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From: Ellen-Marie Silverman
Date: 03 Oct 2009
Time: 07:30:28 -0500
Remote Name: 205.188.117.70
[[Dr. Silverman, In your paper, you discuss using a combination of three types of meditation: vipassana practice, shenpa practice, and tonglen practice. Do you recommend meditation strategies to all of your clients who stutter as a part of their therapy? If so, how do you incorporate mediation into the therapy setting? Thank you. ]] It is 7:08 am here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so let me wish you Good Morning! and a good start to the day. Let's begin by sharing that I no longer see patients. I formally retired from clinical work two years ago after several decades of work. One reason I closed my practice was to secure time to write about what I had learned (for instance, the text Mind Matters: Setting the Stage for Satisfying Clinical Service. A Personal Essay and Self-Reflection in Clinical Practice in the forthcoming text edited by R. Fourie, Therapeutic Procedures for Communication Disorders). When I worked as a clinician, my goal was to help people meet their individual goals, so for some I recommended meditation, for others, not. If I still was practicing, I would prefer to work only with individuals developing a meditation practice, since I have found, after meditating more than 30 years, that the time-tested Buddhist practices I have cultivated to develop a greater sense of self-awareness and unconditional self-regard contribute to establishing these very same qualities that we consider the bedrock of effective therapy for people with stuttering problems. I believe that is the primary reason meditation has helped me deal satisfactorily with my own stuttering problem. Thank you for your question and for your interest in the ideas expressed in the paper.