The benefits of mindfulness as a weekly activity: experiences from a male homeless service

Abstract

The social services in Ireland are organized by different organizations which have different views on social activities within residential and homeless services for ser-vice-users. Mindfulness has become a ‘buzzword’ when it comes to mental health treatment and for daily practice in the contemporary world. Despite the different modes or practices of mindfulness, this study provides an example of how mindful-ness can be conducted in the social services, in particular a male homeless residential service. By providing a background on how mindfulness was provided the study in-forms of a real-world experience of a weekly mindfulness session in an Irish male homeless service with five participants. Through a limited quantitative approach to understanding the participants’ experience of one of the mindfulness sessions provided, the study informs of some insights that need to be kept in mind for providing mindfulness in social service work or in other therapeutic settings. The sessions took place over the span of 20 months, with the results via a Likert Scale questionnaire deriving from the views of participants on one particular session rather than their overall views on their experience of the mindfulness sessions in general. The findings reveal that the benefit for the participants is apparent and provides insights into the results and experiences of service users partaking in mindfulness on a weekly basis. It can be concluded that there are some notions to be kept in mind prior and post session, which provides a keen insight into the preparations required.