The Challenge of Eating Disorders: A Teacher Learns a New Mindfulness Technique
“She’s brought a cup with her. This is not unusual. Clients often bring food or drinks they’re required to finish—but when Mariko reaches inside the cup, I hear the brittle clicking of ice and look closer. There’s no beverage. She pulls out a piece of ice and, without a word, curls up on her side, cradling the cube tenderly in her palm.”
By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor
Illustration by Anne Horst for AJN.
We hear a lot lately about mindfulness and its benefits in the workplace for dealing with stress, increasing productivity, and the like.
It’s been pointed out lately that mindfulness has become a tool with many uses, some more in keeping with its role in various spiritual traditions than others. Such traditions seem to use meditation practices in order to cultivate compassionate awareness of the varieties of suffering arising from the impermanence of everything from pleasant and unpleasant feelings and the weather to the lives of our loved ones.
This month’s Reflections essay in AJN is by a mindful movement teacher at an eating disorder treatment center. Eating disorders can involve mental and physical suffering that’s unrelenting and self-sustaining. Many clinicians and therapists find patients with eating disorders very challenging to work with. The essay, called “Distress Tolerance,” tells the story of an encounter in which the […]
