When you are being logical, rational, and devoid of emotion, you are said to be in Rational Mind. When you are allowing your thoughts to be driven by your emotions, you are said to be in Emotional Mind. The idea of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy is to achieve Wise Mind. Wise Mind is the joining of Rational Mind and Emotional Mind in perfect balance and harmony. It is a moving beyond opposites to a mindful state of acceptance. Likewise, when we come to realize that there is no line between mind and body, and that they are one and the same, we are able to move beyond the duality that implies that mind and body are separate entities. From there we see that the body can change the mind, and the mind can change the body. Wise Mind and Wise Body is the first step to living in True Self.

Facilitator Notes for Session 3: Wise Mind and Wise Body

PREPARATION

Read the Session 3 Course Materials, review the exercises listed in the chapter and try them at least once yourself prior to facilitating the group. Practice facilitating at least one sensory integration meditation with a friend or co-facilitator prior to doing it with your group (you may download several recordings of mindful meditations at www.mindfulecotherapy.org in the Resources section). For your own guided meditation during Session 3, you may create your own script or use the one in the book. If creating your own script, try not to deviate too far from the central idea of being in the present moment while focusing on the senses.

Practice presenting the materials in this session alone before facilitating the session so you will have a good idea of how long it will take you, given your own speaking and presentation style, to go over critical materials. Adjust by adding or leaving out materials as needed, but do not cut key concepts or Priority 1 exercises and activities if at all possible.

KEY CONCEPTS

 (Key concepts are those concepts that are foundational principles of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy, and must be covered in the session): Wise Mind, Emotional Mind, Rational Mind, Sensory Integration, Wise Body, mindful acceptance of discomfort; True Self, Wise Mind and Wise Body as one

SECONDARY CONCEPTS

(Secondary concepts are those concepts that are not foundational, but that are important if the facilitator can work them into the session – otherwise students will read about them on their own in the reading assignments): Reflections on the Sensory Integration Meditation; Hebb’s Postulate (“What fires together, wires together”); mindful eating; going inside the discomfort, and The Mindful Body of the True Self

INTRODUCTIONS

As an icebreaker exercise, ask participants to discuss their experiences with Wise Mind, after defining the concept for the class. If they have had any experiences where being too emotional or too rational has caused them problems, facilitate a discussion about how Wise Mind could have helped them out of that situation. If homework was assigned (e.g. exercises from the workbook that there wasn’t time for at the previous session), ask if there were any questions about the materials and have students share their experiences in completing the activities. Try not to spend more than ten minutes or so on this portion of the session.

SESSION 3 OUTLINE

3.0 What is Wise Mind?

When we are being logical, rational, and devoid of emotion, we are in Rational Mind. When we are allowing our thoughts to be driven by our feelings, we are in Emotional Mind. A goal of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy (MBE) is to achieve Wise Mind. Wise Mind is the joining of Rational Mind and Emotional Mind in perfect balance and harmony. It is a moving beyond opposites to a mindful state of acceptance.

You may wish to begin Session 3 by reading this definition of Wise Mind, then asking each member of the group what Wise Mind means to them, and how it might help them to overcome a recent problem in which they were too emotional or too rational.

3.1 Wise Mind and Wise Body

This section of Session 3 affords a great opportunity to facilitate a discussion about the duality of mind/body thinking. In reality, our minds are a part of our bodies. By looking at things in this way, and considering Hebb’s Postulate, we can actually re-wire our brains through the conscious and deliberate effort of meditation! Since the act of meditation causes our the neurons in our brains to “fire together” in a new way, the neurons will “wire together” into circuits that promote greater relaxation, better concentration, better judgment, and better emotional regulation and distress tolerance.

3.2 Sensory Integration Meditation

For this section of the session you will conduct a Sensory Integration meditation. You may do so by writing your own script or by reading the one out of the book. In either case, practice the sensory integration meditation at least once on your own before conducting it in session. Ideally you should practice it several times before attempting to facilitate it with your class so that you will be intimately familiar with the sensations and reflections of the meditation. You may also wish to complete the exercise, Reflections on the Sensory Integration Meditation yourself before facilitating the class so that you will have a good understanding of the goals of the exercise.

3.3 Reflections on the Sensory Integration Meditation

EXERCISE: Reflections on the Sensory Integration Meditation – PRIORITY 1

Have students complete the Reflections on the Sensory Integration Meditation exercise, and facilitate a discussion by going over each item on the list and having your students volunteer their responses. Since this material is deeply personal, don’t force students to participate if they don’t want to, but have everyone list some generic examples of what people might learn about themselves and their bodies by engaging in this meditation.

3.4 The Mindful Body and the Wise Mind

This section of the workbook discusses the connection between the mind and the body, and how powerful it can be. I often use a simple guided visualization to help illustrate the power the mind has over the body: I have the group close their eyes and visualize a lemon in great detail, asking them to imagine with all of their senses. What does the lemon look like? If they had to draw it, could they? What does its skin feel like in their hands? What is its scent as they hold it up to their noses, etc.? I then ask them to imagine slicing that lemon and taking a bite out of it. After the visualization is over I ask them to raise their hands if their mouths began to water during the exercise. Usually at least half the class raises their hands at this point. My question for the class: “There was no actual lemon here, so why did your mouth water?”

The answer, of course, is obvious. Their minds tricked their bodies into experiencing the sensation of eating a lemon. This anecdotal exercise provides a great segue’ to the next section on mindful eating.

3.5 Mindful Eating

If your groups are scheduled around a meal time, you might be able to share a meal together while discussing the process of mindful eating. If not, you might bring a bag of chocolate kisses or some sort of fruit with which to engage in the Last Kiss exercise in order to illustrate the principle of mindful eating. If neither of these options are available, you can just discuss the process of mindful eating with the group and ask them to experiment with it the next time they eat a meal.

3.6 Mindful Acceptance of Discomfort

DISCLAIMER: The Mindful Acceptance of Discomfort exercise is not to be used as a substitute for treatment for chronic pain by a licensed medical health practitioner. If you have any students with chronic pain issues, advise them to consult with their doctors and other health care providers before attempting this exercise.

Since this is an exercise only for people with pain issues, and not everyone in your group may have a pain issue, the actual exercise is an optional one. Review the information in your session if possible, but it is not necessary to engage in the actual exercise itself. If you choose to actually do the activity, have another activity on stand-by for those who don’t have chronic pain issues.

EXERCISE: Mindful Acceptance of Discomfort

If you choose to do this activity during session, do so, have students complete the worksheets. If you choose not to do this activity during the session, you may assign it as homework for those who have issues with chronic pain. If you do this, remember to discuss the results at the icebreaker portion of Session 4 next week.

3.7 Wise Mind, Wise Body, and True Self

The Serenity Prayer states, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

This prayer may be graphed out as done in Section 3.7. Where acceptance and change overlap, there is wisdom. In general, we can only change ourselves. We cannot change others. What we can do, is ask others to change, but if we ask and they are unwilling to change, then all we can do is to accept that this is the way things are. Note that this doesn’t mean we should have to accept abuse from others. In such a case the “acceptance” might be that we just have to accept the fact that since this person is unwilling to change, we have to end the relationship.

The next concept in this section is the idea of True Self vs. Perceived Self. I often illustrate this by holding up two hands. One hand represents the way I would like to be (the Ideal Self or the True Self) and the other hand represents how I see myself (the Perceived Self). The closer together these two hands are, the less problems people are likely to have, but the farther apart these two hands are, the more problems are likely to occur because the Perceived Self hand is always asking itself, “Why can’t I be more like that other hand?” In this case the “other hand” represents the True Self or Ideal Self.

There are two ways to resolve the gap between the hands. We can move the True Self hand closer to the Perceived Self hand or we can move the Perceived Self hand closer to the True Self hand. What usually happens over the course of the Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy program is that both hands meet in the middle somewhere.

EXERCISE: The Mindful Body of the True Self – PRIORITY 2

Time permitting, do this exercise in class. If you don’t have time, you may assign it as homework. If you do it in class, you may facilitate a discussion about the exercise by asking people to share some of their responses, but don’t force people to respond unless they volunteer first. The personal nature of the questions might lead some students to be hesitant about answering them in front of a group of people.

3.8 Mind and Body as One

I like to facilitate a discussion at this point by asking two or three members of the class to define their “perfect day” or perhaps their “perfect meal.” Inevitably the answers are different. When two or more people give different answers to any question about “perfection,” my next question is, “You both gave different responses to your definition of the perfect day (or perfect meal, etc.). So which one of you is correct and which one of you is wrong?”

The answer, of course, is that each of them is correct in their own way, because they are defining what’s “perfect” to them. So what this means is that the idea of “perfection” is subjective; we get to define what “perfect” means. Since we’re the ones defining what “perfect” means, if the world is consistently falling short of our expectations for “perfection,” we can always change our own personal definitions to more closely match what we get from the world around us.

HOMEWORK

Have students read the Session 4 materials prior to the next session; have them complete any exercises from Session 3 that weren’t covered in the session itself; ask them to bring any questions about the materials or the exercises to the next session.

DISCUSSION PERIOD

At the one-hour mark, invite group participants to stay for the discussion period. Point out that the thirty-minute post-session discussion period is optional. Note who stays for the discussion, and who leaves. Work at the next session to more actively engage those who leave.