You can find the basic orientation to this style of meditation in three of my blog posts. These are the instructions we provide in the first session of an emotion-focused mindfulness therapy (EFMT) group to set up the first meditation practice.
- Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Meditation
- Integrating Self-Compassion into Your Mindfulness Meditation
- How We Learned to Suppress Emotions
In EFMT groups, participants journal and then take turns sharing their meditation experience and the group therapist empathically explores their experience with them. Participants learn experiential focusing by being facilitated into focusing by a therapist during this process or through vicarious learning by witnessing someone else being guided into this kind of processing. When it is over, the therapist will debrief with the person who was doing the processing and then with the group. They will then summarize the new learning with some brief psycho-education to help people integrate this into meditation and the rest of their life. The following handout could be emailed to them after the session, to help them consolidate this new learning:
The following article describes an EFMT perspective on the Buddhist brahmaviharas as four central values for orienting to in our mediation practice and our lives. The post is based on a talk I gave during a one-day retreat in an outpatient psychiatry EFMT group:
The talk went on to describe values in more detail and included an exercise for identifying your key values in life: