode of trying to generalize and standardize. References Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential approach to behavior