Psychologist & Psychotherapist

This book aims to encourage the field of CBT to incorporate the body into therapy and to view it as an essential source of insight for understanding patients and their distress. The goal is to make the body an integral part of their journey toward healing. Today, scientific research increasingly challenges the idea that the mind is an ethereal entity located in the head, disconnected from the physical body. In reality, the mind is a widespread, emergent, embodied process that resides in every cell of our being. Like a sponge, the body continually adapts and responds to life’s small and large challenges by developing contractions, tensions, pains, or illnesses. It is often the first to bear the impact when psychological difficulties arise. Therefore, learning to make space for the somatic dimension in therapy and to intervene with sensitivity in this area means adopting a deeper, more comprehensive, and transformative approach to treatment.

This book is the Italian edition of the volume by Woods and Rockman, “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Protocol, practice, and teaching skills”, which I translated into Italian and edited. It is a comprehensive guide to facilitating the 8-week program that allows instructors to teach the heart of MBSR.

Mindfulness is a practice steeped in age-old wisdom that, in its radical essentiality, allows us to regain a sense of freedom and control over our own lives. It consists simply of stopping and observing reality in a non-judgmental way as it presents itself to us here and now. It teaches us to dwell in the moment and fully savor its juice.

The book helps the reader become familiar with meditation in its various forms by presenting numerous mindfulness exercises. The emphasis is on transferring the same quality of presence experienced during meditation into everyday life: from daily tasks to relationships to the profession. It concludes with a review of psychotherapeutic models based on mindfulness.