Mindful June 2017

LIVING | walk the talk
Intimately Mindful
By Victoria Dawson
Photograph by Lever Rukhin
Born in Toronto, to Jamaican parents,
Giselle Jones worked as an actress
in New York City and Hollywood for
17 years, then served as the education
director of a youth literacy group in LA.
She’s now a psychotherapist in private
practice who treats people with mental
health and relationship issues including
sexual anxiety, trauma, and addiction.
How did you first come
to meditation?
In 2012, while at UCLA getting my
master’s degree in social work, I did
an internship at a school in the Watts
neighborhood. On day one, the school
shut down for race-related fighting
and thieving of computers, and I had
teachers tossing me students.
As I got to know them, kids would
disclose sexual abuse and other
traumatic experiences, and then they
would leave the room, and I would
hold my head and cry. But as a UCLA
student, I was able to attend, for free,
a daylong course in mindfulness meditation
with Dr. Marvin Belzer at the
Mindful Awareness Research Center.
And I really fell in love with it. It was
delicious for me.
Delicious? Can you explain
what you mean?
I got to see how much my body was
speaking to me. I’ve always been very
physically oriented: I identify emotions
in my body before I know what they
are in my thoughts. Learning through
mindfulness to not shy away from that
intensity, but to actually pay attention
to it, allows us to tolerate our intensity,
the intensity of being human. The
practice helped me to stay present in
my sessions with the kids and in the
social work I was learning and doing,
without collapsing.
The marketing imagery can
make certain communities of
people feel like mindfulness
is a luxury only for rich
white people, or that it’s not
applicable to their own lives.
How do you use it in your work?
Here’s one example: At a weekly
women’s intimacy group that I facilitate
at the Center for Healthy Sex,
before starting we all sit in a brief
meditation to let us arrive and disarm
and feel safe enough to be vulnerable
in each other’s presences. Mindfulness
practice is not only a tuning fork
for what’s going on in the room but
can also enable us to show up with as
few defenses as possible.
You deal with people who have
sexual anxiety issues. How does
mindfulness help?
I sometimes give a homework exercise
called sensate focus therapy, created
by Masters and Johnson in the ’60s. It’s
a way of pulling intimacy all the way
back to the beginning, with touch—and
make that a mindfulness exercise.
One partner receives the touching
and the other is the giver, whose
task is to do a slow, slow exploration.
What does it feel like to smell behind
this person’s ear? How can you take
20 minutes to explore this person’s
hand? Both partners pay attention to
their own responses, and the person
receiving can say what’s working for
them or not. Such exploration can be
really liberating and actually increase
desire. It’s all about slowing it down
so the intimacy comes in.
You work with a pretty diverse
group. How important is that to you?
Very. The marketing imagery can
make certain communities of people
feel like mindfulness is a luxury
only for rich white people, or that
it’s not applicable to their own lives.
To say “just bring yourself into the
present moment and everything
is going to be hunky-dory” is not
helpful for school kids afraid of being
targeted by gangs. But when you
do bring mindfulness interventions
in—though I might not label them
as “mindfulness”— some people are
like, “This really helps.”
The diversity issue was partly what
compelled me to get my certification
as a mindfulness facilitator. I really
appreciated that a significant part of
my training there was dedicated to
cultural humility and high inclusiveness
on diversity issues.
You also do some volunteer work.
Who participates?
Some of the regulars are homeless,
with PTSD or anxiety or depression.
One woman who identified as
transient told me that the meditation
has really helped with her anxiety.
Another homeless participant had
been targeted by street violence
because of being transgender. I think
mindfulness is a path toward being
able to inhabit your own body in a
way that feels safe.
What do you get out of it?
I never, ever, ever, ever leave feeling
anything but filled by the experience.
When we end, there’s a sense
of community, a thread that seems to
run through the entire room, which
I like to call love, or life. And I get to
be part of that. ●
28 mindful June 2017