Meditation and Mindfulness: Valuable Recovery Tools
Mindfulness and meditation have become widely used and highly popular calming strategies, and for good reason. These practices help with grounding and play an important role in healing one’s relationship with their body. These tools can be especially useful for eating disorder recovery.
By: Aliesha Bryan
The appeal of meditation and mindfulness practice continues to grow each year. Growing numbers of people see within these practices an opportunity to regulate emotions, stress, and depression. Consistent mindfulness practice can result in a decrease of the relative appeal of escape mechanisms, and an increase in attention and concentration. Yet other rewards include the increased ability to observe one’s thoughts and feelings without judgment and the power to exercise greater control over one’s reality by creating sufficient distance between oneself and one’s thoughts and feelings – just enough distance to cast a critical eye over circumstances and make decisions that truly serve.
In teaching the practitioner to observe the contents of the mind and bodily sensations without judgment, mindfulness practice contributes to the development of a non-critical attitude toward the self, a valuable facet of eating disorder recovery.
Mindfulness practice often includes meditation. There is some fundamental overlap between the two, but they are not one and the same. Mindfulness could be described as the act of paying attention, being present, and noticing the world around and within us. That includes the surrounding environment, colors, sounds, smells, and textures. It also includes our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, movements, and the effect those things have on us and our surroundings. When we practice mindfulness, we are focusing our awareness on what is happening and acknowledging the accompanying sensations. Maybe you have had the experience of putting your keys in a drawer and not remembering you did it until you find the keys thereafter a search. To do something without awareness is to do it mindlessly. However, paying attention to your steps as you walk to the drawer and open it, registering the texture of the metal and the wood, and seeing your hand drop the keys inside is to act mindfully. When we are mindful, we bring in our senses.
Meditation can be geared toward an emptying of the mind, but it can also use the practice of mindfulness to train attention and awareness in a way that achieves mental clarity and emotional calm, for example. There are many types of meditation – you may recognize “loving-kindness meditation”, guided meditations, or meditations that involve visualization. This author’s favorite type of meditation is breath-awareness meditation, as not only is the breath fundamental to life and a key to grounding, but it is a strong emotion regulator that can help us through moments of discomfort. Connection to the breath not only centers us, but it also helps us to reconnect to ourselves.
Given the nature of eating disorders, there is often a relationship of enmity between the person struggling with the disorder and their body. Dissociation, for example, is often a factor as the body is deemed a site of painful memory and experience. People struggling with eating disorders are often “disembodied”. Meditation and mindfulness offer pathways back to “embodiment” by facilitating a connection between body-level sensing and perception, moving from a place of disregard of the body and its messages (which is considered central to the development and maintenance of eating disorders) to regard, and hopefully, eventually, positive regard.
Ultimately, meditation and mindfulness connect us with the evolving experience of the self, offering opportunities to diminish dysregulation, dissociation, and anxiety, to find our sense of orientation, and to learn to listen to the body in the most fundamental of ways. Mindfulness and meditation do not negate the fact that the body can be a source of discomfort, but they do remind us that the body can also be a source of sanctuary and pleasure and that it offers us resources to cope.
At BALANCE eating disorder treatment center, our compassionate, highly skilled team of clinicians is trained in diagnosing and treating the spectrum of eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, compulsive overeating, and other disordered eating behaviors and body image issues. Our team utilizes a variety of experiential therapies including yoga, mindfulness practices, and dance/movement therapy in our treatment approach to help clients heal their relationship with their body.
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This post was written by BALANCE intern, Aliesha Bryan.
Aliesha is a second-year graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College pursuing her Master of Science in Dance/Movement Therapy. She completed her undergraduate education at Barnard College, majoring in French and Francophone Studies. She previously worked as a translator for a variety of organizations within the UN system, including UNESCO, United Nations Headquarters, and the Pan-American Health Organization. Aliesha is also a professional Flamenco dancer who has had the opportunity to perform live at venues and festivals here in the United States and internationally. As a Dance/Movement Therapist in training, Aliesha believes that the body is a repository of extraordinarily valuable information — often symbolic and potentially difficult to express in everyday language — but nonetheless vital to healing. She is passionate about eating disorder recovery and is excited to be a part of the BALANCE team.