Random Thoughts with Random Excess Ep 6: Mindful not Mind Full

In the previous Episode, Episode 5, I talked about the din from thoughts in my head competing for attention. I talked about being Mind Full and today I want to take about being Mindful

I have done years of therapy of all kinds including lots of DBT (Dialectacle Behavioral Therapy), indicated for personality disorders and obsessive behaviors and a few other diagnoses. DBT, if you permit me to oversimplify it a bit, is the merging of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Zen Buddhism... and relies heavily on doing things mindfully.

Every DBT group I have ever been in starts with going over what it means to be mindful and talks about three states of mind, Reasonable, Emotional, and Wise... and as an aside, I think the Resasonable mind should be called the Rational Mind. The rational mind is the seat of contemplation and analysis. Basically the executive function of the frontal cortex

The Emotional mind might also do with a different name more suggestive of its function, something like the Motivated Mind, or Triggered Mind, or even the Action Mind. It is the seat of taking action. It sits down in what some call the lizard brain and involves the functions the hippocampus and amygdala and is very closely linked to our memories, espeically those experiences of deep personal meaning.

I'm Random Excess