The Christian Counseling Today magazine (Vol. 16 No. 3) produced by the American Association of Christian Counselors, contains an article by Freda V. Crews entitled, "Integrating Mindfulness into Christian Counseling." Your profession may call you to work with people who are in pain. If so, here's an excerpt of that article which may be of help:
"Mindfulness proposes that although pain is inevitable, suffering is optional and caused by our unsatisfactoriness with life. In other words, the gap between our present life reality and the way we wish it was motivates us to resist pain.
"A formula used to illustrate this is:
PAIN + RESISTANCE = SUFFERING
"Consequently, suffering can be alleviated by letting go of our "craving" for a perfect world and accepting the way it is. The Scriptures make a similar assertion in James 4.1-2."
The article talks of how mindfulness (looking directly at where they presently are) helps people "be with" or "embrace" pain in order to move on with their life. And as the people helper we can lead them to a "radical acceptance" of their pain rather than focusing on "fixing" or "rescuing" them.
Learn to help others deal productively with their pain and you'll be Serving Strong!
I am excited to see more Christians looking into mindfulness. So much of the literature is written from Buddhist teachings which makes me uncomfortable as a Christian Counselor.
~BJ
Posted by: BJ Olson | August 11, 2009 at 10:52 AM
Truthfully, Jesus was the one to address mindfulness. "...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matthew 6.34 NIV
Posted by: Scott Couchenour | August 11, 2009 at 10:20 PM
A good companion to this post is Seth Godin's thought here:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/problems-and-constraints.html
Posted by: Scott Couchenour | November 08, 2010 at 10:57 AM