How To Make Mindfulness Effortless, Find Your True Self, and Heal from Trauma
Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays. I spent most of this weekend doing an online retreat with author and meditation teacher Loch Kelly, who teaches a system called Effortless Mindfulness.
Rather than gradually developing attention or concentration power like mainstream mindfulness practices, Effortless Mindfulness focuses on shifting directly into the awareness that’s always already here—the awareness in which everything we experience is already happening.
This retreat was about combining Effortless Mindfulness with a therapy modality called IFS in order to heal trauma and live in a state of greater flow and ease.
IFS, or Internal Family Systems, is a style of therapy that focuses on working with the various parts of ourselves that make up our personalities, behavior, and responses to different circumstances. It’s become very popular in recent years as a tool for healing trauma and also for personal growth. Loch Kelly sometimes co-teaches with Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, as the two systems complement each other well.
One of the keys to IFS is the Self, which isn’t a ‘part’, but our true nature. The Self in IFS is not a thought, a feeling, a brain region, a personality, or anything content-based, but rather the context of awareness in which everything we experience shows up. The Self is often described in terms of the ‘8 Cs’: Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, Calm, Connectedness, and Clarity.
As a therapist and coach, one thing I’ve found is that the experience of the Self can prove elusive for many clients (and for me, at times, too!) Even though the Self is always present as our true nature, it can be difficult to recognize if we’re caught up in thoughts or blended with parts. As Loch explained in the retreat, sometimes we can think we’re in Self when we’re actually in a Self-like part, such as a caring therapist part, a diligent meditator part, or a spiritual ego part.
Effortless Mindfulness helps unlock Self by teaching ‘glimpse’ practices that allow you to experience it directly.
One of my favorite glimpse practices goes something like this:
Ask yourself “what’s here, now, when there’s no problem to solve?”
Don’t try to answer the question with your thinking mind, but look with awareness, directly at your own experience in the present moment.
What happens when you allow the problem solver to relax?
What is the awareness that’s here, now, looking out through your eyes? Can you just rest as that awareness for a few moments?
If you found this confusing or aren’t quite sure if you got it, don’t worry. Although it’s called Effortless Mindfulness, it takes most people a little practice to get the hang of it. Loch’s approach is “small glimpses, many times.” And different glimpse practices will work better for different people.
If you got a sense of the constantly-thinking, problem-solving part of your mind relaxing, and just being a kind of quiet presence or awareness instead, you’re on the right track.
Most forms of therapy and self-development try to solve the problems of parts from other parts. CBT, for example, is all about using the thinking mind to solve thinking mind problems (and to be fair, it’s pretty good at that). But as Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the level of consciousness that created it.”
By combining Effortless Mindfulness practice with IFS, you can can shift into Self to heal the anxious, traumatized, or otherwise burdened parts of the psyche from a more resourced place—one where you have access to courage, compassion, and all the other qualities of Self. That’s why in the nondual traditions, the Self or nature of mind is sometimes called the Ultimate Medicine.
There’s way more to this approach than I can describe in a single email. (Even the two day retreat I just attended barely scratched the surface of it). If you’re curious to learn more, I highly recommend checking out Loch’s books, podcast, or Mindful Glimpses app (not affiliate links). Or, for a quick introduction, revisit my article Effortless Mindfulness for Beginners. For IFS, Dick Schwartz’s book No Bad Parts is a good introduction.
And if you’d like personal guidance on how to connect with your Self and heal from past traumas or overcome obstacles in your path, 1:1 therapy or coaching can be very helpful. If you’re interested, just reply to this email and we can set up a call to see if working with me is a good fit for you.
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment below.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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