Mindfulness is at the core of the wellness work I do with clients and in my personal journey. It informs massage therapy and wellness coaching and provides the foundation for all our work together.
What is mindfulness? Simply, it is the process of coming fully into the present moment. Why do we seek it? What value does it bring to our lives and health?
The Practice of Mindfulness Shifts Our Experience of Time
We live in a world of pasts and futures. When we try to walk through life while looking over our shoulders, we trip over the present. The same happens when we focus too much on the horizon ahead! We are distracted by anticipating and striving and urgency and our life becomes an infinite scroll of to-do list, checking off one task after another. Our experience of time is collapsed and accelerated as we jump to The Next Thing and we miss the experience of the earth under our feet with every step on the way.
As we bring our consciousness more fully into the present, time expands and swells. We experience more Now in our now. This doesn’t mean we forget where we’ve come from; instead of lingering in memories, we feel their legacy as it lives in us now. This also doesn’t mean that we become aimless; we build and hold awareness of our orientation, which way we’re headed…while we consciously connect with how we’re moving toward the life we want. With this sort of presence in attention, our every action becomes more effective. We see more clearly where we are and what our next step will be, and we watch life play in bullet time (think The Matrix), with space to consider our choices and time to witness each moment more fully.
The Practice of Mindfulness Allows Us to Create Change That Persists
As our experience of the present moment expands, we also unlock the ability to access intentional plasticity. We know the word “plasticity” from the popular concept of “neuroplasticity” (that the brain and its function can be altered). Recognize, though, that plasticity is relevant both in mind and body. In response to any impulse, influence, or impact, there are four potential responses by our body/mind: rigid, elastic, plastic, and rupture. A rigid response leaves us completely unchanged, even in the moment of impact. An elastic response accepts the outside influence and is temporarily altered, before returning to its original shape, unchanged. A plastic response allows the influence to produce change without returning to the original shape. A rupture occurs when something is irretrievably broken. If you imagine being struck by a car, an elastic response sounds great, but if you’re being struck by an intelligent idea, maybe you want more plasticity. My goal is to help clients cultivate the ability to shift into the mode that will best serve them through the application of mindfulness; we develop rigid resistance where we don’t want to fold, elastic resilience when we need to be accommodating, we carefully navigate rupture when something’s gotta give, and we access useful plasticity in a safe environment when we want to create lasting, healthy change.
What Does a Mindfulness-Based Practice Look Like?
We are intricate living systems, and for our own well-being, we must be able to take the jostling that life gives us and find some balance between preserving our integrity and letting life’s influences change us for the better. In holistic manual therapy practice, we recognize that the body and mind are not separate and that fear, stress, and anger make us more rigid, both in our thinking and in our joints. By creating a space where clients can slow down and come into the present moment, we open the door to recognizing and relinquishing self-defeating responses to the influences in our lives. Time expands, our breath goes deeper, and our tensions and aches and struggles ease and flow away.
Without being full of thought, we shift entirely into the present and become fully at home in our own bodies. This is the exquisite experience and deep benefit of skillful touch.
In the coaching environment, we cultivate the ability to intentionally shift into presence as the process of accessing the parts of ourselves we want to change. As we expand the moment, we witness how we relate to and narrate our stories. We connect with our core values to understand how we have been serving or betraying ourselves. We begin to intentionally deconstruct the patterns we’ve been stuck in from a place of willingness and support. We start building new capacity within ourselves for the life we want to live. Though this process is unique to each person, we access it through this common thread: Be Here Now. This process allows the client to create skills that they can carry forward into their lives, even after our work together is complete, which they can continue to adapt and employ even as their aims in life shift.
Whatever form our work together takes, the gift we cultivate for ourselves in this practice of mindfulness is the ability to feel at home in our lives, not because the world outside is as we wish it were, but because we understand and embrace our own agency, and can accept what is beyond us. It is a great privilege to get to facilitate this process for those who work with me.
Ethan DeFord opened Integrative Alchemy as an ecological health and wellness practice to help clients shift into happier and healthier lives. He calls from a diverse background stretching back thirty years to provide touch-based therapies and mindfulness-based wellness coaching for individuals and couples. His offices are in Guilford, CT, and he offers telehealth as an alternative for long-distance coaching clients.
Reach out at: www.alchemy.link or call/text 203.533.9466 and leave a message!