Our Approach
While we all would agree that getting lots of exercise and eating healthy foods is great advice, we all experience stuff—cravings, distractions, feelings— that gets in the way. When we fear going blind or having a leg amputated, we can feel stuck in our unhealthy habits. More good advice and volumes of information at this point is not really helpful; we know what we need to do, but we just can’t seem to make it happen. Self-management involves looking inside myself to get acquainted with that sensitive inner part of me that is struggling. Sometimes that part has lost its voice.
You may think that you have no sensitive inner voice, but …surprise! When you really listen to someone else’s struggles and joys, you eventually discover the desire to tell your own personal story. Gradually you will find a voice that you never had before! When you share your story in a safe, small group setting you get a chance to recollect, to imagine, and to re-design your life story. Even though you may not be able to change life’s circumstances, you can live your circumstances according to your own script! What kind of a person do you want to become—loving, generous and kind, or grumpy, rough and mean?
Mindfulness is the way we do things. By Mindfulness we mean
Practices that teach the healing art of being present to both one’s internal processes and one’s external environment.
Attitudes of heightened, embodied perception and non-judgemental acceptance of what is.
Mindfulness-Based Diabetes Management is a process of living with diabetes. Mindfulness introduces a dimension of stillness into our busy lives, just resting in the body experience, alert to the intense fullness of the moment. In this way Experience grounds both Science, which wants to challenge the limits of human mortality, and the Healing Tradition, which wants human life to reach the fullness of its potential. Science has the capacity, albeit limited, to provide freedom from medical complications. Tradition engages the freedom for fullness of life. Tradition may become Fluff when untempered by Science; Science may become Frenzy when untempered by Tradition. It is via mindful Experience that Science and Tradition meet and integrate. Mindfulness enables both patient and professional to draw upon a presence that is restful, open, and fluid without excluding interventions that are measured, achieving, and programmed.
The exercises of Mindfulness Practice harness the mind into the process of heightened awareness of the body. When the mind is trained to be alert and attentive to the areas of tension in the body, the body’s release becomes healing in accord with the mind’s intention. In this way, mindfulness distinguishes itself from progressive relaxation. In the latter practice, the body becomes relaxed, but the mind does not focus the relaxation into a healing release; there remains a disconnect between the body and the mind. In progressive muscle relaxation the mind is wandering, day-dreaming, and fantasizing, and the deep healing of the mind-body integration does not happen.