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Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

This free course, Mindfulness in mental health and prison settings, looks at the use of mindfulness in counselling and forensic settings. You will start by learning a bit more about the concept of mindfulness and how it can be understood and applied. You will then consider the different ways in which mindfulness can be integrated into therapy sessions, and what the benefits of these might be. After this, you will explore some of the specific ways in which mindfulness has been used in prison contexts. Finally, you will have the chance to think a bit more critically about the whole mindfulness movement after listening to a debate about how mindfulness is being applied in Western contexts.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD310 Counselling and forensic psychology: investigating crime and therapy.

Figure 1 ‘Seeing the light’ by Sue Cheval

Long description

Learning outcomes

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

After studying this course, you should be able to:

define mindfulness
practise mindfulness in daily life
understand how mindfulness can help clients with mental health difficulties
describe how mindfulness can be useful in prison settings
critically evaluate ‘the mindfulness movement’.

1 Mindfulness

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

Figure 2 Mindfulness

Long description

You may already have some ideas about what mindfulness is, given that it has become quite a buzzword in recent years. Before you go any further, watch this video created by The Open University about what mindfulness is and why we should care about it.

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Five reasons to care about mindfulness

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NARRATOR

Five reasons why you should care about mindfulness. Mindfulness is about focusing on the present moment, whilst at the same time accepting your feelings, thoughts, and body sensations. But why does mindfulness matter?

One: People have been doing mindfulness for centuries. Mindfulness is based on principles originating in Buddhist practises, amongst other things, and is often achieved through yoga, meditation, and breathing techniques. However, mindfulness is now recognised as something that can be of benefit, regardless of whether or not you have spiritual or religious beliefs. One way in which we can practise mindfulness is by setting aside time to sit silently and pay attention to the sensations of our breathing.

Two: Mindfulness can help you manage pain. The human condition includes pain. But the mind and body don't have to instinctively react to painful experiences. Mindfulness is a skill that allows us to be at least unthinkingly responsive to what is happening in the present so that our overall suffering might be reduced and our sense of well-being improved.

Three: Most of us can get really stuck in autopilot. We're usually caught up in unhelpful patterns of thinking and can end up operating on autopilot. This is mindlessness. For instance, during meal times, most of us eat too quickly to think about what we're consuming or reflect upon the experience of devouring our food. We might want to consider switching off the television or computer during meal times and really savouring the flavours of the food we eat and being alert to the experience.

Four: Many people are already benefiting from mindfulness in the United Kingdom and abroad. The Mental Health Foundation considers mindfulness as something that has real benefit. Mindfulness has become increasingly cited in the research.

Back in 1970, about two dozen articles were published related to mindfulness. By 2016, there were nearly 200,000 articles. As with any practise, it may not work for everyone, but there is increasing interest in its beneficial effects.

Five: We can all take time to stop and smell the roses. It's very easy to unintentionally enter a state of mindlessness, that means we overlook the things that might be really important to us. Hence, we all need to remind ourselves about the value of mindfulness. So the next time you take a stroll outdoors, notice how the plants and the trees change with the seasons, how the smells meet your nose, or how the temperature feels on your skin. Really appreciate being part of that particular moment.

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From the video, you will have learned that mindfulness is about focusing on the present moment and accepting your feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations. It is something that we can practise in meditation in order to bring that quality more into our everyday lives, and that can help us with emotionally and physically painful experiences. The next section will allow you to experience mindfulness for yourself.

1.1 Experiencing mindfulness

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

To really grasp what mindfulness is, it’s important to have some experience of mindfulness practice for yourself. You can’t really get a sense of it just from reading about it. Here you will learn about a basic form of mindfulness meditation that you can try. However, many people find it easier – especially at the start – to have somebody talking them through the practice.

Activity 1 Trying out mindfulness meditation

Have a go at a mindfulness meditation from an app or website. There are lots of apps with audio meditation practices that you can download to your device.

Some of the popular ones at the time of writing are:

Headspace
Stop, Breathe, Think
The Mindfulness App.

If you don’t want to use an app, the following websites are run by some of the major mindfulness researchers and practitioners in the UK and the USA. These pages include a number of audio meditations that you can play:

Pick one audio practice from one of these apps or websites, and have a go at a mindfulness meditation.

When you’re finished, think of three words or short phrases that describe what the experience was like for you and enter them in the text box below. There are no right or wrong answers; just write what it was like for you.

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Discussion

When mindfulness researchers Nugent, Moss, Barnes and Wilks (2011) encouraged a group of health professionals to do an activity similar to the one you just did, the kinds of things they said were that mindfulness enabled space to pause in life; that it deepened their relationships with themselves (through tuning into how they felt, for example); that it enabled them to observe things they wouldn’t otherwise have noticed (such as how tense they were), opening up the potential of changing these things; and that it was a way of paying attention that they could bring to any experience (not just to specific meditations like the one you did).

Participants in the study also said that being mindful often brought discomfort and uncertainty: that it wasn’t easy. Most accounts of people’s first attempts at mindful meditation include words like ‘boredom’, ‘pain’, ‘frustration’ and ‘anger’ more often than they do words like ‘calm’, ‘peace’ and ‘wisdom’, which we often associate with such practices. Quietly attending to ourselves doesn’t always bring peace. It often brings us face to face with things that we’d rather avoid. It is worth bearing this in mind when we decide to engage with mindfulness. We should be aware of the expectations that people tend to have, and the reality that most people experience.

You might ask yourself, if people’s experience of mindfulness can be quite negative, why engage with mindfulness at all? You’ll find out some answers to this question during this course, but for now it’s worth understanding that mindfulness is about becoming more able to stay with all of the thoughts, feelings and sensations that you have, easy or hard, rather than trying to get rid of the ‘negative’ ones and keep hold of the ‘positive’ ones. This is because, according to mindfulness, the capacity to stay with all of our feelings can help us to weather them when they are hard. Trying to ensure that we only have positive feelings often, paradoxically, makes us suffer more.

At this point you are invited to read a chapter from Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology(2017). Chapter 16, ‘Mindfulness’, was written by course authors Meg-John Barker and Troy Cooper for the Open University course DD310 Counselling and forensic psychology: investigating crime and therapy. Click on the link below to read this chapter before moving on to the next section.

‘Mindfulness’

2 Mindful therapy

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

In ‘Mindfulness’ from Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, you read about how mindfulness has been found to be helpful for many mental health difficulties, and you explored some of the ways in which mindfulness can work in counselling practice with clients.

Watch this animation, created by some of the course authors at The Open University, for a bit more about why the mindfulness idea of ‘being present’ is so useful – in general, and in therapy in particular.

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Being present in therapy – key ideas in therapy

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NARRATOR

No matter how good a therapist is -- how many books they've read or letters appear after their name -- they do need to 'turn up' to sessions. And that's not just physically, it's emotionally. A good therapist knows how to be present, to give their full attention no matter what the client's like or how difficult the subject matter. They don't always drift off and get distracted. They don't make clients feel like only certain sides of them are okay.

A good therapist can sit with the client, whoever they are, and whatever they bring. We're often taught that some feelings are okay and others aren't, which stops us navigating our emotions comfortably. By tolerating whatever a client brings, the therapists can show them a healthy way to relate to their own emotions.

You can practise being present through mindfulness, which comes from Buddhist teachings from over 2,000 years ago. The Buddha taught that human suffering is rooted in craving, trying to hold on to what we want and get rid of what we don't want. The Buddha stressed the importance of just being with our experiences, noticing them, without trying to change them. Mindfulness is about being present in your whole experience, whatever you're doing, thinking or feeling.

Therapists have to be present with themselves before they can be present with others. Some therapists teach their clients mindful techniques, such as meditation. Here, you sit comfortably and breathe, letting all of your sensations, thoughts and feelings come and go. Don't try to hold on to them or get rid of them, just notice how they bubble up and drift away. It's not easy, and you'll definitely get distracted. When this happens, just notice it and come back to the present moment, and the feeling of your breath. It's important to be gentle and kind with yourself.

You can practise being present during everyday tasks too, like washing up, brushing your teeth or walking the dog. The idea is to gradually shift your habit of trying to grasp what you want, and hurl away what you don't want, so that you can be more open to the whole of your experience. And it all starts with this very moment -- now

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Activity 2 Mindfulness in counselling

From reading the chapter and watching the animation, come up with a list of ways in which therapists or counsellors could bring mindfulness into their work with clients.

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Discussion

There are three ways in which counsellors can bring mindfulness into therapy:

counsellors offering mindfulness ideas and practices to their clients
counsellors practising mindfulness themselves
cultivating a mindful therapeutic relationship.

You’ll cover these in more detail next.

2.1 Bringing mindfulness into therapy

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

The three ways in which counsellors can bring mindfulness into therapy are now explored.

1 Counsellors offering mindfulness ideas and practices to their clients

Counsellors can offer mindfulness ideas and practices to their clients in individual sessions, or in groups.

In one-to-one therapy, counsellors could offer mindfulness as:

a way for the client to prepare for the therapy before it starts
a kind of ‘homework’ to engage with outside therapy, to observe themselves and their thoughts and feelings
something to do in the therapy hour; for example, at the start to ground them, or in order to ‘sit with’ a difficult feeling that comes up
practices they can do in order to continue the work of therapy once therapy is over, in order to keep making time in their lives for self-care and self-reflection.

2 Counsellors practising mindfulness themselves

In ‘Mindfulness’, from Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, you learned how important it is, from a mindfulness perspective, not to create a ‘them and us’ between therapists and clients, because we all struggle in similar ways.

Mindfulness practice can also help counsellors to develop important therapeutic qualities (Barker, 2013), these include:

Attention: Counsellors need to be able to focus their attention on the client. They also need to have a spacious awareness of everything that is going on in the therapy room, such as the client’s body language, the dynamic between themselves and the client, and any thoughts and feelings that are coming up for them as the client talks. Mindfulness is a good way to practise focused attention, and spacious awareness.
Empathy and compassion: These are the qualities which correlate most highly with positive outcomes of therapy (Cooper, 2008). There are loving-kindness and compassion meditations which directly cultivate our ability to empathise and to be compassionate with ourselves and with other people. Living in a culture which encourages judgement, criticism and comparison to others, we need to practise a different way of being, rather than it being something that comes easily.
Ability to sit with difficult feelings: Counsellors need to be able to sit with any difficult feelings that come up for the client instead of rushing to make them feel better, or giving them the message that those feelings are not okay. Joan Halifax (2011) says that meditation practice can help counsellors to learn how to sit grounded like a mountain, welcoming all emotions like the weather.
Self-awareness: It is important for counsellors to have self-awareness so that they can be there for the client, rather than bringing their own prejudices, assumptions or habits into the room. Sitting with themselves quietly, on a regular basis, can help counsellors to learn what assumptions they make, and how they tend to react.

3 Cultivating a mindful therapeutic relationship

You saw earlier in the video ‘Being present in therapy – key ideas in therapy’ that mindfulness is also a way of viewing the therapeutic relationship. Being present with the client, modelling compassion towards them and demonstrating how to stay with difficult feelings that arise are helpful in and of themselves.

Here are some practical ways in which a counsellor can cultivate a mindful therapeutic relationship:

doing meditation or journaling before sessions in order to be aware of where they are at, and to practise self-compassion
doing brief practices right before meeting the client, so that they’re ready to be present with them
employing mindful awareness in session: encouraging the client to attend to their whole experience and to give it time; noticing their own responses and slowing down to consider what to say and do next to best serve the client.

In the next section you will explore some of the ways that mindfulness can be used in prison settings.

3 Mindfulness in prisons

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

Figure 3 Prisoners meditating

Long description

In ‘Mindfulness’, from Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, you learned that mindfulness could be useful in prisons for a number of reasons:

levels of mental health difficulties – including depression, anxiety and suicide – are higher in prisons than in the general population. Mindfulness – particularly in group formats – is a useful, and cost-effective, way of tackling such mental health difficulties (Shonin et al., 2015)
prisoners tend to have higher levels of difficult emotions, such as anger, and more trouble regulating such feelings. Mindfulness can be particularly helpful with emotional regulation (Chambers et al., 2009)
prisoners also tend to have higher levels of substance abuse, which mindfulness can help to treat (Bowen et al., 2010)
linked to the above, there is evidence that prisoners who have taken part in sustained mindfulness programmes have significantly lower rates of re-offending (Auty et al., 2015).

3.1 Experiencing meditation in prison

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

Figure 4 Fleet Maull

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This is an excerpt from an interview with Fleet Maull (2005), who you read about in ‘Mindfulness’. Here he talks about his journey from being sentenced to 30 years in prison, to applying the meditation practices he’d previously learned in order to get through the experience, and eventually founding the Prison Dharma Network.

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Fleet Maull: waking up in prison

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FLEET MAULL:

As I was standing there getting sentenced, my knees literally buckled and my lawyer kind of held me up … When I went back to this county jail where I was being held, and awaiting a transfer to a federal prison and so forth. That's really when the reality of what I'd done to myself, what I'd done to my son, in particular, how I'd let down my family, my community, my spiritual teacher. It just hit me - a ton of bricks.

I finally had to face the truth of the incredible series of selfish decisions I'd been making for years. Justifying it in all kinds of ways. Thinking I was basically a good person. Thinking I love my son.

All of which on some level was true, but it certainly wasn't playing out in my actions. So I had to face that. And so that's really what began to transform things for me. I became radically dedicated to extricate all the negativity out of my life, and do something positive with this experience.

I was scared to death. I was in this county jail, hearing all the horror stories about prison. Unable to sleep, having nightmares all night long about prison rapes, just all the fears one might imagine, having anticipating going to a high security prison for thirty years.

I was devastated, but I knew that it was sort of like that moment when I was finally cornered, and I knew, I had to take everything I had received and apply it, just in a sense of surviving.

And I just started focusing on meditation and practicing it as much as I possibly could. I had no sense that I would even survive my prison time. Once I got there, I had even less surety that I would survive my prison time. But I wanted to leave my son some better legacy than just his dad went to prison, or even that his dad died in prison.

Well I worked in a number of ways. To begin with it was choiceless. My [inaudible] teacher, Chyogam Rinpoche, it was as if he was sitting right there on my shoulder. And here was an incredible man. So, I'm skeptical by nature. I was always kind of watching him like a hawk. As far as I could tell, 24/7, he was dedicated to nothing but the service of humanity. I had that example and there was no question that I was going to figure out some way to show up and serve and contribute in this world in which I found myself.

In this particular place, you started off in these 28 man dorms, on an upper bunk, and it was just bedlam, especially in the evenings. Just a crazy environment. But I would sit up on the top bunk and try to practice late at night. Then I discovered another alternative. At the entrance to these dormitories, there was like a broom closet. In there, were the trash cans and the brooms and the mops and everything. So I would go in there and clean it up. It was usually not too clean. I'd clean it up. Set the stuff outside so people had access to it, take a folding chair in there, and sit in there and do my practice.

And even through the summer months when it was just sweltering, I'd just sit in there and sweat, it was like sitting in a sauna. I began doing that, and people saw me doing that. There was a little window in the door, and sometimes they'd look in and they'd think I was you know "What's that crazy person doing?" In prison, interestingly enough, even if people don't understand what you're doing, if they recognize you're really disciplined and dedicated to it, they tend to respect it.

Also, I almost immediately got a meditation group going in the prison chapel. It wasn't easy, because when I first went down there and inquired, they said "No way. Prisoners don't start nothing around here." I found a way to just keep showing up down there, and I found there was a space that was open. I said, "Well, can I just sit here?"

They kind of looked at me like they couldn't figure out a reason to say no. So they said "Yes, but if anybody comes, you will have to leave." Anyway, I just started regularly going down. I got a few more guys to join me, and then I got the outer Shambhala community to name us as a Dharma study group, and the chapel started getting mail for this Dharma study group. We just kind of morphed into becoming an official group.

And the way men would just see things about my life, or they'd see me practicing up in that broom closet or up on my top bunk, and they'd kind of get curious. Like "What are you doing?" So I said "Well, come down and check it out." So that's one way that the meditation group attracted people. Over the years, it was a very transitional place, because there was a thousand medical patients, 600 medical, 400 psychiatric, and about 300, what they call general population, or work cadre inmates like myself.

Now, today what I know about from the work we do, about your typical prison meditation group, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these groups all over the country, that the typical structure is you do some practice, you have some open dialogue, and you do some kind of conscious movements - some yoga, some stretching, some qigong, something like that. And in the dialogue process part, people do surface a lot of the struggle and turmoil that they're dealing with. This may be because there's often an outside voice there, an outside facilitator to listen. When I go into groups today, that is often what's coming up.

But in the group that I led and facilitated all those years there was a little bit of that, but it mostly focused on learning the practice, and watching videos to get more teachings about the practice, and talking about the meditation instruction itself.

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Activity 3 How can meditation practice help prisoners?

Having heard the excerpt from Fleet Maull’s interview, use the box below to make a list of ways in which meditation or mindfulness practice can be helpful to people in prison.

Also, jot down any criticisms you have of the focus on mindfulness and/or meditation practices in prison.

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Discussion

From Maull’s interview you might have noticed the following things that he, and other prisoners, got out of their meditation practice:

something to fill, or structure, their time in prison
a sense of meaning or purpose: something worthwhile to do with the time, making sure something good comes from a bad situation
an air of being dedicated and disciplined, which elicits respect from other prisoners and staff
an ethical code to follow, around being of service to others, with role models in the form of teachers or facilitators
an antidote to the guilt or shame they feel about the crimes they committed
a sense of belonging with the other prisoners who are part of the meditation, mindfulness or Dharma group
a place to talk openly and honestly about their struggles, and to receive support.

Reflecting more critically about the use of mindfulness or meditation programmes in prison, you might have considered the following points about their shortcomings:

Adding mindfulness or meditation programmes into the existing criminal justice system doesn’t address some of the serious problems with this system, such as class and race injustices around who is incarcerated .
It does little to address the questions over whether imprisonment is effective at rehabilitating people, and whether it is appropriate treatment for people who are, themselves, often the victims of serious abuse. If one of the key aims of mindfulness is cultivating kindness and compassion, what are the implications of trying to do this within a system which is, itself, often cruel? For example, Maull’s interview highlights that there is a high risk of further physical or sexual abuse in the prison system, and that staff often treat prisoners as inferior human beings.
Many people in prisons may already have existing spiritual practices, faiths and beliefs. Should mindfulness be offered as an alternative to these, or would it be more appropriate to explore what is available in each group’s or individual’s own cultural background, encouraging them to develop that?

These points relate to some of the wider criticisms of the mindfulness movement, which we will explore shortly. Critics have argued that it is problematic to bring mindfulness practices into settings such as workplaces, schools and prisons as a kind of add-on, without challenging the often unethical ways in which these settings operate. For example, people are frequently unequally valued within hierarchical structures, often bullied or otherwise abused, and treated as objects to produce outcomes and reach targets rather than as full human beings.

Critics have also pointed to the cultural issues with this westernised, secularised version of Buddhism being offered to everyone regardless of the rich spiritual traditions and practices they may already be engaged with – many of which include similar ideas to mindfulness.

4 Criticisms of mindfulness

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

Towards the end of the reading ‘Mindfulness’ you learned that there have been many criticisms of the ways in which mindfulness has been applied so far. In the Radio 4 Beyond Belief programme you will listen to shortly, you will hear three experts discussing mindfulness applications, and the issues with them. The speakers are Buddhist teacher Christopher Titmuss from Gaia House Buddhist Retreat Centre, Chris Cullan from the University of Oxford Mindfulness and Rebecca Crane from Bangor Centre for Mindfulness Research. Chris and Rebecca are key UK researchers in this area, and have been involved with the Mindful Nation UK report and the development of mindfulness-based cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Now listen to BBC Beyond Belief: Mindfulness. We recommend that you listen to the final section of the programme, from 18 minutes and 30 seconds. However, the whole episode, with more discussion of what mindfulness is and how it relates to meditation and other spiritual practices, is available at this link.

Activity 4 Ethical mindfulness

Based on your learning from this course and the Beyond Belief episode, decide whether each of the forms of mindfulness education listed here is ‘attention training’ or ‘ethical mindfulness’ (the distinction made towards the end of the Beyond Belief programme).

Teaching mindfulness skills in the military to help soldiers to be better at targeting the opponent, and coping with any post-traumatic stress disorder they experience.

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Engaging all staff in an organisation in an ongoing dialogue about what can be done to create a work environment where people treat themselves and others compassionately, and work towards ensuring that the organisation operates in the most ethical way possible.

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Giving children in school a mindfulness class once a week to help improve their attention.

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Giving politicians an eight-week mindfulness training course to help them to deal with the stress of their occupation.

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General practitioners sending depressed patients on a brief mindfulness course, given that it has been found to be effective with depression.

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Bringing mindfulness movements together with social justice movements to consider where human suffering comes from and how it might be addressed (e.g. war, discrimination, our impact on the environment, the treatment of refugees, austerity measures, etc.).

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Building mindfulness into school curriculums in terms of both practices and an ongoing discussion at all levels about how to make the school a more mindful and compassionate culture for everybody there.

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Inviting politicians into a sustained engagement with Buddhist mindfulness and compassion in order to think about the implications of their policies for increasing or decreasing human suffering.

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Providing staff in an organisation with optional mindfulness classes in order to enhance productivity.

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Encouraging people on mindfulness courses to develop – through mindfulness – a kind of ‘clear-seeing’ into the consequences of their actions for other people, and how the dynamics of power and privilege operate in the world.

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Conclusion

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

In this free course, Mindfulness in mental health and prison settings, you have learned about mindfulness and how it can be used in both counselling and prison settings. You have also reflected a good deal on what mindfulness is, how therapists and clients experience it and the different ways in which it can be brought into therapy.

You’ve considered both mindful meditation practices, and ways of bringing mindfulness into everyday life. You’ve heard about the research evidence for mindfulness both in relation to mental health difficulties and in relation to rehabilitation and reducing recidivism in a criminal justice context. You’ve learned about how mindful therapy can work in practice.

Finally, you’ve developed your skills in critical evaluation, by exploring some of the criticisms that have been levelled at the ‘mindfulness movement’.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD310 Counselling and forensic psychology: investigating crime and therapy.

This resource is part of the ‘Wellbeing and Mental Health Collection’ collated by The Open University in Wales. You can find out more and discover other courses, articles and interactives on the collection homepage.

References

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

Auty, K.M., Cope, A. and Liebling, A. (2015) ‘A systematic review of meta-analysis of yoga and mindfulness meditation in prison: effects on psychological well-being and behavioural functioning’, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, vol. 60, no. 13, pp. 1–22.

Barker, M-J. (2013) Mindful Counselling & Psychotherapy: Practising Mindfully across Approaches and Issues, London, Sage.

Barker, M-J. (2016) ‘Staying with our feelings’ [Online]. Available at http://rewriting-the-rules.com/ (Accessed 14 July 2017).

Barker, M-J. and Cooper, T. (2017) ‘Mindfulness’ in Vossler, A., Havard, C., Pike, G., Barker, M-J and Raabe, B. (eds) Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, London, Sage, pp. 237–50.

Batchelor, M. (2001) Meditation for Life, London, Frances Lincoln.

Bowen, S., Chawla, N. and Marlatt, G.A. (2010) Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention: A Clinician’s Guide, New York, NY, The Guilford Press.

Chambers, R., Gullone, E. and Allen, N.B. (2009) ‘Mindful emotion regulation: an integrative review’, Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 560–72.

Cooper, M. (2008) Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Facts Are Friendly, London, Sage.

Gilbert, P. (2010) Compassion Focused Therapy, London, Routledge.

Halifax, J. (2011) Compassion and the True Meaning of Empathy. TED Talks [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQijrruP9c4 (Accessed 6 July 2017).

Maull, F. (2005) Dharma in Hell. The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull, Boulder, CO, Prison Dharma Network.

Nanda, J. (2005) ‘A phenomenological enquiry into the effect of meditation on therapeutic practice’, Existential Analysis, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 322–35.

Nugent, P., Moss, D., Barnes, R. and Wilks, J. (2011) ‘Clear(ing) space: mindfulness-based reflective practice’, Reflective Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–13.

Shonin, E., Van Gordon, W. and Griffiths, M.D. (2015) ‘Does mindfulness work?’, British Medical Journal, vol. 351, p. h6919.

Williams, M., Teasdale, J., Segal, Z. and Kabat-Zinn, J. (2007) The Mindful Way through Depression, New York, NY, The Guildford Press.

Acknowledgements

The Open University — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:29:41 GMT

This free course was written by Meg-John Barker.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course:

Images

Course image: Pause for Thought: Image courtesy of Sue Cheval

Figure 1: Image courtesy of Sue Cheval

Figure 2: © Unsplash/Pixabay This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Public Domain Licence https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Figure 3: Courtesy of Go Project Films

Figure 4: Courtesy of Go Project Films

Text

Chapter 16 ‘Mindfulness’: Barker, MJ. and Cooper, T. (2017), ‘Mindfulness’, Mad or Bad? A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, SAGE Publications, Copyright © Meg-John Barker and Troy Cooper 2017

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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RSS feed for Mindfulness in mental health and prison settings

Introduction

Learning outcomes

1 Mindfulness

Transcript: Five reasons to care about mindfulness

1.1 Experiencing mindfulness

Activity 1 Trying out mindfulness meditation

Discussion

2 Mindful therapy

Transcript: Being present in therapy – key ideas in therapy

Activity 2 Mindfulness in counselling

Discussion

2.1 Bringing mindfulness into therapy

1 Counsellors offering mindfulness ideas and practices to their clients

2 Counsellors practising mindfulness themselves

3 Cultivating a mindful therapeutic relationship

3 Mindfulness in prisons

3.1 Experiencing meditation in prison

Transcript: Fleet Maull: waking up in prison

Activity 3 How can meditation practice help prisoners?

Discussion

4 Criticisms of mindfulness

Activity 4 Ethical mindfulness

Conclusion

References

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Images

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