When I returned to Australia two years later I trained and worked as a Shiatsu therapist. Shiatsu is a body therapy based on working with Chi or energy meridian systems as utilized in traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine. Working as a Shiatsu therapist and trainer provided an opportunity to cultivate compassion and mindfulness, a livelihood aligned with my life goals and aspirations. I worked with many individuals presenting with a wide range of physical, emotional and mental conditions. In my work as a body therapist, it became evident that non-cognitive, non-talking body-oriented therapy could resolve many mental and emotional problems. Part of this healing seemed related to how body therapies encouraged present centered awareness. I didn't learn about contemporary psychological approaches such as Behavior Therapy (BT), Cognitive Therapy (CT) or Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) until I began university in the mid-1980s. Though lacking any overt reference to ethics many of the principles described in these contemporary approaches seemed very similar to some of those I had learnt in both Tibetan (Mahayana) and Theravada Buddhist traditions.
I began working as a psychologist and developing mindfulness programs in 1991. At this time mindfulness and meditation were not yet understood or accepted within mainstream health settings so the programs I developed and ran were referred to as 'stress management programs. By the late 1990s, some mindfulness-based therapies were gaining credibility as supported by scientific evidence. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, many contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches referred to mindfulness as a key therapeutic factor. These approaches were coined the 'third wave' therapies by one prominent psychologist because he thought they had advanced in many different ways from the earlier conventional practices of BT and CBT (Hayes, 2004). Mindfulness has become increasingly popular in contemporary psychology in the last 20 years and now there are many different third wave therapies. The foundational third wave therapies include: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy or MBCT (Segal, Williams and Teasdale, 2002), Dialectical Behavior Therapy or DBT (Linehan, 1993) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT (Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson, 1999).
Currently, mindfulness is regarded as a meditation practice, a coping skill, a mode of being, and a key factor in therapy. It is both a therapeutic stance used by therapists and a skill that can be taught to individuals seeking treatment, therapy, life coaching, and stress management. Mindfulness can be learned individually or within-group settings and is not limited to any one particular mental, emotional or spiritual approach. In the fields of health, therapy, and neuropsychology, the overwhelming evidence is accumulating to suggest that learning mindfulness and related practices improve health and wellbeing.
In its adaptations to Western health services mindfulness has had to, understandably, be free from many of the religious and cultural additions these teachings had acquired over the centuries. The ways that third wave therapies frame and teach mindfulness are different from the ways in which I learned these skills in a traditional Buddhist setting. Nonetheless, I am enormously grateful to the research practitioners and third-wave therapists who have served to make mindfulness and related practices a validated approach to mental and emotional health and wellbeing. I also appreciate the ways in which they have creatively explained and taught these skills and related concepts to our Western culture. Without these adaptations, mindfulness may not have emerged from the domains of Eastern religions and gained credibility in contemporary psychology. I have used many of the strategies and ideas developed by the third wave therapies to great benefit. In this book, I integrate the benefits of contemporary psychology and ancient Buddhist psychology.
