Well, today was the day.  Today was the day of great revelation and life changing discovery!  Um…maybe NOT!!  Two words that make me squirm, group therapy.  Maybe if they changed the name to “mindfulness program” and told you the other people there were just for support because we all are going through the same thing, then it would make you overjoyed and totally within your comfort zone to attend.  Okay, again, um…maybe NOT!!

So, with a deep breath and a somewhat opened mind I walked into the room with chairs placed in a circle.  My first thought, “Score!  Rolly chairs!”  Then my thought changed to, “How am I going to stay focused on the teacher, when all I want to do is spin around?”  Do you know how fabulous those chairs are for playing a good game of bumper cars?!  The session began.  Everything sounded good.  It made sense – nothing foreign.  It is all about being in the moment.  Reigning in all the cluttered thoughts, fears, anxieties and just focusing on what is present.  (Babies and animals are very good at this.)  “Great!  Sounds simple and I know I can do that!”  Then we were given an object in our palm.  We were to act as though we had never experienced this object before.  “Well, duh!  It is obviously a raisin,” I said instinctively (to myself, of course).  Then we needed to examine it with our eyes, then our touch, then our smell and then our taste.  Oh, we even got to listen to it.  The room was so quiet, I heard mine say, “Eat me, I’m all alone!”  Okay, so I think you can tell how much I enjoyed this.  If everyone else wasn’t taking it so seriously, I would have dropped mine on the ground, jumped on my chair and started yelling, “It’s alive!  It’s alive!”

Alright, so maybe another aspect of the session would make an impact.  After our break we got out our mats and pillows and laid on the floor.  This was when we went through a mindfulness body scan.  As the teacher talked us through we were to breathe and take special note of the parts of the body she was speaking about.  The idea of this is to, again, think in the present and be aware of things going on…all the sensations.  So, hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep, I closed my eyes and listened to the soft voice and tried to make a conscience effort to be mindful.  Well, it didn’t last long.  I felt like I was at the doctors and my head kept saying, “No issues here. Everything feels fine.  All parts accounted for.”  Not to mention, when she said how are your feet, I went back to the raisin and thought, “Isn’t that neat how she tied the two workshops together?!”  After that I went to mind full rather than mindful.  Needless to say, I did not feel the first day went very well and couldn’t figure out how I was going to get through 7 more weeks.  I really didn’t think there was any hope for me.

The good news – there is hope for me!  The teacher explained to me that many individuals feel the same way after the first session, but as they progress and we learn more skills and start to train our minds, there is a change.  These are the attitudes we will be working on (all of which I have been struggling with): non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.  These are things all of us should work on whether we are in therapy or not.  My attitude right now is, this will be interesting.  I am going to give these two months my very best.  I can tell you one thing: I will never look at a raisin the same way again.