Mindfulness & Stuttering: Using Eastern Strategies to Speak with Greater Ease

Mindfulness & Stuttering provides information to help the reader decide whether or not mindfulness may be a congenial strategy to help resolve a stuttering problem. Recent research verifies that mindfulness, a means to greater self-awareness and well-being practiced for more than 2,500 years, facilitates desired personal change. From reducing stress to lessening negative self-talk and by improving the ability to learn new skills, practicing mindfulness leads to living with greater ease. Ellen-Marie Silverman, Ph.D., a speech pathologist for more than 40 years and a Fellow of the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association, has been practicing mindfulness for more than 16 years and has used the practice with her own stuttering problem to speak and communicate with greater ease. In Mindfulness & Stuttering, she addresses questions and concerns people may have about the practice of mindfulness and its application to stuttering problems and describes the use of six mindfulness techniques --- shamatha-vipassana, working with shenpa, maitri, lojong, using gatha's, and tonglen --- as secular practices. She shows how mindfulness can help address two concerns people with a covert or overt stuttering problem may have, Fear of Stuttering and Struggling to Speak, and offers suggestions for constructively managing impatience, boredom, and relapse, obstacles that can arise when learning to speak with greater ease. Dr. Silverman is the author of Relief From Stuttering. Laying the Groundwork to Speak with Greater Ease.