Mindfulness & Interbeing: Insight into how I Understand Mindfulness in the Therapy Room & Beyond
Please note that this blog post reflects the author’s perspective is not a substitute for individual therapy or support. If you need immediate support, please connect with your local crisis support (such as calling or texting 9-8-8 within Canada) or emergency services (such as 9-1-1).
It may surprise you that as a social worker and psychotherapist who currently works from a mindfulness-based approach, I didn’t always like mindfulness.
Years ago, the versions of mindfulness I encountered felt intertwined with a self-care culture that seemed to suggest individuals are entirely responsible for their problems. I felt this perspective placed an unfair burden on people, ignoring the systemic structures that advantage some groups while disadvantaging others. I’m not alone in noticing this – it’s a topic explored across many disciplines and cultures.
When I was in graduate school, I took a course that looked at mindfulness within social work. To be honest, I was somewhat expecting more of the self-care narratives that I had heard before. But my professor, who co-edited a book on embodied learning and decolonization, opened my eyes to a new way of understanding mindfulness. They helped me see that the mindfulness I had been introduced to was indeed a commodified version, stripped of its richness and connection to collective well-being.
In grad school, I wrote a thesis-type paper titled Are You Here to Solve Anxiety or Are You Here to Work Toward Liberation? (Yes, that title is peak critical social work energy!). Through this work, I continued to encounter the knowledge that mindfulness is rooted in many spiritual, religious, and wisdom traditions including Buddhism. At its core, mindfulness is not about hyper-individualistic fixes. It’s about stopping, concentrating, and embodying the insight that all beings are deeply connected.
This deeper understanding of mindfulness is beautifully expressed in what Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”.
I see examples of interbeing in everyday life, like on my walks with my dog -
In my neighbourhood, during the few days after garbage day on a particularly windy week, there can be recycling and garbage strewn on roads and lawns. While I was walking with my dog, I noticed that there was a clear plastic container that had the remnants of some sort of orange oily soup on the inside (perhaps you can picture the ones). I felt frustrated, as I had just spent time picking up some garbage that had blown about in another part of the neighbourhood, and didn’t have enough hands to pick it up and carry the poop bag and hold my dog, who loves to try and eat sticks and requires me to be pretty attentive. So, I walked by, and felt fine because I had already picked up garbage earlier.
A few days later on a cold and windy morning, I was walking with my dog again and noticed that she had picked something up and was vigorously chewing on it. If I didn’t have my (harmless) bitter tasting dog spray meant to get her to drop sticks, she may have tried to swallow it and choked. When I finally was able to get the piece of plastic from her mouth, I saw that it was a piece of clear plastic, clearly broken off from a larger container, with remnants of an orange, oily soup.
In that moment, I realized that I had experienced a rather direct example of interbeing – the insight that when we are taking care of, for example, the health of our planet, our neighbours, and our neighbourhoods, we are taking care of ourselves and the ones we love.
So, how does this connect to my work as a social worker and psychotherapist? For me, personally, mindfulness is more than a therapeutic tool; it’s a way of living that helps me (re)remember and take action based on insight of interconnectedness. In my work with clients, I indeed practice from a secular, non-religious perspective, drawing on approaches that are widely used within Western therapy spaces like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), and Internal Family Systems (IFS). These methods, which are grounded in mindfulness, focus on healing the individual.
But, I personally believe that healing also ripples outward. I believe that when we heal in therapy, we’re not just healing ourselves. We’re expanding our ability to show up for others, for the natural world, for future generations, and even for past generations in ways that trauma or wounds may have previously blocked. Healing invites us to move beyond feelings of scarcity and self-protection, opening us up to connection and generosity.
At the same time, I recognize that many people live with very real threats and challenges rooted in systemic inequities. Healing is complex and nuanced. While mindfulness can’t solve these issues alone, it offers a path to greater awareness and collective care—a way to hold space for both individual and shared experiences.
These ideas are not unique to me (indeed, they are centuries old, spanning across many traditions and cultures), but I hope this post gives you a sense of how I think about mindfulness and strive to approach it from an anti-oppressive lens in my work as a social worker and psychotherapist.
There is so much more to say about mindfulness, healing, and the interconnected nature of our lives with those around us and with the planet. I look forward to continuing to unpack some thoughts in future posts.
For now, when you have space, I invite you to be curious. What versions of mindfulness have you encountered? How have they shaped your view of healing? How does this understanding show up in your own life or in the therapy room? Know that I am right there too, continually sitting with these questions from a place of openness, warmth, and curiosity.
About the author
Sabrina Sibbald (MSW, RSW) is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist. She supports adults in Burlington, Toronto, and across Ontario to overcome anxiety, people pleasing, and trauma so they can move forward in a way that feels true to who they are.
References
Hanh, T. N. (1991). Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Bantam Books.
Wong, R., & Batacharya, S. (2021). Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization. Athabasca University Press.
