Inner RePatterning and Mindfulness Research

Recent Research into the Benefits of Mindfulness

By June Kaye Spencer

Introduction

Inner RePatterning has played a major role in the development of empirical research into the benefits of taking part in an 8 week mindfulness based course to reduce the affects experienced by attendees of stress, anxiety and depression.  The course has since been developed further and is being run within mental health organisations as well as health organisations.  The following information offers a brief overview of positive affects achieved by participants of the first cohort.

 Results from 7 Week Programme

This chart is an overview of the results from a 7 week course in which participants were taught mindfulness based techniques including mindful breathing, walking and meditation, Inner RePatterning, Qigong exercise and Body Scanning to assist them to overcome problems with anxiety, stress and depression. A base-line scale was achieved using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) (Brown and Ryan 2003)

The chart presents clients 2 to 6 in colour coded data points on the trajectory that their sessions followed. Answers client’s gave to the questionnaire at the beginning of each session were recorded on a week by week basis. The answers were then calculated to provide an overall average for each weekly session. This is represented in the chart as a colour-coded diamond for each participant. As you can see there are 7 diamonds per colour/participant which relates to the 7 weeks that the study was active.

This shows the overall average of improvement or decline that the participants experienced throughout the study. Through studying the results in the chart it is easy to see that overall there is an improvement for all of the clients from week 1 to week 7. For example in week 1 participant number 6 was recorded as 1.93 as their overall average in relation to the questions. However in week 7 their overall average rose to a 5.8. Similarly participant number 3 began with an overall average score of 3.4, which by week 7 had risen to an overall average of 4.7.  Interestingly the participants, excluding participant 2 who experienced a steady weekly improvement, experienced a momentary recession in their scores during one or two weeks throughout the whole 7 weeks. However despite this they all still showed an overall average greater in week 7 than week 1.

The chart below shows the overall averages for each participant calculated for week one, shown as the yellow columns, plotted against the each participants’ overall average for week 7, shown in the red columns. As the chart indicates there was an overall improvement during the course of the 7 weeks of sessions.