Social Workers' Narratives of Integrating Mindfulness into Practice

Abstract

Mindfulness is increasingly important as a professional intervention in social work; however, little is known about how practitioners integrate a practice of eastern origins into a western context. To explore the integration of mindfulness in social work, we collected written stories from social workers who participated in two workshops in regional Australia. The participants developed their own individual written narratives about their understanding of and experience in using mindfulness, and contributed these to a larger group discussion. We identified four scenarios/plotlines within the collected stories and ‘restoried’ four examples of the participants' written narratives. The stories reveal that participants experience little dissonance when integrating mindfulness into their personal lives, but the process of incorporating it into their practice requires a complex negotiation between the participant's story of themselves as a practitioner of mindfulness, their ‘professional story’, stories of themselves as social workers and the story of social work in their professional knowledge landscape.

Keywords::

• mindfulness
• social work practice
• meditation
• epistemology
• narrative

Acknowledgements

This manuscript has been supported by the CQUniversity HEALTH CRNwww.cqu.edu.au/crn and the Australian Government's Collaborative Research Networks Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robyn Lynn

Robyn Lynn James Cook University, P.O. Box 6811, Cairns, Qld, 4870, Australia. [email: [email protected]]

Jo Mensinga

Jo Mensinga James Cook University, P.O. Box 6811, Cairns, Qld, 4870, Australia. [email: [email protected]]