120 The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook
You may even want to experiment with noticing the space that contains your thoughts and
feelings. Can you relax, observe, and allow thoughts and feelings to arise, change, and leave the
space of the present moment?
Exercise: Meditation Practice to Turn Toward Stillness and Silence
Instructions
Take a comfortable position. Establish and steady your attention in the present moment by focusing
mindfully on your breath sensations for a few breaths.
When you notice that your attention moves to something else, thoughts or sounds for example,
you don’t have to fight that and you don’t have to follow it. Just let the breath sensations return to your
awareness, with patience and kindness.
As you practice mindfulness of your breath, you may begin to notice that a sense of inner stillness
arises. It may appear only in brief flashes at first, but don’t be discouraged. Just let it come. Continue
noticing any feelings of stillness you experience. Relax in them, and allow them to come to you. Initially,
you may notice the stillness in your body as a feeling of calm and ease. Then, it will become easier to
experience the stillness in your mind when your thoughts quiet down.
Sometimes the stillness appears more clearly as silence. When you notice any sense of silence,
between sounds or between thoughts, for instance, let your attention rest there. Let it return there when
it wanders.
Listen carefully to all sounds as they come and go. Don’t focus on any one sound, but instead focus
on the silence and space between the sounds. As your attention steadies, notice how the sounds arise from
silence and return to silence. Let your attention rest in the silence as you listen for the next sound.
CONCLuSION
In practicing mindfulness, you are joining a vast and ancient tradition, cultivated by countless
human beings for thousands of years. Many teachers have pointed out that practicing mindfulness
includes the attitudes of kindness and compassion in the way you pay attention. As you become
more mindful, a growing sense of wholeness, including spaciousness and stillness, becomes brighter
and can help transform your experience of living. This chapter invites you to draw upon some
valuable teachings from the tradition of mindfulness meditation—by focusing on kindness and
compassion and spaciousness and stillness—in order to discover more about your own amazing
and powerful resources for healing and enriching your life.