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.

A qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis of social workers’ experience in end-of-life care

“…The first author wrote a “re-storied passage” (Lynn & Mensinga, 2015) to enrich the findings from the QIMS methodology. This narrative device incorporates participant quotes from across the four original articles, with slight grammatical edits and addition of linking words.…”

“…The first author engaged a "narrative lens" to their reflections, drawing on narrative concepts such as "being in the midst of stories" (Clandinin, 2013); "stories about stories" (Riessman, 2008); and "narrative openness" (Randall, 2019). The first author wrote a "re-storied passage" (Lynn & Mensinga, 2015) to enrich the findings from the QIMS methodology. This narrative device incorporates participant quotes from across the four original articles, with slight grammatical edits and addition of linking words.…”

Becoming Fully Present in Your Body: Analysing Mindfulness as an Affective Investment in Tech Culture

“…We interpreted the obtained Internet research material by applying phenomenological concepts that enabled us to explore how managerial bodies are expected to be shaped through MBI practices so as to render managers better leaders (Coole 2007). Phenomenology offers a potentially useful conceptualisation for understanding the internal experiences related to mindfulness practices, although they need to be contextualised by drawing on material derived from mindfulness as a socially lived phenomenon (Lynn and Mensinga 2015). In order to interpret the rhetoric of the mindfulness programmes advertised for managers, we analysed the interpersonal dimensions of mindfulness practices as they are manifested in mindfulness discourse, which are expected to serve as a transformative social and somatic force within teamwork.…”

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“…The process of socialising to the role of social worker, during a student's placement, is a time when a student social worker is particularly vulnerable to stress (Maddock et al, 2021). Students may be working with service users and distressing life scenarios for the first time and students may need to navigate the complex thoughts and emotions that can accompany practice in challenging environments (Lynn and Mensinga, 2015). During their placement, students are also particularly vulnerable to self-doubt as they attempt to practice the social work skills and develop the competencies necessary to be a professionally qualified social worker (Gockel et al, 2013).…”