Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance
How to Use This MBEB Workbook
Introduction – The more you practice, the greater the benefits.
Here are some attitudinal foundations that can help you to engage with the practices and get the most out of this workbook.
Non Judgment. This quality of awareness involves cultivating impartial observation regarding any experience—not labeling thoughts, feelings, or sensations as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair, but simply taking note of thoughts, feelings, or sensations in each moment.
Patience. This is an expression of wisdom and maturity. It acknowledges that things must unfold in their own time and is a wonderful antidote to the agitation that can escalate around resisting the truth of the present moment.
Beginner’s Mind. This quality of awareness sees things as new and fresh, as if for the first time, with a sense of curiosity.
Trust. This is about honoring your own experience and learning how to listen deeply to your own heart, mind, and body. There will be times throughout the course of this training, and certainly in life, when your inner experience conflicts with what is being asked of you. Learning how to trust yourself is essential to engaging with these practices and cultivating emotional balance.
Non-Striving. With this quality of awareness, there is no grasping, aversion to change, or movement away from whatever arises in the moment; in other words, non-striving means not trying to get anywhere other than where you are.
Acceptance. This quality of awareness validates and acknowledges things as they are. To accept the truth doesn’t necessarily mean you have to love it, or even like it. It is really about connecting with what is true in each moment and fighting the tendency to deny, reject, or avoid.
Letting Be. Although Kabat-Zinn uses the phrase “Letting Go,” we prefer to soften this a little. For many people, letting go is a slippery slope on the way to actively pushing away what is unwanted. With this quality of awareness, you can simply let things be as they are, with no need to try to let GO of whatever is present.
Humor. Although humor can’t be forced, it can be welcomed and encouraged. And humor is a great ally when it comes to watching the machinations of your own mind.
Like many of the attitudes on this list, humor creates space in the mind and counter-acts the tendencies to tighten and contract in response to unpleasant experience.
Curiosity. Many of the insights that lead to emotional balance involve seeing things as they are while at the same time inquiring into their causality and consequences.
Affection. Kabat-Zinn sometimes describes mindfulness as “affectionate attention.” When awareness is imbued with the qualities of warmth and tenderness, it’s much easier to move in close to experience and to know it fully, especially when that experience is painful or invokes feelings of vulnerability.
We encourage you to approach these qualities or attitudes as touchstones, rather than as mandates. None of us will ever fully embody these qualities in every moment. And even meditation and compassion cultivation can become co-opted by past conditioning into yet another way to beat ourselves up.
Non-Judging
“…by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as non-judgmentally…”
When using the phrase “non-judgmentally” Kabat-Zinn is pointing our attention toward how we relate to our moment-to-moment experience, instead of toward the objects of that awareness. He’s inviting us to meet each arising experience with a willingness to see it in its fullness, without becoming entangled, enmeshed, or identified with it in any way. He’s also asking us to let go of evaluating sensations, thoughts, or emotions as inherently good or bad; instead, we note their presence and allow them to be here because they already are present.
And yet, how often have you noticed an inner commentary that says something like “I shouldn’t be thinking that,” or “See! This is the problem with me and how I … (fill in the blank).” Can you entertain the possibility that these thoughts, too, can be seen as further brain secretions that can also be noticed, rather than believed and acted upon?
This is the non judgment to which we are referring.
It’s worth noting that nonjudgment doesn’t mean giving up your capacity to discern—the ability to recognize the relative merits or possibilities in choices and to make those choices on a consistent basis. Sometimes when people hear “nonjudgmental” they imagine passivity so extreme it verges on inertia, where everything is viewed as allowable and every situation is met with a “go with the flow” attitude. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We are cultivating this very fine-tuned awareness of what is arising and, in the light of this abiding awareness, we’re able to untangle the reality of what is occurring from our own reactions to that reality (thoughts, feelings, memories, old habits, old wounds) and from there to discern and decide on a skillful and nonreactive response that draws from a deep inner wisdom of what is appropriate. Sometimes that wise response involves strong action, sometimes it calls for measured action, and still other times, the skillful choice may be no action at all.
(Throughout the book, we use the word “skillful” to mean well-advised, wholesome, and effective, rather than the more common usage suggesting competence or proficiency at a sport or musical instrument, for example.) The key is that we’re now captains of our own ship, so to speak, and not servants of our conditioned reactions.
Let’s take the example of cheesecake. A scrumptious and pleasing example if ever there was one! Mindfulness in this situation could allow you to hold in awareness the cheesecake itself, and all that comes up in your mind and heart and body around that cheesecake (both for and against consumption!), and to then choose among the various options available to you the one that is most in service of what matters to you in the bigger picture. This is the value of discernment.
“…and open heartedly as possible.”
And so we arrive at the attitude of mindfulness. Inherent in this present-moment willing-ness to encounter all that arises, nonreactivity and without judgment, is a stance of patience, kindness, and friendliness. One way to describe how we meet each moment and each experience is with a kind of gentle curiosity that might even have an undercurrent of playfulness or lightheartedness. People often mistake the attitude of mindfulness for one of rigid resolve and stern intention.
Jack Kornfield (2012) calls on his own decades of meditation practice to describe this common mistake: “I used to think that to become free you had to practice like a samurai warrior, but now I understand that you have to practice like a devoted mother of a newborn child. It takes the same energy but has a completely different quality. It’s unwavering compassion and presence that liberates rather than having to defeat the enemy in battle.”
Practicing like a samurai warrior may even elicit a kind of resistance to experience that’s not consistent with mindfulness practice. Instead, we’re invited to soften our stance (perhaps both physically and attitudinally) and be willing to move in closer to the phenomena arising with curiosity and kind willingness. The intention is to be fully in contact with the experience and know it in a way that allows us to then respond in new and potentially fruitful ways.