What is Therapy & What is Mindfulness?

Therapy without the backdrop of "mindfulness" seems more like coaching than therapy. If we're looking to "fix" ourselves, then maybe coaching is fine. Our world is full of that mentality, so we can't miss if that's what we're looking for. But if we're wanting to truly heal, then a therapist needs to be far more capable.  It's the difference between giving answers and helping find the right questions to explore. To heal means to become whole and that comes from within. 

When we approach life in a fixing sort of way, we end up needing on-going management and defense for our fixes because that's not a free state of being or the truth of our potential.  

'Mindfulness' implies developing awareness beyond our tight, fixing, control-focused minds; an inner orientation with nothing really to do with problem solving.  It is more like open attunement in the moment of life. This moment, and this one... We learn to observe and start to perceive how we've been making stories about reality rather than simply living reality. By perceiving our mental behavior while practicing flexibility and curiosity (non-attachment to any outcome, no preference) the behavior of story making begins to dissolve itself. Truth shows up and relaxes us. We begin discovering we are actually walking in amazement that we could have never planned and executed from that stodgy way of thinking, believing and trying that we've been doing.

It's our right and responsibility to continually practice (friendly within ourselves) and when consciousness shows up expanded beyond our mental belief systems, we finally see and can stop believing our mental activities. We become capable of surfing life as it rolls along. Not goal oriented but life oriented. Free.  ... Therapy should help with this.

"Be like water, my friend", Bruce Lee famously said. He wasn't just talking about physicality. The mind can and needs to orient to flow. Without this flexibility, we create prisons everywhere. That's what human culture has created around the world, and we've got to evolve past that model by awakening to the simple moment of life within ourselves, not remaining problem fixing oriented in our narrow boxed in ways of thinking.  That's not healthy and it's not healing.

Therapy, whether talk or body oriented, and any mode of healing needs to become oriented to the evolving front of humanity. If not, then it's just more compartmentalized thought exercise that we desperately need to move beyond. We're killing our ecosystem from our addiction to compounding heady ideas. The newest fad is not evolution, it's just another fad, "same as it ever was".

Recently, I joined and then left a talk therapy group that I discovered was practicing a purely fix-it style of group coaching.  Heady analyzing and mansplaining galore!  It felt like a cult.  I was baffled at how obtuse it all was, lead by a person who is a PhD psychologist. That person must have no mindfulness practice to rest on. That experience made me wonder about the prevalence of therapy these days and the strong potential to end up being groomed further down a dead end via "therapy". 

Therapy, to me, is relating with respect for the *still small voice* of wisdom inside us all. It takes a mindful, spacious orientation to allow that voice to be heard and to allow honest change to happen.
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Therapy needs the humility to perceive the moment while in the moment with another human. Allow the honest question to arise out of the moment and to be spoken as an invitation to explore.  There's a free, bright-eyed wonder to this. A commitment to staying in the not-knowing with each other, open and generous, honest and awake, so the honest resolution can happen organically. Big invitation into freedom. That's therapeutic to me.