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SALT LAKE CITY — Several years ago, social worker Marc Potter worked at an HIV/AIDS clinic in Seattle, when the stress of the job became too much to bear.
He turned to meth.
“I went from treating homeless mentally ill addicts in Seattle to becoming a homeless mentally ill addict,” he said.
Eventually Potter got help and returned home to Utah, where his sister gave him a recording of the teachings of Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh.
“I just started listening to that,” he said. “It just started working in me.
“I really do credit it for helping my mind be able to function again,” he said.
Listening to that recording, Potter learned mindfulness, the practice of living in the moment, and, without judgment, taking notice of your environment as well as inner thoughts and feelings.
“When I have major anxiety now I know I just don’t identify as strongly with it as mine,” he said, “it's just anxiety.”
Mindfulness, a concept that has been around for thousands of years, in recent years has become a buzzword in the West. It has infiltrated hospitals, public schools and corporate America.
It has become another tool for therapists, said social worker Emily Miranda.
“It's definitely something that the psychologically minded community is having a lot more awareness about,“ Miranda said.
Miranda runs the Mindfulness Clinic, part of the Student Counseling Center at the University of Utah. The center added mindfulness — therapy, yoga, meditation, workshops — to the menu of treatment options because staff thought it might be more accepted by students and staff looking for help.
Where maybe a student would feel embarrassment for coming in for therapy, so to speak, but to come in for mindfulness practice such as the meditation that we lead, the yoga or the workshops that we teach, mindfulness skills, that feels maybe a little bit more accessible and a little less stigmatized.
–Emily Miranda
“Where maybe a student would feel embarrassment for coming in for therapy, so to speak, but to come in for mindfulness practice such as the meditation that we lead, the yoga or the workshops that we teach, mindfulness skills, that feels maybe a little bit more accessible and a little less stigmatized,” she said.
“Most of us, we walk around with lots of judgments about ourself, about other people about how we should be feeling about, what we should be thinking,” said the center director, Dr. Lauren Weitzman. “Here, we really encourage people to start to develop a different relationship with their thoughts. … We teach people how to notice those thoughts but not get attached to them.”
At the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, psychologist Edward Varra helps teach a 12-week mindfulness skills group class.
“I think it’s very helpful for PTSD. It's very helpful for anxiety and panic. I think it’s very helpful for depression, substance abuse,” he said.
“In PTSD, the past is not remembered, it’s relived, or 'I’m in the future.' What’s around the next corner? When’s the other shoe gonna drop?” he explains. “With PTSD, we teach people to be more in the present moment, be right here, right now.”
Marc Potter, the once-homeless social worker, is now a therapist with Intermountain Healthcare’s Employee Assistance Program. He teaches mindfulness to clients as well as students in his EAP meditation class. He dreams of spreading the world of mindfulness across the Intermountain workforce, in the same way that Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, Google’s in-house mindfulness guru, is doing for that company.
“We do this for patients quite a bit, but we often forget about ourselves,” he said.
“There's a saying in mindfulness that pain in life is inevitable but that the suffering is optional,” Varra said. “We all have things happen to us. We all have pain that we experience … but the way we relate to our internal experiences is often what creates the suffering that we have in our life.”
