About Mindfulness
Mindfulness, to put it as plainly as possible, is the ability to observe one's own internal sensations with the calm clarity of an external witness. It has been described by the great Buddhist monk Nyanaponika as "the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us, at the successive moments of perception."
The mental act of adverting attention in this manner can enable sufferers of OCD and related problems to develop the insight necessary for consciously choosing new and more adaptive responses to the intrusive and intensely bothersome thoughts and urges which bombard their consciousness.
As a practical matter, shifting one's perspective in this way requires substantial and quite directed effort, especially when it is done in the presence of significant anxiety and fear. For that reason, in my book Brain Lock I developed Four Steps -- Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, Revalue -- to help people working on OCD and related problems utilize mindfulness more effectively
The Four Step approach to treatment is essentially an enhancement of traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy methods. It involves systematically training people with OCD to recognize their symptoms as being related to brain biochemical imbalances that can be responded to adaptively and in ways that lead to improved function.
A great deal of personal therapeutic empowerment occurs when OCD sufferers clearly realize that their symptoms are, in effect, "false messages from the brain" which the medical condition OCD is causing them to experience, and that they have the ability to willfully change their behavioral and emotional responses to these "false messages."
The goal of treatment is to learn to respond to these "false brain messages" in new and much more adaptive ways. This is accomplished through the utilization of techniques of behavioral refocusing, in which functional activities are systematically performed in place of habitual OCD responses. These cognitive-behavioral training techniques enable patients to utilize improved self-monitoring capabilities in order to more accurately interpret their symptoms, resulting in an improved ability to manage their emotional and behavioral responses to the intense anxiety they cause.
This results in an enhanced ability to maintain attentional focus on the performance of consciously chosen adaptive behaviors, rather than capitulating to automaton like compulsive responses such as repetitive washing and checking, when besieged by the fearsome thoughts and urges of OCD.