Self Awareness is Key!
Failing to get it “right” all the time is an expected part of this process, you will not get it right every single time. In fact, in the beginning you will probably fail a lot!! What we are going to do is remove the shame associated with this failure so you can learn from the experience and make changes to try again. This is what it means to build the life you want to live, and for some people putting this foundation in place is strict, and for others it’s quite relaxed, it really depends on what you need. All I ask is that you bring into this process an openness to change and a willingness to try new things, keeping in mind the whole time, if something isn’t working, we have to ask why, and not just keep banging away trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole, because that’s not something that works for anyone. We do this by building your ability to notice when things aren’t changing the way you want them too, understanding why this is, and making the adjustments you need to make from a nonjudgmental point of view.
We will be getting into the areas of support, and physical wellbeing later on in this chapter, and we will be building structure and schedule in your life throughout the entire course. Before we move on, there are a few basic skills we need to put in place as we step into building your awareness for the things that stop you Living the Life you Want to Live. These skills are part of the foundational work of practicing mindfulness, and we need to build these skills in support of developing healthy ways to cope with our inevitable emotional distress. Without these skills we will just blindly go through our days not noticing what’s happening, and struggling to see the reasons for the failures we are experiencing. These basic skills are as follows:
1. The Art of Mindful Breathing
2. Creating a Safe Internal Space
3. Accessing Your Wise Mind
4. Using the STOP Skill
All of these skills are taken from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, and Schema Therapy, and over the next few weeks, we will go over these in more detail and begin to put the things in place we need to, so you can get into the habit of practicing them every single day. Learning new behaviours is not just about knowing the skills we need to know, its not about just reading a book so we understand it, because understanding is just one part of the process. It’s also about practicing how we use these skills on a daily basis so that we can create the psychological muscle memory we need to create to form the new habitual behaviours.
Time and time again I hear people say things like, “Oh yeah, I’ve done DBT” or, “I did the 12 steps before.” However, with any program designed to help you with changing unhealthy behaviour patterns, its not just a case of doing these things one time, it’s a case of living the skills every single day. We have to accept that changing our behaviours means addressing our current lifestyle, because change is not just a thought process, its about taking actions to lead us into living the life you want to live, not staying stuck in the life you are currently stuck in. One of most important things that people often forget to do when they get emotionally activated is breathe. Let’s begin by looking at what it means to practice the are of mindful breathing.
