Mindfulness
How to lose your head
The head mind is the logical and practical part of ourselves that goes about the daily business of living, but it is prone to worry and overthinking. The solution is to become fully present, to live in the here and the now.
Doing Mode and Being Mode
According to the four authors of The Mindful Way through Depression, when people feel depressed or anxious, they naturally try to get rid of their feelings by reasoning them away. They think up one solution after another and, before long, start to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them for being unable to find their way out of their despair.
There is an answer though, and that is shifting from Thinking Mode into Being Mode.
The four authors describe Doing Mode as similar to being on automatic pilot. You drive, walk, eat, and even speak without being aware of the present while your mind is somewhere else, focused on achieving this goal or solving that problem.
Being Mode, on the other hand, is intentional rather than automatic. In this Mode, you inhabit the present moment and become fully conscious of your life. Being brings freshness to your perception, and you become fully alive and aware again.
The Mindful Way Through Depression is a truly superb book that tremendously influenced my thinking. I must admit that it had a life-changing effect on me. I remember coming home from work and slipping the attached CD into the player each day so that I could relax and listen to the mindfulness exercises. I think you'll love the book if you have an analytical mind and need to understand the nuts and bolts of the theory.
The Mindful Way Workbook is less technical and theoretical, as workbooks tend to be. If you prefer a practical, no-nonsense approach, this is the book to get. It's laid out in a way that makes the exercises easy to follow.
One-minute mindfulness exercise
Here is a short exercise adapted from The mindful way workbook. It will give you a feel of what to expect.
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Put down your phone, pad, or computer.
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Sit without doing anything for a minute.
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Pick up your device and start reading again.
Where was your mind in that minute? Was it right there with you, fully engaged with the present as it unfolded from one moment to the next? Or did your mind take you far away from this time and place? Did it take you forward to the future or back to the past?
If your mind was with you in the present, you were in Being Mode, but if it took you to the past or future, you were in Doing Mode.
5 ways to reach Being Mode
There are many paths to mindfulness, and in my practice I've narrowed my approach down to the five that I have found to consistency produce the best results. They are: listening, journaling, imagining, meditating, and releasing.
1. Listening
Sometimes the best therapy is simply talking to someone. Chronic illness has a mental and emotional side and most of the time you just need someone who will listen to you. Before becoming a doctor of medical heilkunst I studied psychology. But psychology is mostly theory and too be honest I've forgotten most of it. My consultations are on average about and hour long and nowadays, instead of trying to analyze my patients, I remain quite most of the time and simply listen to their stories.
To be honest, I bought the Divided Mind by John E. Sarno, MD because I liked the cover. Well, my intuition was right because it turned out to be one of the best books I ever read.
Doctor Sarno discovered something fascinating. In many instances his patients suffered from severe debilitating pain but there was no physical cause. No cut, no breaks, no herniated disks, nothing. Just pain. Of course he searched. He used X-rays, MRIs, blood tests, and more but he found nothing
He realized that the pain had to be created by the subconscious mind. So he developed a method to connect to the subconscious mind. His method is surprisingly easy, simply open your journal and write to your subconscious mind for just an hour a day.
Although Carl Jung’s work isn’t part of the formal Heilkunst curriculum, his ideas fit naturally into the realm of therapeutic education. Jung saw illness, especially chronic or psychological symptoms, not just as problems to solve, but as messages from the unconscious. When certain parts of the self are denied or repressed, they don’t vanish. They often surface in disguised forms: emotional reactivity, relationship patterns, or even physical symptoms. In my own work, I draw especially from two of Jung’s most useful methods: active imagination and dream work.
Meditation isn’t about escaping your thoughts or reaching some abstract ideal of stillness. It’s a practical, grounded tool that’s been validated by both ancient wisdom and modern science. Studies show that meditation can shift brainwaves from the high-alert beta state into more restful alpha, theta, and delta states. From the myriad of meditation techniques out there I have selected a few that work well for people with pain and fatigue: guided meditations as well as the ideas of Louise Hay and Dr. Joe Dispenza. These are easy to practice and tend to produce good results.
Sigmund Freud believed that when unconscious conflicts were made conscious psychological problems would disappear. One of his students, Wilhelm Reich, found that this was not always true. Some of the most thoroughly analyzed cases remained uncured.
When searching for a reason why, Reich discovered that the one factor that differentiated the cured from the uncured was the capacity for surrender. To let go! When we are able to let our energy flow we are happy and content, but when we dam it up our emotions become rigid, and our muscles become stiff. Reich referred to this as body armor.
I’m Dr. Rodger Douglas, DMH, a South African-born homeopath now based in Osaka, Japan. With a psychology degree from Nelson Mandela University and a diploma from the Hahnemann College of Heilkunst, I specialize in holistic care for fibromyalgia. I serve clients by phone or video across the US, Canada, the UK, and beyond.