Access the Wisdom of your Body: How Mindfulness, Meditation and Breathwork help in Trauma Therapy

David Cornwell, psychotherapist at The Balance, specializing in depression, trauma, and nervous system healing, breaks down the subtle yet powerful ways the body holds and processes our experiences. In this episode, he explores how awareness, presence, and somatic practices can lead to real transformation. From the irony of wealth to the wisdom of the nervous system, David invites us to slow down, feel more deeply, and reconnect with what truly matters.
 
🔗 Watch now for a conversation that just might change the way you think about the connection between your body, mind, and emotions.
 
About David: David Cornwell is an accredited psychotherapist with a Master’s in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford and over 25 years of personal mindfulness practice. He specializes in body-centered approaches to healing trauma, depression, and chronic stress, combining talk therapy with somatic techniques and EMDR. After living with asthma for 35 years, David developed a program that helped him become completely medication-free — an experience that deeply informs his work. Today, at The Balance, he supports clients in releasing long-held tension and reconnecting with their innate capacity to heal, blending psychotherapy, mindfulness, and body awareness into a truly integrative path to transformation.
 
[00:00:00] – What Is Meditation? A Simple Introduction
[00:02:12] – How Therapy and Meditation Changed David’s Life
[00:04:25] – Healing Trauma Through Mind-Body Integration
[00:06:58] – Training in Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy Explained
[00:08:19] – Learning from Chris Cullen and Oxford’s Influence
[00:09:31] – The Neuroscience Behind Mindfulness and Healing
[00:12:00] – Personal Growth: How Meditation Shapes the Self
[00:16:18] – Regulating Emotions Through Early Meditation Practice
[00:20:33] – Finding Joy and Presence Through Various Meditations
[00:24:28] – Building Body Awareness Through Mindfulness Practices
[00:27:17] – The Roots and Rise of Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy
[00:30:05] – Transforming Pain: Mindfulness as a Structured Path
[00:34:02] – Unpacking Childhood Patterns Through Mindful Therapy
[00:36:27] – Trauma Awareness and the Power of Being Present
[00:40:22] – Everyday Mindfulness Across Cultures and Routines
[00:41:01] – The Science of Mindful Eating and Neural Shifts
[00:44:57] – How to Stay Mindful in the Chaos of Daily Life
[00:46:48] – Recognising Autopilot Mode and Creating New Experiences
[00:51:56] – Understanding Processing Styles, Decisions, and Low Mood
[00:55:53] – Deepening Embodied Awareness Through Breathwork
[00:58:36] – Guided Practice: Creating Space from Emotions
[01:06:00] – Mindfulness for Simplicity and High-Pressure Lifestyles
[01:13:01] – Somatic Therapy and Stories of Deep Transformation
[01:20:22] – Rediscovering Joy and Creativity After Trauma
[01:25:47] – Redefining Masculinity: Mental Health and Vulnerability
[01:30:56] – Daily Practices and Global Well-Being Advice
 
For further mental health information and support, visit The Balance RehabClinic website: https://balancerehabclinic.com/
 
Follow David Cornwell
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-ernest-cornwell/
 
Follow Abdullah Boulad: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullahboulad/
https://www.instagram.com/abdullahboulad/          
 
You can order Abdullah’s book, ‘Living A Life In Balance’, here: 
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0BC9S5TCF
 
Follow The Balance RehabClinic:  
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thebalancerehabclinic/
https://www.instagram.com/thebalancerehabclinic/

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Transcript

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David Cornwell 00:00:00  I remember when I first practiced meditation, I was 18 years old and I remember feeling like I'd come home. The reason we do these practices is to be joyful, to be happy, to be present, so that if I'm walking with my children and I have their hands in my hands, I can feel their hands in my hands. I'm aware of it. And I'm not worried about the telephone bill or the problems that I have that I can simply be present. We all know the story of Medusa. All these warriors went out to slay Medusa and they were unsuccessful. If we look in Trauma's eye, we turn to stone, we freeze. And we understand this about the nervous system also. But if we can look at at the mind's reflection, which is the sensations in the body, well, some of these thoughts and images that we have that are overwhelming, that freeze us when we bring our awareness to the body. There's more movement, there's more adaptivity and we can start to become friendly with the the trauma, with the experience, and we can start to transform it in a, in a sort of roundabout way.

Abdullah Boulad 00:01:14  Welcome to the Living a Life and Balance podcast. My name is Abdullah Bullard. I'm the founder and CEO of the Balanced Rehab Clinic. My guest today is David Cornwell, a psychotherapist, meditation master and somatic experiencing practitioner at the balance. In this episode, we discuss the power of combining psychotherapy with mindfulness practices such as meditation and somatic work, treating trauma, eating disorders, addiction, and other health conditions. We dove into what it means to be a man today, and how we all have an inner wisdom that we can access. David guided me through an introductory meditation practice that I also invite you to join. I hope you will enjoy. David, what motivated you to do what you do today?

David Cornwell 00:02:12  Well, today. So what I'm doing today, I work as a therapist at the at the Balance. And my main background is with sort of mindfulness based psychotherapy or embodied psychotherapy. And the, the motivation for that really began in, well, when I was 18 years old, I would say it began with, with growing up in, in Ireland in a large family, and then moving to England, going to university in England.

David Cornwell 00:02:52  And in my first days of university, someone gave me a book on meditation and I was I was so taken with the book I read, it covered a cover in overnight, and the next day I found myself in a meditation center in. I was living in Newcastle upon Tyne and I found myself in the local Zen center, and I started practicing quite in quite a disciplined way for the for the next three years that I was at university. And when I left university, I thought, okay, I'm not going to pursue the career path that I had studied. I knew that I wanted to continue with meditation practice and and this had become my life. It was very clear to me, and that took me on journeys to different retreat centers. I was living in Ibiza at one point. I was living in this amazing meditation retreat centre in Ibiza. I was in my early 20s and then I moved to Istanbul. I met, someone who would become my wife and the mother of my two children, and we she was Turkish and we moved to Istanbul, and together we created a sort of mindfulness and yoga centres, these amazing studios that were a huge success.

David Cornwell 00:04:25  But I found myself at the time moving out of the practices that I loved the mindfulness practices, doing some yoga practice, but mainly meditation and moving into a more management role, which just wasn't me. Although it was good, the place was exploding. It was really successful. It was an amazing thing to do. I was in my mid 20s and I found find myself in having this, these amazing centers. And they were there was we straddled Europe and Asia. There was a studio in in Europe, there was a studio on either side of the Bosphorus and but yeah, I was I find myself really in this management space and not doing so well, not being very happy with that. And it was at that time that someone had told me about a trauma therapy training that was happening in Ireland, very close to where I grew up. So, and the trauma therapy, what I love about trauma therapy, it's really about the relationship between the mind and the body. And that's what mindfulness is, is about.

David Cornwell 00:05:40  It's really about the relationship between the mind and the body. And I felt that this was a natural sort of progression of my personal practice. and it was much more suited or tailored towards the Western psyche. So in terms of the eastern psyche, where you maybe sit alone on a cushion and you meditate for hours a day, I think we're much more relational beings and we need that extra layer, of work, you know, that maybe through therapy. And, and life is also so difficult and so complex. And I started to realize the importance of this type of work. So I was living in Istanbul, managing this, huge business actually, at the time for, for yoga studio and meditation center. And I decided to leave that and to train as a therapist in order to continue my own development. So I trained in Ireland, which was amazing for me because I kind of ran away from Ireland when I was 18, you know, I'd. I was happy to, like many of us, you know, we all have our own stories from our childhood.

David Cornwell 00:06:58  And, I felt that my, especially my teenage years were more chaotic, more difficult. So it was really wonderful for me to go back to Ireland and to do this training, that I find it very transformative. And then when I was doing this training, I realized that, well, I wanted to become I wanted to develop my skills and get more licensing. So I studied there was a a college in England, in the south of England that was based. It was a mindfulness. It was, oh, sorry. It was a training centre to become a licensed psychotherapist. And that training centre was based upon Buddhist psychology. And it's similar in in America you have the Naropa Institute and in, then in the UK you have the Corona Institute. These are kind of sister colleges. Some, some people will be more familiar with the Naropa Institute. So I did the training there, as well as getting a master's in mindfulness based psychotherapy and a licensed psychotherapist. And then one of the participants on the training that I was at was a guy called Chris Cullen and who Chris Cullen teaches mindfulness every week in the Houses of Parliament in the UK.

David Cornwell 00:08:19  And he's involved in, I think, in the mindfulness into schools. But he has quite an active role in the development of mindfulness in the UK. He's a wonderful speaker and he's also very involved in the Extinction Rebellion at the moment. But he was on the training I was at in in the UK when I was training to be a therapist, and he encouraged me then to apply to Oxford. He he was also teaching Buddhist psychology at Oxford University. And he said, look, you know, come and do the master's program at Oxford. And you can, you know, this, it'll really it'll really tie a lot of these pieces together. So that was really cool. So I went to Oxford. I studied, the neuroscience of mindfulness, Buddhist psychology, cognitive science and the clinical application of mindfulness. And I felt like this, all of these things, it created a for me, there was a deep understanding was developing around mindfulness. like today, I also have a 25 year disciplined practice of meditation.

David Cornwell 00:09:31  So I threw those pieces in and I felt that I had, something to offer as a clinician that I could really help people to understand the relationship between the body and the mind. How the mind is this? Or how the body is this amazing resource resource that we have that can help to transform our difficulty, that we need to sort of listen to it and trust it, and to really support people to cultivate that connection to the body. You know the word for mindfulness, the original translation is the word sati, which means to remember. It's simply that to remember. And I think we've forgotten that we have this amazing wisdom in our bodies that can help us to deal with life's difficulties. You know, we have this amazing mind which can help us to figure things out, that we can really solve the most complex things. But when you know, when it comes to an emotional problem or something that doesn't have necessarily a real world solution. An easy solution that we can fix. Then it's so valuable to drop into the body and to work with the wisdom of the body that can help process what's difficult in our lives without necessarily having to fix it.

David Cornwell 00:11:03  So I think it's that journey that brought me here and to my work as a therapist to support people, to remember that they have this amazing resource that's there. And if they can just drop into it and reconnect to it, then it will be it will support them in their lives.

Abdullah Boulad 00:11:25  Thank you very much for sharing that. So what you are doing or what you did is basically went through the, the, the meditation then into the body and, and and the mental psychotherapeutic side. But what interests me is at the age of 18, not many people would be ready to to jump into an, meditation. Yeah. So what, what was at that time for you, special or what? What draw you into this, education?

David Cornwell 00:12:00  Yeah, there's there's so many pieces to it, I think. Abdullah. So I was well, I grew up in, in the north of Ireland, in a village in a small fishing village outside of Belfast. And I had a wonderful childhood in many ways. I had six brothers and sisters.

David Cornwell 00:12:20  My father was a fisherman, and there was a very strong sense of belonging that I had growing up in this community. There's a really a sense of belonging and there is a sense of connection. And I knew everyone. I had many friends, Huge family. But I think there's also a piece where. The people are not doing therapy. People are not, working on their their shadows or working with what's difficult. And when I was 18 years old, I just felt that I was a little bit lost. You know, I had, you know, growing up in this, in a very tight community with very clear expectations of what it is to be a man, what it is to be from here, all of these, all of these factors. I felt that I was kind of aware that at 18 years old, I was I was not in a good space. I was a bit lost. And it was coincidence that brought this book to me. this book on meditation. And, you know, a story that I often tell is that.

David Cornwell 00:13:44  So this, on my first, first day at university, almost the first week at university. And I made friends with this, guy. His name was Ross, and he was a wonderful. Him and I were best friends all through university, and it was him in the first, in the first week that brought me this book on meditation. When I read it, I realized that I needed what was in there. I needed this transformation, this inner transformation. But the reason I tell this story is because Ross, who was my best friend through university and we both graduated the same time, and shortly after the graduation, he died of a heroin overdose. And he was. So I found it interesting. So he's one of the few people I, I know in my life who is a avid reader. He would read book after book after book, and he what was interesting, what I reflect on is that I got this book. We both came from a similar background, working class background, lots of chaos, lots of stuff, lots of alcohol, drugs that were around.

David Cornwell 00:15:04  But when I got this book on meditation, I did the practices. It impacted me enough to go to a to a Zen center and learn meditation. He got the book on meditation and never practiced. And shortly after university, he died. And I would say, these are sliding door moments in my life, that his life went in one direction and my life went in quite another. And I have a lot of gratitude for him at that moment, given me the book, but I can sort of reflect on it and see how mindfulness and these practices supported me to have a completely different trajectory in my life.

Abdullah Boulad 00:15:46  I'm sorry to hear about Ros. And and I hear you now how how this has affected you. so when when you talk about, meditation, what did it gave to you? that at that time of of your life. And what happened in your body, were you better connected? what was it that intrigued you to go deeper into this practice?

David Cornwell 00:16:18  Okay. Well, when I learned there were two practices, which I learned, one was the mindfulness of breathing.

David Cornwell 00:16:26  And that's a practice which I do. I still do several times a week. And the other practice was a self-compassion practice. These are the two main practices, let's say, that are taught in the mindfulness tradition. They're often described as the two wings of the bird. You know, one word is or one wing is about cultivating insight, clarity and compassion and wisdom. And the other wing is about cultivating self-compassion. So I think I remember when I first practiced meditation, I was 18 years old. There was a the Zen center was running a six week meditation training. And I remember feeling like I'd come home, like sitting in that meditation posture, you know, really comfortable cushions around me and beautiful space. I remember the beauty of the space. It was just very. And it was very calm. And I remember the, the, the teachers that were there seemed very regulated. They had a quality of presence, which I hadn't really known before. And they also the teachers were men. And I also recognized they had a, a maturity, a mature sort of emotional maturity.

David Cornwell 00:17:51  They were able to communicate. They were able to talk. And I remember just immediately feeling the gift of that, like it was very it was a very regulating environment to be in. So the practices I think what they did first was cultivate a lot of self-compassion. So I would do I would alternate one day I would do the mindfulness of breathing meditation. The next day I would do a compassion practice. And I alternated these every day for three years. And what I experienced was a lot of Self-compassion. A lot of, loving myself, for want of a better word. Taking care of myself. And then the other. The other piece was that I started to to see myself with more clarity, to understand the patterns that had become established in my life and how those were sort of unconsciously sort of running. They were like, you know, sort of these deep ocean currents that had become established and were driving my behavior unconsciously. And through mindfulness practice, I started to work with these patterns. And I didn't work on them directly, necessarily.

David Cornwell 00:19:17  It's just the process that happens when you start to have a disciplined meditation practice, these things start to transform by themselves. I also understand Stand the regulating effect on the nervous system, it starts to transform the nervous system. These are things which I try to support the clients. The at the balance with, for example, is the understanding, and this is all evidence based, is that you see in quite a short amount of time how the structures in the brain begin to change, for example, the amygdala. You know, you see research done on eight weeks of meditation practice that an enlarged amygdala starts to, you know, because of neuroplasticity, it starts to change its state and its function. There's less gray matter density. And I think that these things happen. This is just the byproduct of doing a meditation practice. It happens for everyone. If you do a practice, you get these structural changes to the brain affecting, Acting. You know, our emotions, our cognition, our nervous system regulation.

David Cornwell 00:20:33  So I would say that there was a lot that was happening in those early days of me practicing that I wasn't aware of, but my sense of myself was was changing. It was unfolding, and I felt much more, in in myself, I was, I was and I think actually ultimately I was becoming happier. And that's the piece that's key. And this is something I say to people all the time, is that the reason we do these practices is to be joyful, to be happy, to be present, so that if I'm walking with my children and I have their hands in my hands, I can feel their hands in my hands. I'm aware of it. And I'm not worried about the telephone bill or the problems that I have that I can simply be present. Yes. And this is the this is what I was beginning to cultivate back then as an 18 year old. And, and, you know, just moving from a space of more chaos or more disorganized and dysregulated nervous system into a more organized, present and unregulated system.

David Cornwell 00:21:47  And that that was the gift. And a lot of that was happening unconsciously. In fact, I think most of it was, you know.

Abdullah Boulad 00:21:54  No, it's certainly a beautiful technique. And more and more people are applying meditation around the world, and it's been more recognized today. There are multiple types of meditation. There is certainly the breath based breathwork based meditation and more others. Can you explain like the differences and which is your favorite one?

David Cornwell 00:22:20  Yeah, you're right, there are so many different practices. and but I think what they have in common is the intention to transform people's suffering. This is what's at the heart of them. So I think it's very easy to get caught up in, you know, there's this practice that has this copyrighted information and there's this one that, you know, is this and this and this. For me, what I feel is that the simplest practice is just sitting still and watching the breath. So I think that this is a practice that is at least 2500 years old.

David Cornwell 00:23:05  And if we look, for example, at the story of the Buddha, it was and we talk about his awakening. It was doing breath meditation. If you read the, the, the accounts of his awakening, let's say it is about sitting and watching the breath and supporting the regulation of the sense of deep regulation and calm that he was able to cultivate, so that he could then see things with greater clarity. But it was always taught with the intention of reducing suffering. You know, that was the M.O. was that they would recognize we would recognize that life is filled with pain. There's an inevitable amount of pain which each of us comes into contact with in our lives. Some people are more lucky than others. But there's this extra layer, which is about reactivity, how someone is reacting to the reality of their life. And that's where these mindfulness practices are focused. They're focused at working with the reactivity and to transform that that reactivity. So if you have a breath meditation that can be working with that reactivity.

David Cornwell 00:24:28  If you have a compassion practice that can be working with the reactivity. Similarly, if you're, you know, in a Zen practice, staring at a wall or at another practice looking at a, at a desk, or you're doing a yoga practice where there's movement or tai chi or qigong. All of these practices are part of the same family. They may have slight variations and differences, and one practice may be more appropriate for a certain person at a certain time. But we see that they're all part of a family of practices. And I think the key is rather is not rather to see what's different about them, but what is similar in them, what they're trying to impact and transform. And for me, that's all about reactivity. And this is something we see as therapists. This is what I'm helping my clients with in therapies to transform their, their their experience, their reactivity towards their lives. Yeah. That's where mindfulness, that's the gift of mindfulness.

Abdullah Boulad 00:25:32  That's that's beautiful. And I think it's it's, it's important to say that meditation is not just always, sitting still and, and, and, and, not do anything.

Abdullah Boulad 00:25:46  It could be also in evolving the body, moving the body, like qigong, yoga, or other similar types of, meditation processes. And my understanding is also that meditation practices are here to lower the mind's activity and connect you with the present moment. And, being mindful about your surroundings, using your, your senses, different types of senses. This is also something I've come across, in the last years. there is this term mindfulness based psychotherapy, mindfulness based therapy. And I know you implement this also to your daily practice. How and in what cases do you feel it's appropriate to be, worked with, your clients? Yeah.

David Cornwell 00:26:43  Yeah. Well, just to to answer the first part, which is. Yeah, the these practices, they are, the, the coming into the body, like the mind dropping into the body. I think there's real truth in that, in the sense that when we look at the brain and how the brain is functioning, you can see this in, fMRI imaging techniques, especially there's a neuroscientist called Norman Farb And I.

David Cornwell 00:27:17  When we see his his work, we see that mindfulness practice. When someone's paying attention to the breath, for example, it starts to utilize older structures in the brain. It's sort of a midline cortical axis. It's across this midline section of the brain. And these parts of the brain do not facilitate abstraction or imagination or worry or anxiety. But when we move into the more prefrontal regions of the brain, you see that this is when someone starts to worry, starts to think about stuff, starts to ruminate, and we start to see, you know, depression or anxiety disorders. So when we're practicing something as simple as paying attention to the breath, we see how the metabolic activity shifts in the brain into older structures. And it's you can only do one at a time. The more that you're in that sense, in being brain. The less you're in the overthinking, the worried brain. And this is how mindfulness can be really effective. So and that's something that we can cultivate is someone's capacity to be with their sensory experience.

Abdullah Boulad 00:28:33  So I understand that mindfulness and meditation breathwork can help everyone in our daily life, stressful life, but particularly for mindfulness based stress reduction or psychotherapy. How do you implement this in your more clinical practice? Yeah.

David Cornwell 00:28:57  You know, I think it's really helpful to understand the origins of mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy to understand how it works. So let me tell you a story. So Jon Kabat-Zinn is the is the guy who was created mindfulness based stress reduction. And he was a he was working within a pain management clinic at if I if I'm correct, at the University of University Hospital of Massachusetts. And he was helping people with chronic pain. Now John Kabat-Zinn was also a dedicated meditation practitioner. He had learned in he had studied Zen and he had he was on a retreat. He was he was on a Zen retreat, which is very intense. And in the middle of his meditation, he had this eureka moment. And he in fact, he had two moments. The first one was ta ta.

David Cornwell 00:30:05  He had this insight of how he could work with people at the pain management clinic, and he had this vision of people having this vocation, this career in mindfulness, bringing mindfulness into the world to help people with their pain and their suffering. And he sort of seen this new wave of mindfulness that was going to come. And yeah, that was in 1979. So the the insight, so the insight that Jon Kabat-Zinn had was to, to help. It was based upon his own meditation practice, and it was the understanding that instead of trying to get rid of people's pain, because that's what a pain management clinic was effectively doing, they were using surgery, physiotherapy or medication to try and ameliorate people's pain. And that was the M.O.. He said, what if I taught people how to become friendly with their pain, which is really at the heart of mindfulness practice. So he went back to his the hospital and he said to his colleagues, send me all your most difficult patients. And of course, they were super happy to do that.

David Cornwell 00:31:22  So he found that his his studio or his his clinic was filling up with these sort of hopeless cases. And he started to teach them mindfulness, and he started to teach them how they could transform their relationship with pain, which is a 2500 year old meditation tradition. But he was applying it in this very clinical way. Now, what was remarkable? Well, first of all, what was remarkable was it worked. It started to. They started to see these amazing results. But the other thing that was remarkable was how people's lives changed. All of a sudden they had these new skills, which they could apply the wisdom of these skills to other parts of their life, to their relationships, to their relationship with food, to the relationship with their family, to their relationship with their bodies. All of these skills started, or all of this, wisdom that they were getting from learning mindfulness was transforming every aspect of their life. So my understanding of mindfulness is a very simple understanding. As I've said earlier, it's about working with our reactivity to allow things to be as they are.

David Cornwell 00:32:47  And so this is at the heart of the mbsr mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy. I think there's something else that's worth mentioning is that once Jon Kabat-Zinn started to develop this program, he systematized it into an eight week program and because it was systematized, it could be researched. And once they could research it, they could start to have these sort of standard studies that standardized practice that could be studied and they could see, well, this is what eight weeks of mindfulness does to the brain. This is what it does to our, relation to the mind. It does to the amygdala. This is what it does to the prefrontal cortex. So they had this platform from which they could develop this evidence base, which meant that mindfulness has grown exponentially since 1979. And there's a huge evidence base to support it. And people understand its utility within therapy. And just for basic, you know, people's lives. So what I do in the, mbsr, like I do I sometimes do MBAs or MBT groups.

David Cornwell 00:34:02  I'm a trained mindfulness based cognitive therapy practitioner. So I sometimes lead groups, but I tend more to bring those skills into my therapy work, which is really about getting people to become more accepting to of their life as it is. Like that's the the platform from which I want to do the work. You know, maybe you're familiar with the prayer, the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, which is, you know, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Well, I think that what mindfulness helps us to do and helps me to do in the balance is to get that platform of acceptance that we can allow and accept our life as it is, because that's our reality. There's no other way. But once we have that acceptance, we can also start to change the things we can start to, you know, create new behaviors, new patterns. We can begin to transform our life, which is really important. But we work on these in these two ways.

David Cornwell 00:35:13  And I think that's what mindfulness based cognitive therapy does. That's what I do as a therapist is to support, is to support that. Does that make sense?

Abdullah Boulad 00:35:22  Absolutely, absolutely. And, I've experienced mindfulness in my own life also at some point. And, it helped me to calm down my mind and, and also reduce some, some thoughts and anxiety and, and in future future rumination. Certainly. what conditions, do you come mostly across in your clinical practice with your clients where, mindfulness based, cognitive behavioral therapy helps.

David Cornwell 00:35:53  Yeah. Okay. Well, with my clients, I think that what we see as therapists generally Really is that. A lot of our wounding begins in our early developmental period in our childhood. This is you know, I think, that's what I see, at least even if we don't use the word wounding, we can use the word patterns. Our patterns start to establish, arguably within the womb. You know, one of my teachers would say we marinated in our mother's emotions for nine months.

David Cornwell 00:36:27  And that sense of it being a marinade. And we're getting conditioned by those emotions even within the womb. And so these patterns are developing that are developing all through our early developmental, all through our high school years, through our adolescence, teenage years, disappointments and relationship disappointments at work. Some of us experienced trauma capital T trauma. I think that there's, you know, there's there's capital T trauma, which are sort of sudden high impact events which unexpectedly, you know, they reshape the trajectory of someone's life. But in terms of the nervous system, there's also the small t traumas, which is just that continuous, constant exposure to stress that many of us experience. And that also has a profound impact on our nervous system and on our lives. So when it comes to my clients, when I'm meeting my clients, when I'm meeting you, Abdullah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, what are the patterns that have been shaped in this person's early period of their life and throughout their life that have become deeply established, and that maybe at one point they were adaptive and were helping the client, but are no longer serving the client, you know.

Abdullah Boulad 00:37:57  Or other life experiences add up or traumatic experiences. From a small T perspective. Yeah. And then at some point this is not enough. They cannot hold it anymore for then. it shows in, in some, some disorders. Illnesses.

David Cornwell 00:38:14  Yeah. I think and you know, you could argue that every disorder and illness, you know, has, has those in their roots. and then mindfulness, it just helps people to become aware of what's, of what's happening to, to really. Mindfulness based psychotherapy is all about cultivating the capacity to pay attention, to become more aware of what is moving a person through life, and to begin to relinquish some of the patterns that we are deeply invested in. you know, we might be deeply like it's like having a bank account that we fill with money because we're deeply invested in this very dysfunctional behavior that is there. And now we have to really take the energy out of it. We've got to we've got to ameliorate this. These habits and these patterns.

Abdullah Boulad 00:39:09  Yes.

Abdullah Boulad 00:39:10  No, I think I think certainly we we are we are grabbing here thousands of years old wisdom and we, we make it into a modern type of solution for for today's problems. Yes. if, when I think I mean, you've been in Istanbul and Turkey, you have experience like the, the Arabic or the Islamic environment where the, the prayer five times a day. This is also kind of a mindful practice and meditation practice where I find it beautiful to, to, to break up the day, not be in an autopilot mode. And, the same thing with, with, with churches. and in the, in the Western world, like the ringing the when the bells ring, you know, it's like a little bit of a wake up call. there is something like now. Yeah. And that's what I, what I love and I learned, over the years to appreciate them and not just to be annoyed by by by the loud noises. Yeah. For sure.

David Cornwell 00:40:22  and I think, you know, at this comes back to this definition of mindfulness.

David Cornwell 00:40:26  What is the definition to remember? Yes, but to remember well, to remember that we are this human body. We need to sometimes take a pause, you know, come out of our overthinking, our worry, and just just stop things for a moment and breathe and pay attention and be present. And that's what these the namaz five times a day has a similar effect.

Abdullah Boulad 00:40:48  Yeah. What do you mean with remember? Is it more based to remember what's in your DNA in your body or what? What your own history tells you. What do you want to connect to?

David Cornwell 00:41:01  Well, remember, I think is. Well, I think deliberately these are spectrum words. So they're like a placeholder for many different things. You know, they they, the word srt can be interpreted. The word remember in so many ways. For me, it's just about remembering to take a breath, to come to my center, to allow things to, you know, to maybe feel that there's very strong emotions present. I'm having some difficult thoughts.

David Cornwell 00:41:33  I can zoom out a little bit and notice my mind is, you know, there's the mind is filled with thoughts, thoughts that are often competing against each other. The understanding that just because I think something doesn't mean it's true. That's a valuable thing to remember, and to remember that I have feet on the ground, to remember that I'm holding my child's hand. To remember that I'm eating this food and I'm not just in autopilot eating it. So I think I think that's really valuable. And, like, this is something that I work with, for example, with eating disorder clients, because when they see food, their awareness goes up and out. They think of food as the enemy they they have. They just go into a very overthinking, ruminative experience of food. But they can remember to just taste the food, to have a sensory experience of food, to just taste the flavors, the smells.

Abdullah Boulad 00:42:31  By connecting to the body. They remember and they access more emotions and feelings and.

David Cornwell 00:42:38  But just connecting to the sensory experience.

David Cornwell 00:42:41  And whenever we're leading the the, mindful eating exercise, sometimes I ask the client, you know, to an eating disorder client, you know, put a bit of food on your hand, a grip and look at it as if you've no idea what this is, as if it's you've been an alien who has dropped on planet Earth, and you're just looking at this grip and just appreciating its shape, its colour, its textures. The way is it moist? Is it dry? Does it have lines on it? Is it heavy? And not to think about it, not to overthink, just be in that direct sensory relationship. And as I was saying earlier, when we look at the neuroscience of this, you cannot do both simultaneously. You cannot be in that sensory experience of the grip just from a pure sensory experience, and be thinking that what is going to happen to me if I eat this grip? And that's something we can cultivate. Neuroplasticity shows us that we can cultivate these. It's not just magic.

David Cornwell 00:43:52  It's changes to the structure and to the function of the nervous system that if we apply a continuous and constant pressure, it will start to transform and, you know, mindfulness. if you if you read the accounts, the historical accounts of mindfulness, there's always this reference to artisans or to gardeners, because something a skill can be developed over time and something can be cultivated and as well as something being cultivated, other things can atrophy. So if a client has this obsessive relationship overthinking with food. But if we support the client in a deliberate and continuous way to shift how they experience the process in style through which they relate to something as simple as a grip, it starts to create these deep shifts in their brain, in their nervous system, in their how they think, in their patterns of mind and in their emotions, in their behaviours. All of these become affected.

Abdullah Boulad 00:44:57  Do you feel like accessing the present moment? Being mindful has, has something to do also with using your hands and, and doing something with your hands, like, like for example, if I would do gardening, I, I have to focus on what I'm doing.

Abdullah Boulad 00:45:18  If I clean, the dishes or if I whatever paint, I cannot be just in my mind. I have to focus on what I do. How how do you experience that?

David Cornwell 00:45:32  I, I completely agree. However, I think a lot of the times I'm cleaning the dishes, I'm thinking about my problems at work.

Abdullah Boulad 00:45:41  If you do something repetitive, yes, most likely so.

David Cornwell 00:45:44  I think that you know this the. Okay. So this was this is my understanding of this, that mindfulness. For me it is a practice. It is something that is that has some discipline. In the same way, learning to make tables by a carpenter, it takes time. At the beginning the table doesn't look straight, but over time they become more skilled. And then what is so mindfulness? You sit and you watch the breath. You create the most simple space you can. You turn off the phone, you remove distractions. You pay attention to your breath. This is a practice because we want that state to become more of a default state, so that it translates it.

David Cornwell 00:46:29  We can transition from the meditation cushion into washing the dishes, and we're more present washing the dishes. But it and I think that there is mind. It is important to have mindfulness of everyday tasks. That is the intention. But there can be some effort required in order to for that to be your reality.

Abdullah Boulad 00:46:48  Or something new. what I come across is that if you do something new to you, it becomes a mindful practice. Yes. this is why also, when people travel, travel to new cities or travel around the world, they have to be present. The mind cannot go on autopilot because they don't know that. The mind doesn't know what is happening right now. Yes. And and this is where I feel like people going on vacation, they feel relaxed. It's basically because they they had a period where they have been mindful and more connected to the present moment. Whereas if they would stay at home or repeatedly go to the same place and do the same thing, it would be most likely less, relaxing and and beneficial.

Abdullah Boulad 00:47:41  Yeah.

David Cornwell 00:47:42  Yeah, I would agree with that, that that to some extent. But I think that people who, doing something new, like when you're learning to drive a car at the beginning, you're having to move the shift, the stick, and you have to be very mindful. The problem is it very quickly becomes automatic. You know, we see how the processing style and the brain moves into the default mode network. When people are driving the car after one week of learning, they start. They can drive and worry. So I think there is a million good reasons to go on a holiday and to take a break. And there is that sense of seeing something new. But the trick, Abdullah, is that we can have that same experience in every moment of our lives. Like, here we are. We're not the same person we were this morning. This office is not the same as it was yesterday, because you're not the same as you were yesterday. This and there's also these images from the mindfulness tradition.

David Cornwell 00:48:40  For example, you could never step in the same river twice. And that's true because people change. Change is the only thing shift happens. And and I and I think that that is true. And you're not the same person you were yesterday. Our clients are not the same person they were when they arrived. And that's such a valuable thing for them to remember that they changed, that they can change, and that this space that we are in can be perceived completely differently as a result of our therapy work and as a result of our inner transformation. So something that is looks the same, yes, in many ways is the same, but our relation to it relationship with it has completely shifted and transformed. That's the beauty of working with with our clients.

Abdullah Boulad 00:49:32  No, certainly. I mean my mindfulness, being mindful is like a muscle. You have also to train it it. Yeah. You cannot just switch it on. And here it is. It's it's years of training. It's likely and and doing something.

Abdullah Boulad 00:49:47  But also what comes to my mind is, we we always say the autopilot, the mind is on autopilot. But this is, this is not just bad because we would be overwhelmed if we have to think about everything we do in our daily life. If we have to think about now, how do I need to brush my teeth? Or how do I need to walk or walk up the stairs? So we learn from small upwards this.

David Cornwell 00:50:15  The difficulty is I. I completely agree. The difficulty is that style of processing is completely over habituated. We are amazing problem solvers of the look. You set up this amazing studio. This is problem solving. You we can we can build an iPhone.

Abdullah Boulad 00:50:34  We can delegate.

David Cornwell 00:50:36  Yes, exactly. And you can, you know, you can decide what tonight's dinner is. We can really, we can do those things amazingly. But the problem is, and if you look at the research of Antonio Damasio and his work on somatic markers, he says the problem is we're stuck.

David Cornwell 00:50:55  It's like a pendulum. We have a pendulum that swings. It can swing between processing our experience in a thinking way, in a doing way, let's say, or processing it in a sensing way. Now, the problem is that we are very much stuck in the thinking way. So you get a problem. Let me explain, because I think this is this is useful if you have a problem, if you have a problem at work today when you go home, what are you going to do with that problem? You're going to spend the whole evening thinking about that problem. You're going to. It's going to make you upset. You might not eat your dinner. You're going to you're going to fix it on it. Now it's right that we do that because we're great problem solvers. But how likely is it that you'll just close your eyes and feel the sensations in your body and work with that sense? Work with that problem not in a cognitive way, but in a more direct sense, in emotional.

David Cornwell 00:51:56  And I'll just say one last thing to that, which is Antonio Damasio research, for example, shows that people who cannot connect to their body, who cannot feel their body, feel their stomach, feel their breathing. They find it difficult to choose food on a menu. That's what there is. It's very simple things. They feel they have this lack of wisdom, this lack of this gut feeling that informs good decision making. Yes. And that is also a problem. And this is a problem we have with the clients is that they are they can't make simple good decisions because they're so disconnected from their bodies. So we we these both of these processing styles are really important. The thinking and the emotional getting in contact with our emotions. The problem is the pendulum gets stuck here, and people need to remember that they have this wisdom to drop into, to connect to.

Abdullah Boulad 00:52:58  Sometimes in in my daily life, when it gets stressful, I try to access this problem solving situations. But if I have to make as an entrepreneur too many decisions, too many problems at the same time happening.

Abdullah Boulad 00:53:18  and I hear this often also from from other entrepreneurs or some of our clients that they get tired of decision making itself. And they're I truly believe in meditation and best work to to help to connect. in your practice, you mentioned trauma, eating disorders. What other type of conditions would you consider? body based, mindfulness based, psychotherapy is helpful.

David Cornwell 00:53:50  Depression is is a really is a really good one. For example, one of the things that we see, one of the cognitive patterns that underpins depression is that, okay, we all have difficult thoughts. You have difficult thoughts. I have difficult thoughts. We notice how, you know, we wake up in the morning, we're having a hard time and we see that our mind is, you know, we have familiar patterns of difficult thought. John Kabat-Zinn calls this the curriculum. Abdullah, you have your curriculum. I have.

Abdullah Boulad 00:54:25  Certainly.

David Cornwell 00:54:26  And that's our challenge, is to work through the curriculum. But What happens with depression, for example, is that because the person has low mood, they they feel low in themselves.

David Cornwell 00:54:41  They're they're more likely to believe those thoughts are true. So that's that's a that's a characteristic of depression that. So you and I may not suffer from depression, but we still have the difficult thoughts. But what you notice is that if you get tired, if you have too much stress at work, if you're not sleeping because your children keep waking up during the night, or you know there's a lot of stress going on with your parents or your family and your mood starts to decrease, starts to lower. That's when you start to perceive those thoughts as being true, more true than before. And that's when you might end up in a a depression in an episode of depression. So I think mindfulness, it can help us. that's that's one case where mindfulness can be helpful is to help people who suffer from depression understand this relationship between mood and their investment or how much they believe their thoughts. And yeah, I think that with trauma, if we can have a well tailored practice, we choose the right practice.

David Cornwell 00:55:53  Again, it could be yoga or it could be a seated position. all of these conditions will benefit from this, increase in the person's capacity for embodied self-awareness. It just it just has this it's transformative and healing. You know, people talk about the, the gut, the the gut brain as being our second brain. But actually, if we look at the evolution of the gut, it's much older than the one up here. Yeah, this is the first brain. This is the wisdom that we can drop into. And this is the second brain. So we need to come into the wisdom of the body, and that will help us to make decisions as an entrepreneur. It'll help us to make, to work with our anxiety. It will help us to work with depression. It will help us to transform our trauma. But again, I think often it's not enough by itself, especially people with trauma. They need to have some therapy, some support. But maybe this would be a good moment for me to teach a mindfulness practice based upon what I've said.

David Cornwell 00:57:02  So this is a practice from mindfulness based cognitive therapy. It's a practice called the three minute breathing space. Actually it's no longer called that. It's called the three step breathing space because the intention is it can be done in one minute okay. It doesn't have to be limited to a time. You can do it as a longer practice. Or you can do do it as a shorter practice. And this is a practice that we can call in a first aid practice like in an emergency. And and it's also so the practice I'm about to teach is it's done as when somebody is having a moment of crisis, but it's also done in a way that you described earlier, actually, which is you set a timer or there's bells, an interval at random intervals during the day. You have this, you have a bell that rings. And the invitation is to do this practice so that you can start to cultivate the capacity to be mindful throughout your day. And you can be sort of you can work, you can develop these skills, you know, as, again, John Kabat-Zinn, who I'm quoting a lot today.

David Cornwell 00:58:17  He says, we don't want to be tying the parachute when the airplane has burst into flames. We want to we want to integrate these skills into our day so that whenever we're having a moment of difficulty, we can naturally call upon them. So let's do the three step breathing space together.

Abdullah Boulad 00:58:36  Do you want me to. Yeah. To do it.

David Cornwell 00:58:37  So yeah, we do it together. And what you can do is just we uncross our legs, I'll uncross my legs too. And we just find a good a good posture, just a shift of position and let let's let's close our eyes. If you're okay to close your eyes and close our eyes. So step one is acknowledging what is here. So just notice what is present, what the inner weather is. Is it stormy? Is it calm? Is there pain in your body? What emotions may be present? Notice. Is your mind busy or quiet? Notice maybe you're thinking about the next question. You can see what's there. You can feel the contact of your body with the floor, with the chair.

David Cornwell 00:59:51  So just acknowledging what is here, what is present. Maybe things that are easy. It may be difficult experiences. Step two gather in your attention around the breath. So let's feel the breath in the body. Maybe we can focus on the belly, the core of the body, and just feel in movement of your belly and abdomen as you breathe. Feel how the abdominal wall moves towards the spine when you exhale. Moves away from the spine when you inhale. So not thinking about the breath, but feeling the sensations of breathing in your body. Notice if you get distracted, you start to think about something. And when you notice that, return your attention to the sensations of breathing in the belly and abdomen. And now, step three expanding the breath into the whole body. You can be aware of your breath. And aware of your emotions. Perhaps there's difficult emotions present and you can have a sense of your breath and at the same time, a sense of your emotions. Maybe you have physical pain or discomfort in the body, and you can feel the breath and feel the discomfort.

David Cornwell 01:02:28  Or maybe you have difficult thoughts and you can just notice they arise in and pass in of your thoughts and at the same time feel the sensations of breathing. Your sense of breathing into your whole body. When you're ready in your own time, can slowly open your eyes and bring the practice to a close. So very simple practice. This is the three step breathing space. And the first part is just acknowledging what is here. You know, being present. Remembering. Yeah. And shifting the attention to the breath. Because that's developing a skill. Like a carpenter, like an artisan. Developing a skill that you can shift your attention somewhere else. And the third is working wisely, being with your difficulty and being with a sense of presence. And these are very useful skills. And you can do that sitting at the bus stop. You can do it as a longer practice. You know, you can do that as a 30 minute practice at night. and it's just a way of, you know, working wisely with our difficulty cultivating wisdom and presence.

David Cornwell 01:04:02  Yeah.

Abdullah Boulad 01:04:03  Thank you for guiding me. Thank you. I felt like it's kind of cleaning the mind. I would compare it, like if I would go and wash my hands or go take a shower. But it's like more cleaning the mind. Yeah. And, if we do this a couple times a day. Yeah. it's it's connecting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Cornwell 01:04:35  Thank you. It's a very beautiful, simple practice. And honestly, it was a practice that was that. They call it the spine of NBC. It's. They say it's the most important practice, but it's a Zen practice. This is how I. If I'm teaching a meditation, a more Zen style practice, it's the same one. So this is just condensed into three minutes. It's very it's just a simple, beautiful little practice. And yeah, I agree. If you can set timers and you do this a few times a day, you do it when you're not having difficulty. You do it when you're having difficulty.

David Cornwell 01:05:11  Suddenly we're finding adapt you know, like an a capacity for adaptivity, for wisdom, for ways of working that we may not have noticed before and and some unconscious processing. And yeah, things can change and shift.

Abdullah Boulad 01:05:30  And not to be dragged in emotionally into little micro things which are happening throughout the day. But but really take this distance and have more the pilot view of, yeah. What's going on. Yeah. mindfulness certainly helps to disconnect the mind and, and disconnect from current problems, thought patterns and so on.

David Cornwell 01:05:58  I would use the word integrate.

Abdullah Boulad 01:06:00  Integrate.

David Cornwell 01:06:00  Rather than this helps to integrate integrate mind. Yes. And integrate with the synchronize.

Abdullah Boulad 01:06:05  Integrate. Yeah. what I think about is also It's kind of a mini simplifying your life. Oh for sure. on a micro scale, you could minify or simplify your life recognizing what is causing this stress for life. So anytime something happens. So to think about what can you change? How can you simplify it? And I often see this with, with with clients they have type of our clients.

Abdullah Boulad 01:06:40  They have houses around the world. They have things and stuff and they travel a lot. And what what happens often is that they become slaves of what they have to do and perform just to keep things up. And, and then I find and see people who have less to be more calm the more the slow, slow living type of, people in some parts of the world, cultures of the world where there is not much around. They they feel more cleaner and calmer because they don't have these responsibilities. And I think.

David Cornwell 01:07:21  It's not the irony of our clients in some ways, like they these people. Our clients are the people who can, you know, there's some of the wealthiest people in the world. They could construct their life in the most amazing way. They could spend the rest of their life on a yacht, traveling and, enjoying every moment of their existence. And I think the irony is sometimes that they feel like they don't have these choices or these options. And sometimes, that's just it can be really helpful to say, actually, you can simplify, you can pay attention, you can take a breath and shift things around.

David Cornwell 01:08:03  You don't need the six houses. there's a lot that can be done just to make their life more simple and more meaningful. Abdullah, this is the point. Also. You know, it's more meaningful.

Abdullah Boulad 01:08:16  If it's just wealth to manage. I would agree if there is fame included, it's a little bit more difficult unless you withdraw yourself from the public. yeah. presence. there are certainly difficulties there.

David Cornwell 01:08:37  but if if mindfulness teaches us something, what it can also teach us is that we don't have to be so invested in how we're perceived in how, you know. So even for a celebrity, for example. Yeah, you know, we can help through mindful awareness. We can help the celebrity not feel that they have to believe everything that's written about them, that they have to react. This is all about reactivity and reactivity is a double edged sword. It's about trying to present ourselves to the world in a certain way. It's also about not liking how the world presents us to the world. So it's a double edged sword, and we have to support the client in just allowing and accepting what is.

David Cornwell 01:09:30  That's the first stage of that three step breathing space, just being present to what is there. So even with a celebrity, this simplification can be that I can accept things as they are. I don't need to control everything and that is a huge simplification for someone.

Abdullah Boulad 01:09:48  I agree, if someone is in a state of who's able to access inner wisdom, the self-esteem has been has been developed properly. But if I think about, let's say, young young adults who where their brain has not been developed properly. They become famous. They jump into some substances or other abusive, environment where people want to profit from them and their fame. they haven't developed their self-esteem at that at that stage. And, this is where we see often also, public figures, dying from overdose and, and having other mental health problems and disorders. but many, many can get out of it, as you say. Yeah.

David Cornwell 01:10:44  And, you know, they they do the work. They come. Like, I think that our what we offer is amazing because it's very personalized care.

David Cornwell 01:10:56  It's the rhythms are very slow. So I think, you know what I see from, from the balances a lot of the care that we offer people is about a slower rhythm. It's not always fancy technology. It's not always the latest neuroimaging. It's about giving the clients space to be themselves, to experience boredom, to experience to, to to remember that they have emotions, to remember that they can be a different way. And even for young people, you know, when I reflect on myself, I was 18 when I found these practices. I was in a in a difficult space, and it helped me and it helped me very quickly because I started to get some insight and perspective. And I started to my nervous system started to switch to a slower rhythm. And I think that with with young people it's difficult. I agree the brain isn't developed. And like we see this mental health crisis that that came up when the iPhone put the front facing camera on the iPhone in 2007. I think that was and we see, you know, rates of of eating disorders soaring.

David Cornwell 01:12:16  We see all sorts of issues that come and they're very difficult to manage. But we can shift, we can support clients and we can transform how they experience the world. Even celebrities, even people who like some of the people that we've worked with. And you would almost say it was hopeless. And yet we see such a huge transformation just from slowing down, just from doing some from doing talking therapy, from reconnecting to themselves, remembering who they are.

Abdullah Boulad 01:12:55  What they want.

David Cornwell 01:12:55  And what they want. Yeah. And it's it. It works. This stuff works.

Abdullah Boulad 01:13:01  Yeah. Yes. This is why we exist. And this is why we are doing this. in your career, you also mentioned you went into further trainings to complete the full picture of of work you can implement to the clinical sessions you have with your clients. You mentioned somatic experiencing. Can you elaborate on that? how is it helping you and where do you see the benefits implementing somatic work with, with your psychotherapeutic work?

David Cornwell 01:13:37  And I know that especially, you know, working, sometimes with other therapists, they don't always understand what somatic experiencing is like.

David Cornwell 01:13:46  What is this? I think the clue is in the name. It's. This is the soma. This is the body. And it's about experience in the body. So it's just experiencing what is here And Peter Levine tells this wonderful. He reinterprets Peter Levine as the person who created somatic experiences, and he has this reinterpretation of the Medusa myth, which I think is very helpful for understanding what somatic experiencing is. So we all know the story of Medusa. All these warriors went out to slay Medusa and they were unsuccessful. Perseus was a little bit wiser. He visited Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and she said, don't look in at her eyes. You'll turn to stone. Look at her reflection, and you'll get close enough to to cut off her head. So first of all, we have this image of Medusa. Her head is crowned with snakes, which is a symbol of transformation. And then we have the understanding that trauma, if we look at it, If we look in Trauma's eye, we turn to stone, we freeze.

David Cornwell 01:15:01  And we understand this about the nervous system. Also from Stephen Porges work, we understand this, state of parasympathetic freeze that comes. It's it's something that happens as a result of trauma. But if we can look at, at the mind's reflection, which is the sensations in the body, well, some of these thoughts and images that we have that are overwhelming, that freeze us when we bring our awareness to the body. There's more movement, there's more adaptivity, and we can start to become friendly with the the trauma, with the experience, and we can start to transform it in a, in a sort of roundabout way. You know, we by by connecting by paying attention to this somatic experience and the mind's reflection, the sensations in the body, we can start to transform the trauma and somatic experience. And there's some really useful skills. For example pendulum, which is let's say you're we're we're in a therapy session and the person is talking about their trauma and they feel like they've an overwhelming intensity in their in their stomach, in their belly.

David Cornwell 01:16:18  Then the client will tell me that. And then I will say, okay, so is there anywhere in your body that feels good? And then the client might say, well, my breathing feels good. It feels easy. And I'll say to the client, okay, let's take a minute and just feel the sensations of breathing. Not think about breathing, but feel the rhythm, the cadence, the depth of the breath. And we'll do that for a moment, and then we'll bring the awareness back to the difficult sensations in the belly and the stomach. And we'll stay with that for a moment. And then we'll bring the awareness back to what's good about the breathing, and it's this sort of process of metabolizing those difficult metabolizing or processing those difficult somatic experiences. And because the body and mind is one, whatever we do in the body, whatever transformation we get through our emotional body, our sensory body will translate into changes in perception. And that's the beauty of somatic experience. And but honestly, I see all of my work as I don't I don't tend to label it somatic experiences sometimes on the schedule.

David Cornwell 01:17:31  It says somatic experience. In our mindfulness based therapy, I only work in one way, and I work at reconnecting the client to their body and and to transform the relationship between the body and mind. And if I, I might use some specific somatic experience in skills like pendula or titration or these types of things. but I think it's just about reconnecting to the wisdom of the body. That's what Somatic Experiencing again, is about.

Abdullah Boulad 01:18:02  So I understand your work is always a combination from the body up and using psychotherapy work, combining the different methods you you have gathered, throughout the years and worked with, your clients. What type of changes have you seen, happening or moving in your clients?

David Cornwell 01:18:29  Yeah, I we've seen I've seen remarkable changes in the clients. And I must say, I'm part of a team, especially in the balance. So I can't take all the credit. I, I have to share the credit with all the therapists. And we've seen remarkable, changes. One of the things that I will say to the client at the beginning of the session work.

David Cornwell 01:18:53  And it's something that I've shared already in here. That for me, the point of the work isn't just to fix things or isn't to stop using drugs or isn't to, you know, isn't to make these changes necessarily. The point of the work is to live a life that is meaningful and joyful. Especially when we're talking about trauma. We one of the characteristics that's synonymous with people who've experienced trauma is it's a sentence that goes like this life used to be fun, and it's not fun anymore. I used to enjoy just being in my body and doing simple things, and now I don't have any joy in my life. So when I start working with the client, I really oriented them towards this that they can recover their experience of joy, well-being and happiness. That that's the benchmark for my work. And then what we see as as they start to recover that meaning and joy in their life, there's a natural letting go of the need to use cocaine or the need to use alcohol. They they develop a natural resiliency.

David Cornwell 01:20:22  I will say to the clients also that, you know, every day that they don't use is a a bigger distance between today and the last time they used. So that is developing resilience in the client. That's developing capacity. It's it's cultivating their capacity. I see clients completely transform. I see clients When you think that it's hopeless, that they've got nothing meaningful in their lives, they've got nothing joyful that even in a space of six weeks. And granted, I can be working quite intensely with the clients maybe three times a week. But we see how meaning comes back into their life. And even in clients where they have experienced debilitating trauma, trauma that would you would expect to finish most people, you see how they can recover from it, and it can be something that is no longer. When they think about the trauma, they're not reliving it, they're simply remembering something from the past. And this is a key piece of my work is to talk about the trauma, the difficult memories, the difficult experiences.

David Cornwell 01:21:47  And you see in the beginning that when the client presents this kind of stuff, these experiences, they relive it. Their body and their nervous system is responding in a way as if it is happening in real time. And slowly, slowly, there's we go through this process of becoming more friendly with it and then letting it go. And what we can see is that the client starts to the patterns that they that are maintaining the reliving of the trauma, they begin to atrophy. And over time, even over weeks, months and years, these terrible experiences can become just a memory of something that happened in the past. And as time goes by, that memory is recalled less and less. And it's not having the same impact upon the client and their life. And that's that's what I see with my with my clients, I see. and I and I think that the many therapies that we're offering, you know, including body work, equine therapy, I love that we have music and art therapy and ceramics because these are things that we used to love doing as children.

David Cornwell 01:23:13  This is all about joy. Another thing that I love to see in my clients is that creativity comes back in this story of the Medusa myth told by Peter Levine. After Medusa's head is removed. Out of her body comes Pegasus, the winged horse, and creosote, a warrior with a golden sword. These symbolize spontaneity. If. If you've ever been on a horse and it gets spooked, they're pretty spontaneous. spontaneous animals and life can be spontaneous again, because what happens through trauma or through difficult experiences? Life becomes very patterned, you know, becomes. We think that we cannot shake off these patterns and we recover spontaneity and then we recover clarity. We're able to have a clear life purpose. We're able to, we're able to do the things that we want, not because we think we should do them, or these are things that our parents have told us we should do. This is what you know Abdullah should do. He should become a doctor, or he should study law or whatever. Your parents were telling the things that you have been very deeply ingrained that you should do, but didn't resonate with your soul.

David Cornwell 01:24:32  Clarity can emerge. And this is why I love art therapy, because it's about just being and expressing oneself and nurturing that piece of ourselves. like a little seedling that can grow into this oak tree. Of living our life purpose. And I think that that's what hopefully we see with the clients. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes work. And you know, when I just a note about the mindfulness of breathing practice. I remember there was a quote from John Trump, a very famous Tibetan meditation teacher, who said he talked about the the precision and beauty of the breath. And if we can find that precision and beauty of the breath in simply breathing that can expand to all parts of our lives. I can expand to how we, you know, make our breakfast, how we relate to our children, how we relate to our loved ones. And this is what we're trying to recover with the client or trying to remember because it's in it. It's in it, in us. And we can remember that.

David Cornwell 01:25:42  And we can support the client in remembering it for themselves.

Abdullah Boulad 01:25:47  Yeah. Beautifully said. that's that's the goal to disconnect from where you feel you are down and, and explore different things with the different elements you mentioned and therapy and treatment and, and hopefully find something which gives you this, motivation to see the glass half full again and going forward. I know you do a great job. You do great work results. You the work you do resonates a lot with the clients. and, I would like to share with you a quote from one of the clients, about your work.

David Cornwell 01:26:30  Okay. I'm super curious.

Abdullah Boulad 01:26:31  With, with him. David was a fantastic guide in my journey at the balance. His example and safe presence allowed me to connect with my masculinity in a healthy way for the first time in my life.

David Cornwell 01:26:46  Yeah. That's lovely. And, you know, I think that, it's not easy being a man sometimes. And, you know, some of the clients, they come from very defined roles of, you know, what a man should be.

David Cornwell 01:27:01  And I can imagine which clients may have said this. There's several. And, Yeah. It's lovely. It's lovely to work with people, work with men and have them connect to their body, to their emotions, to their senses, and to understand that this is the resource that we have to carry us through life, and that there's wisdom in the body. And if we can just take a pause, take a breath, listen to our experience, it will help to guide us. And and we do lots of other work. We do lots of self-reflection and self-help and all of these different things. But we can have this operating system, this platform of just being in our bodies. And yeah, it's lovely to hear a client's reflection.

Abdullah Boulad 01:27:55  Now, this is, has been certainly, a man. Do you feel there are differences between men and women connecting to their body and accessing it, or. How how?

David Cornwell 01:28:10  Yes. It is. Well, I think what what I experienced, Abdullah, and maybe you can relate to this, is that we we often don't have the skills as guys.

David Cornwell 01:28:23  We've, we've been told, you know, I seen this advert many years ago in a, in the Sunday Times newspaper and it was an advert. It was a bunch of construction workers building a steel reinforced wall and the advert said. Some men get in touch with their feelings. Real men build steel reinforced walls by Black and Decker. That was the advert and I remember thinking, okay, there's the problem, there's the Achilles heel. Is there? Because people think that that's what real men do. But that becomes the point of vulnerability. And I see that with so many men, I, I seen it from myself. I came from a working class family. My father was a fisherman. People did not get in touch with their feelings. People built steel reinforced walls. But that becomes the vulnerability. And you can maybe relate to that. I know many men who relate to that women. My experience is they have more opportunity to share. They they talk about their bodies. They connect with each other.

David Cornwell 01:29:35  They have a sisterhood, which we often like. Now that's a I'm not saying that's the same for everyone, but I can speak to the man a little bit because I am a man, that this is something that I see and I think that we can where there is that mindset and that way of relating, there is a vulnerability. And I think by helping men connect to their emotions, they suddenly and their their body, their sensations, they don't explode. They don't they they become stronger, they become more able to have a meaningful relationship. And again, this is what it's all about. It's about having a meaningful life.

Abdullah Boulad 01:30:20  Exactly. And we know from statistics that there are differences. there are more women reaching out for help than than men, but there are higher suicide rates in men and women. And, I really hope that men with this mental health crisis we are in worldwide, become more open to reach out and get help wherever they they need it. So talking about all problems and conditions and work you do.

Abdullah Boulad 01:30:56  how do you, David, manage to stay in balance in your in your own daily life? Are there specific activities, special practices besides now? Meditation, certainly I understand. Yeah. What do you do?

David Cornwell 01:31:13  I try to have a slower life as much as I can. And, I have a tendency to work way too much. And I, I come from a culture where there's a lot of alcohol, Smoking, overeating, all of these things, and I can certainly participate in that. So I need. I need to be careful. I need to take care. And so what I do, I try to exercise. I feel it's important. I swim most days, I do breathwork. And I'm a lifelong asthmatic. And breathwork has helped me to completely transform my asthma. I, I follow a mostly a sort of paleo diet. We're getting into terms here, but I try to not eat so much carbs. I eat simply, I eat a paleo diet. Yeah. What else do I do? I have friends, I go to concerts, I try to have a social life community.

David Cornwell 01:32:18  I surf as much as I can. I kite, surf and windsurf. So I think those all of those activities are really important for me, but certainly, eating well. Meditation, breathwork and swimming. Those are my daily practices to keep me. To keep me sane.

Abdullah Boulad 01:32:38  And what would you. If you can now talk to everyone in the world. What would you suggest to them? Or tell them as a recommendation what they can do should do?

David Cornwell 01:32:50  Yeah, well, I think maybe. Just take a breath. Slow down, slow down. Feel your children's hands in your hands. Taste the food that you're eating. You know, find ways to. To just take a breath and to listen to themselves and to listen. You know, pay just to come into the moment. and cultivate that, cultivate that capacity because it's something that can be cultivated. Something we've forgotten. It's something that can be remembered. And it's very simple. And we're seeing, as you said, a mental health crisis.

David Cornwell 01:33:24  We're seeing the whole world trending towards this fight. flight, sympathetic arousal. You know, we're drinking a bucket of coffee to get us going. We're, driving in terrible traffic. We're stuck in, you know, underpaid jobs. We're having troubles, and and I think that, Just take a breath. Reconnect to oneself, listen to your inner wisdom, and let it guide you. And I think that's that's super valuable. Yeah.

Abdullah Boulad 01:33:58  Thank you so much for your wisdom and your your great work you do with with all the clients. I, I look forward to seeing much more feedback of of the ones we have had. Thank you so much for being here today. It was a pleasure for me to have this conversation with you, David. Thank you.

David Cornwell 01:34:16  Thank you. Abdul, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to work at the balance. It's a pleasure. Pleasure to work with the clients at the balance. And, Yeah, we keep going. Thank you.