The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
The Fully Mindful podcast explores what it is to be fully mindful and present in our everyday lives, uncover our worth and discover our purposes. Host of TFM, Melissa Chureau is a neurodivergent lawyer, mindfulness teacher, and embodiment and breathwork coach. On TFM, Melissa interviews inspiring creatives, wellness leaders, and social disruptors about how they have discovered their purpose(s), authentic wellness, and the value of their work on the world at large.
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The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
Applying Mindfulness, Awakening Our True Self, Healing Practices and the Power of Awe
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Andrew Daniel, Author, Self-Development & Spiritual Teacher: Melissa introduces you to Author Andrew Daniel who didn’t always have it together. Like so many of us, he leapt from one self-help practice to another, searching for the answer that would solve it all. He learned how we get trapped in our own “stucky story,” fueling perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and addictive cycles. Hedeveloped his groundbreaking work on getting unstuck, using the power of embodiment and deep healing practices.
https://andrewdaniel.org/awaken-to-your-true-self/
FULL EPISODE LINK HERE!
Mayda Poc, Career Strategist & Executive Coach: Next, Meet Mayda Poc, who loves to challenge us with the question, “If I’m not a lawyer, a CEO, a doctor, in finance, a chef, a restauranteur, then who am I?” That’s the question that so many of us have asked ourselves—and are terrified of the answer. There is nothing wrong with working hard or being ambitious. But where things unravel is when we focus so much on success, and so much on our careers, that we lose our sense of the whole self. Mayda candidly shares the moment of clarity that led her to leave it all behind, despite having no clear plan, and the wisdom she’s gained about success, identity, and truly living.
https://maydapoccoaching.com
FULL EPISODE LINK HERE!
Michael Amster, M.D., Author, Physician: Dr. Michael Amster has the solution–and it takes less than a minute a day. With this practice, the practice of accessing awe (as in wonder), Dr. Amster and his colleague, Jake Eagle, found an easy, and remarkably simple, scientifically-proven practice to overcome burnout and anxiety, ease chronic pain, find clarity and purpose–and a sense of calm and acceptance with what is, all the while savoring what is–in less than a minute a day. They call it the Power of Awe, which they published in book form available now, with science, observations, history, and daily practices.
https://thepowerofawe.com/book/
FULL EPISODE LINK HERE!
Sarasvati Karahan, Yin & Hatha Yoga Teacher
What if slowing down was the key to deep healing? Yoga teacher Sarasvati Karahan shares how Yin Yoga—once something she resisted—became a powerful tool for treating sleep disorders, mental health, addiction, and more. In the full episode, we dive into the science and art of this practice, exploring its martial arts roots, modern neuroscience, and its surprising benefits for even the most restless among us. If you’ve ever struggled with slowing down, this episode might just change your mind.
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Welcome to the Fully Mindful Podcast. I'm your host, melissa. I designed this podcast for you. I'm so happy you're here. We are talking about what it means to live with more intention, creativity and authenticity so we can make aligned connections. I'm a neurodivergent lawyer turned coach who found the healing power of breathwork and the powerful impact of mindfulness as we navigate this wild and beautiful ride of life. Here at the Fully Mindful, we dive deep with inspiring guests, share solo mini-sodes that are packed with tools you can apply immediately, and I mix it up a bit with tangents and sidebars where my friend and host of the New World Normal podcast, debbie Harrell, joins us for some down to earth, sometimes random but always meaningful conversations. If you're ready to breathe, reflect and grow, you're in the right place. Let's get fully mindful.
Speaker 1Some stories and conversations are just too good to hear only once. That's why I'm bringing you a mashup of a few of listeners' favorite episodes from the Fully Mindful. These clips capture the heart, the wisdom and aha moments that you've loved and maybe need to hear again. Ready to dive in? Check out the full episodes through the link in the show notes. Trust me, you won't want to miss these. Hey, y'all you are going to want to grab a cup of coffee or tea and listen to this deeply fascinating conversation with Andrew Daniel, who is a leader in personal healing. He knows his work, he has done this work. He's dedicated wholly to the work of healing the self and he's author of, recently, his book awaken to your true self, why you're still stuck and how to break through. You really don't want to miss this. You know their brain, their ego. There's something, just shuts it down. It's like, yeah, I saw it, but I don't want to take any responsibility for this yeah, it's exactly it.
Speaker 3Yeah, and I clarify that in the book and take that to the next place and call it an embodiment, so you can have that the neck up knowledge. But unless it's embodied, it's really only going to have five 10% of its power, and that's what happened to me. I knew all this stuff in my head from the neck up, but it wasn't embodied. I saw myself move and it's like, oh my God, this teaching of generosity and joy and love and abundance. I don't look abundant. Yeah, no wonder I have no money. I don't look abundant. I'm shut down and closed off and afraid of the whole world. There's not dollars coming into that person and so, yeah, it's the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the hardest thing almost all of my clients have ever done, and that's after usually decades of doing transformational work. But it ends up being the one thing that actually helps them break through and it's just so beautiful to see it saved my life. And, yeah, but it's it's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1So talk about how do we take responsibility, right? So we learn these interesting I'm going to use the word interesting truths about ourselves and why we are where we are. And lots of successful people are still, like said, suffering. So it's not like, oh, because you make a million dollars a year and you're married, relatively happy, and have wonderful children and all these successes, that doesn't mean that they're not suffering, right? So how do we stop? Well, oh, one of the things that I love. I'm just going to go on a tangent here.
Speaker 3Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 1You have a section in the book about stop fixing, start living, and it's one of my favorite sections because I think so many of us can relate to this and you've already talked about it. This I'm going to just, if I take one more course, if I get one more certification, if I go to school one more year, two more years, five more years, if I do this thing, this therapy, this modality, this guru, this retreat, you know, somehow I will suddenly be whole and we get addicted to it. We get addicted and I know I have. You know I've certainly been addicted to that, because that's what's keeping me in the story in my case, and yeah, so like talk a little bit about that, this, the stop the fixing, start living.
Speaker 3Yeah that I came across that idea. I was doing a form of tapping. It was a certain form of tapping clearing limiting beliefs, negative emotion, kind of things and I had a notebook like this this doesn't have it, but a notebook like that with lists and lists and lists of all my negative emotions and limiting beliefs and I would just every day, I would just sit down and, all right, here I go, tap, tap, tap, clear, clear, clear. And it was helpful, I mean, like it was a really important part of my journey. But I did that for years and I got to a place where one day I remember it very clearly I'm sitting there with this list and I was adding to it faster than I was crossing it off and I looked at myself. I'm like, oh my God, I think that eventually I'm going to run out of stuff. I'm going to run out of things and then I'm going to be fixed and it's not going to happen. This list is never going to end Because even if I clear all of the stuff from this life, there's all my past life stuff to do, there's all the generational stuff to do, and then that'll be 20 years down the road and in 20 years I'll have new traumas and stuff and stories that come up that I have to deal with.
Speaker 3Then I looked at this and I was terrified. I was terrified. I'm like this isn't going to end, yeah, even though it's helpful, and so I knew at that moment, this is not going to realize peace. This is helpful, it's healing, but it's not going to realize peace, there's no end to it. And so there is an element of kind of facing the music and also an element of, oh, you know what I think I'm also doing here, I think I'm also avoiding living, I think I'm hiding behind this until I feel like I'm enough and ready to go, have the relationship to, to start that business idea, to go out in the world and do this. I'm waiting until I'm perfectly healed to live a perfect life.
Speaker 3And it was just a complete fantasy. I mean, it was such a delusion and I was addicted to the fixing because I felt like I was broken. And it was like another realization of, oh, the more that I fix myself, the more that it's just validating that same story, yes, and so that was how I came up with literally that phrase and that idea. It's like, oh, stop fixing, just start living your life. You get into the ready trap. I call it the ready trap. It's a trap that you got to be ready and you can't do anything until you're ready.
Speaker 1Today's interview with Maida Pak is one of the most engaging and interesting conversations I've had about work life, identity and finding our purposes. Identity and finding our purposes From Wall Street to international life and career coach for executives and fast-paced industries. After more than 16 years in the financial industry in Paris, london and New York City, in years of ignoring serious health concerns culminating in cancer, maida Pak left investment, but not first without a fight. After all, for Maida, like so many of us, what we do is who we are. So you said that you use a little bit of NLP sometimes, where appropriate, or emotional freedom technique. For those who are wondering what those are, can you tell us a little bit about how you use those?
Exploring Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Awe
Speaker 4Yes, it's part of reframing. In reality, I think that's that sometimes we are so much in the habit of a lot of things that what the brain needs is a stop, and emotional freedom technique, which is called tapping as well, or even nlp, are one way to first to stop the emotional tapping is we tap on certain meridian points that are very nodded in a way in the body, and that allows the body to communicate a sense of control and a sense of calmness to the rest of of the body. Nlp is one way of reframing. It's another way of for me is another way of showing the mind that there are other possibilities.
Speaker 4As humans, we have this tendency to generalize it's all or nothing, it's my way or the highway, it's everybody hates me. There are a lot of things that, a lot of assumptions that we base many of our decisions upon. But, like any kind of mathematic formula, if the assumption is wrong, then the conclusion is definitely very wrong, and so NLP is one way of going back to these assumptions and just turning them around Everybody hates me, is that true? Is that everybody, who and why and when? And all of a sudden the brain is like okay, so maybe I'm in conflict with one person, but maybe I have a good reason to be in conflict with this person. So we use the power of the mind, that same power that makes us sometimes miserable and completely depleted because oh my goodness, and I'm a loser and I'm equitable we use that to exactly the opposite, to say hold on one second, I'm human, I'm a normal person, I also have my feelings, I also have my boundaries, my preferences, and this is not okay. Or I have been basing a lot of my assumptions on things that actually are not real. So how can I change that? And this is what nlp does.
Speaker 4It is reprogramming the brain to see things from almost like an observer point of view, rather than from the body, mind, soul that has been reacting to an external trigger and the body keeping these kind of imprint and rehashing them every single time. It's quite close to EMDR, which is a therapy technique where it allows you to find the roots of how the body has associated several sensations and feelings and emotions to one root experience that I had in life. But actually, anytime that I have this emotion, my body goes back to that root and remind me of that kind of trauma, in a way that happened in my life at some point. So there is this re-triggering. So NLP without going into therapy is a bit like that as well.
Speaker 4It's about retelling the brain that one incident is not general, that there is excessive filtering in the brain, because that's what we do and the truth is actually quite dependent on the way we view it and our truth is not universal and it's not the truth. So we need to get out of our own way and explore our zone of excellence rather than stay in our zone of fear, which some people call your comfort zone. I have my personal opinions about comfort zone, but we can, we can. You know, we can stay there. It's fine, yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating, I know. You know I've certainly done my fair share of therapy and have benefited from it. But at one point, I think during one session, I said, you know, I don't think this is really working anymore and it was because my own thinking was trying to solve my own thinking problems and you know, these neuropathways were so well worn that I couldn't get out of them. I needed something else to pull me out of that so I could see them for what they were, which was just neuropathways, just patterns, just patterns of ways of thinking and so something like I've done EMDR as well, and NLP and EFT. They are really excellent tools, especially for very left brained people, which I think you're really working with, who are used to just being very analytical and linear and all that just not even participating in that part of the brain and just really getting over to the right side of the brain or bridging those two sides and using something else so that you get out of those, those well-worn paths, those habits of thinking that that are no longer serving us. And you know, and and sometimes we need that.
Speaker 1And I know I've worked with people and I even remember when I was working with a therapist and she brought up EMDR. She confessed that she was a little bit nervous about it because I am a lawyer and you know I'm so logical and I kind of thought, well, that's funny that that's her perception of me, but also I can understand that. And she's like well, are you willing to try something different? And it was like, yeah, that's what I want and it has amazing results, whether it's EMDR, eft or NLP. Not that those are the only tools. Obviously, any form of deep inquiry or mindfulness techniques can really help people. But I love that you have this in your toolbox that you can use on more difficult cases like me, like I would be one of your more difficult cases, right?
Speaker 4I don't think it's difficult, I think it's. I call people intellectualizer Is when we have been so primed to put everything in the brain, we forget that we have a body, and so we need to remind humans that we have a body, and so we need to remind humans that we are a body. First, the animal is a body. It exists without us. You can take the brain, you can put the brain on life support. Whatever, the body will continue more or less living because we are primed to live, and so we need to involve the body in our decisions. We need to respect the body. If the body is revolting, if the body doesn't like a food, for example, there's no need to feed it more of it. So if the body is not reacting well to a certain stress that we're giving it, we need to pause, because that's how we create diseases. It's very simple. Unfortunately, not all diseases are self-created, but some of them come from stress and from prolonged exposure to this kind of mind looping that we go into, and UFT in particular is a good way to go back into the body, because it's telling the body.
Speaker 4I understand, I understand you are storing a lot of emotions, so let's go through these emotions. I'm giving myself permission to feel, because in all of these places you know finance and what have you we don't have the right to feel. It's forbidden, especially women. I mean even men. They cannot show anger. Some of them do because it's a habit, but for most of them you cannot show anger, you cannot show frustration, you cannot. And so this is a place where you give yourself permission to feel, even if it's not a socially pleasing kind of emotion, but you allow the body to say I'm not happy or I'm stressed out or I'm actually feel disrespected, and then you allow the body to express yourself via the brain and all of a sudden they're working together and that's against each other.
Speaker 1And I'm here with Dr Michael Amster, who I'm absolutely delighted to have on the Fully Mindful podcast. He is a physician and faculty member at Toro School of Medicine, chorro School of Medicine. He graduated from University of California Irvine School of Medicine and completed his pain management fellowship at the University of Iowa. He's also been a student of meditation for something like more than 30 years, as well as a certified yoga teacher and a meditation teacher at one of my favorite places on the planet, spirit Rock Meditation Center. He's also taught all kinds of things like spine health yoga classes and founded a Buddhist Sangha Interfaith Meditation Group.
Speaker 2One thing I did want to share and I think it's important to bring up, because I noticed for a lot of people that are just starting to build their arm muscle the question you know, did I really just have a moment of awe, like I didn't get the full body tingles and we talk about in our book that all happens on a spectrum.
Speaker 2So most of the time for me my awe is pretty subtle. It's just like a subtle maybe tingle or feel that I feel different or a sense of colors being brighter, or I just feel very present. Sometimes you experience what we call like a meta state, where you become the observer of the observed, like a level steps back of awareness, and then the spectrum goes all the way up to what we call an orgasm right when your whole body may tingle or you get chills all over, you may start to cry because you're so emotional from that moment of awe. And what's important again is not to judge yourself on your practice and to not be forceful, just to allow these moments to appear and there's no right and wrong, it's just everyone has their own unique flavors of awe.
Exploring the Power of Awe
Speaker 1I love that and I do think it's really important to to highlight that, that you know we're all going to have different experiences all at different times, and what we might experience even in the morning might be different than what we experienced in the afternoon. And you know, there the evidence is in. You've done the research which I want to talk a little bit more about. That research that was done preliminarily I think it was during the pandemic, so it was right, it was 2020, the pandemic. Start doing this research with people in the medical field as well as people not in the medical field, and you found all this incredible stuff that you've already talked about this improvement of anxiety, depression and I guess I wanted to highlight that because if there was ever a time to do that kind of study and really test the power of awe, that was then Exactly yeah.
Speaker 2Unbelievable yeah, that research was. I mean the whole experience of designing that study. Actually, there were two studies, and implementing it was truly an awe moment in and of itself. So, right before the pandemic, my colleague and I, jake, had both done our own pilot studies where we took about a dozen of our own patients through the awe method and taught a 21-day course, and we saw some incredible outcomes. I met up with Dacher Keltner and we saw some incredible outcomes.
Speaker 2I met up with Dacher Keltner, who's the founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and he's really the I call him the granddaddy of awe research. He wrote the first paper that started to explore awe as a scientific emotion back in 2003. And so, through his lab, when the pandemic struck, we reached out to him and said, hey, we really want to do something to make this to help people that are struggling right now with so much depression, loneliness, anxiety. So, very quickly, in a matter of less than two months, we designed the study, we got the approval from the research board and we had recruited 300 primary care patients and also 200 doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals on the front lines that were knee deep in the stress and the throes of the horrors of the pandemic and at that time also, when the study launched in 2020 in June, we also were having the race riots that were happening and the protests that were going on as well. So it was a really dark time for all of us, with rates of depression skyrocketing and burnout for healthcare professionals. And so that's at the stage, and in the 21-day program, like I shared earlier, we saw these profound statistical significance that support the evidence that this practice changes people's health physically and emotionally in very profound ways in just 21 days, of developing this mindful practice of experiencing moments of awe in the ordinary.
Speaker 2And what's exciting for us is we're still exploring more research on this area.
Speaker 2It feels like we're just starting.
Speaker 2We have another study that we're launching at the very end of February at UC Davis with UC San Francisco, looking at long COVID patients that are suffering from all the brain fog and the depression and low energy and fatigue all from long COVID syndrome, which is affecting 23 million Americans and we don't even know what to do about it, like we don't really have cures for it yet.
Speaker 2But we believe that, understanding how the awe method works in the brain and in the body, that it should help people that are suffering from long COVID. And then we're really excited about even further research, of looking at patients that have had cardiac events and how the awe method will help with cardiac rehab, because we know that awe is the only positive emotion that decreases inflammatory cytokines in the body. So I mean that is incredible that the emotion of awe it's not, you know, gratitude or generosity, or compassion, love. It's the emotion of awe that statistically lowers these inflammatory intracellular communicators that result in chronic heart disease, diabetes, cancers Pretty much most chronic illnesses are a result of inflammation in the body. Even depression is considered a neuro inflammatory condition, and so awe lowers inflammation significantly in our bodies and in our brains. And so the research that we're going to be doing is really exciting, like exploring more into how awe is really the most powerful of all emotions.
Deepening Yoga Practice Through Cultural Understanding
Speaker 1I'm here with the lovely, the amazing, the talented, the beautiful, the wise, sarasvati Hewitt, yeah, and I guess I want to get your take too. I mean you alluded to it a little bit of like. You know we're coming. It's really important to recognize the history and where yin and other yoga comes from, and you know it's been pretty whitewashed in this country. I mean I'm glad that yoga is everywhere and available and yeah you know, there's a little bit of this danger.
Speaker 1You know, here you and I are, you know, fairly dominant culture here and we get to access this. I mean, what, what's your sense of of that and and what, if anything, can we do to to remedy, you know, any whitewashing that has already happened?
Speaker 5to remedy, you know, any whitewashing. That has already happened. Well, the first thing that I do is I literally end every class by saying the same thing. I tell people remember it is an honor and privilege to practice yoga and meditation. Remember that for thousands of years these were secrets of families in places like India and China. So I have people recognize that, so we're constantly, constantly remembering it. I also really encourage people to take classes from people who are from like Asia, southeast Asia. In my training, for example, I do a hundred hour.
Speaker 5One of the first sections that we teach is actually something that's taught by Susanna Barkitaki, who is a brilliant woman who, I believe, grew up in India and maybe England and she's been I think I don't know practicing yoga probably 40 or 50 years or something, and she teaches sections on cultural appropriation and she has a really beautiful way of explaining things. And he answered a lot of questions about history of yoga, but I think a lot of it is just to be open to learning and to be, you know, realizing that it's really cool for us to have this and to look at ways that we can support, um, not only teachers from these places, but the places themselves, like one of the things that I really want to work on is we're not really supposed to even teach you in america, so I'm I'm always like the punk rock one and I'm like yo, we should basically be going to china and find this family and every yin studio should be fucking paying them, because we really don't have. You know, it's like I mean, I don't know I get beef sometimes with how people do stuff, cause I'm like remember people had to carry these traditions when it wasn't cool and it wasn't easy, and just because we decided it was cool or whatever. And you know, like it doesn't mean that, like it belongs to us. You know, and yoga is very strong and for 1000s of years has existed. You know this beautiful tiny four letter word. It can mean so many things, but it stays strong. But I think it's just we're at a point where we can see that like, especially even with again getting popular, we are ready for more of the deeper roots of yoga.
Speaker 5And like when I was in India this was probably 17 years ago, I remember I go I was in Rishikesh, which is like beautiful yoga city of the world. Right, we have one of those. That's cool. So I was at the yoga city of the world and I would go down to the Ganges and I would talk with people and I'm like 23. And I'm like I teach yoga in America, right, like I'm.
Speaker 5And everyone was so cool. They were all like awesome, we love that, you love yoga there. And they were all just kind of the same. They were like look, we've had yoga for a long time and we're going to keep telling you the same shit, which is that you should just meditate and chill, and you're going to keep doing Ashtanga until you work that shit out. And like it was kind of funny because they were all saying the same thing.
Speaker 5They were like burn through this physical obsession with the asana and then you will understand more about yoga. So it's very exciting that we have this sweep now from Vinyasa, ashtanga, bikram style stuff like that, and we've really got this big wave of yin, which it's very needed. Our nervous systems really need it. But what's really cool about it here's what's even more exciting is that by swinging into yin, we teach yin in such a certain way where it's always about harmony, and that's part of what really sold me on yin when I went to yin and at one point like overstretched my glutes. Paul Greeley was like don't do pigeon or swan anymore, go back to the gym and start doing squats.
Mindfulness for Personal Growth and Awareness
Speaker 5And I was like the heavy end just sent me to the gym. I was like what I was like I love these guys. I was like I'm so sold Because they're martial artists and they're not like what I was like I love these guys. I was like I'm so sold because they they're martial artists and they're not like you should only do this one thing. They're like that's crazy. Pro athletes cross train for a reason. So what's great about Yen is that Yen is going to give us a better foundation in general to be like on and off of our mat.
Speaker 5Why do we do what we do? Because the Taoist principle is harmony. So if it's not bringing you harmony, you got to question why you do it, and it's a really great way to live, right? It's a great principle because if you start, we joke that you go inside and you never go back, because once you go inside and you go, wait, do I even need this stretch? Or, you know, do I need to put more strengthening here? Or is this guy different than this? Right, when we start going inside, we have this awareness. When we're in our lives, when we're in our jobs, our relationship, we start to be like wait, how does this feel? Does this work? Did this used to work. What's really happening here and we start to view things in a different way.
Speaker 1Thank you for joining me on the Fully Mindful podcast. If you got value from this episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review or share this episode with someone who loved this content too. Remember, small moments of mindfulness can lead to big changes in your day-to-day life. Until next time, take a deep breath, stay present and tap into your own mindfulness. I'll see you next time.