3.11: Mindfulness For You

In this episode of “The Mindful Academy,” I delve into the significance and personal impact of mindfulness and meditation.

Highlighting mindfulness as a crucial tool for personal and client coaching, I share insights into the transformative power of stepping out of automatic, knee-jerk reactions and into a space of creativity and intention.

Meditation and mindfulness are portrayed not just as practices for self-improvement but as foundational techniques for becoming a more effective individual.

I also share my personal journey with meditation, including the use of various apps, programs, and retreats, emphasizing the simplicity yet profoundness of mindfulness and meditation. By recognizing thoughts as transient and not an absolute reality, individuals can foster flexibility, intentionality, and resilience.

My current practice involves Ziva meditation. But I'm really showcasing the diversity in meditation techniques and the importance of finding one that resonates with you personally.

Furthermore, this episode outlines the benefits of mindfulness, such as increased awareness of default patterns, enhanced emotional intelligence, and the ability to silence the inner critic. Through examples and personal anecdotes, I illustrate how mindfulness facilitates a deeper connection with oneself, leading to improved emotional awareness and decision-making.

Finally, this episode touches on the broader applications of mindfulness in academic and leadership contexts, while advocating for its role in fostering self-compassion, empathy, and a grounded sense of self.

I invite all of my listeners to explore or deepen their mindfulness practices.

Get in Touch!

Need more insights or want to discuss mindfulness further? Reach out to me at jennifer@jenniferaskey.com or connect on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also visit my website: https://www.jenniferaskey.com/

Episode Details

Transcript

Hello, everybody, thank you for lending me your ears for a little bit today while I talk about mindfulness. So the podcast is called the mindful Academy. Because mindfulness is one of the practices that I use as a coach for myself and for my clients to figure out where where we are, where you want to go, what it means to be grounded and centered, and all of that. And in my work with clients and groups of people to sort of look at the thought process that you're in, and step out of default mode and into something that's aligned with who you want to be more aligned with who you want to be stepping into something that is creative and intentional rather than default and knee jerk. Mindfulness is a great tool. And so today, I'd like to talk about meditation and mindfulness as a contemplative practice. And there are other contemplative practices out there, prayer is a contemplative practice. For some people journaling can be a contemplative practice, you can walk and contemplate in a in a sort of focused, intentional way. The modalities that I'm most familiar with are mindfulness and meditation, which are not entirely the same. And so that's what I'm going to talk about. In terms of what I think anybody who is on the path of being a more effective version of themselves needs, okay. I practice meditation for all sorts of reasons. And I'll tell you a little bit about what it looks like for me before I go into some of the research based benefits of meditation. As First of all, I've been meditating, semi regularly for seven years, far more regularly for about five, or five. And I've kind of done it all, like I've used the headspace app, the calm app, the Insight Timer app balance, the Positive Intelligence Program, which I am also certified to lead my clients through, I've gone on a 10 day silent meditation retreat, read a lot of books, like all, I've tried it all I read about it, I, if a new program or thing comes up, I'm very likely to click on it because not one method or program works for everybody. But at its root. mindfulness and meditation are very simple. If you think of what's normally going on in your mind as sort of this constant hum of, of chatter from yourself or from your inner critic, right, so maybe you're a planner, and you're always mulling over what's going to happen next, or maybe you're ruminator. And you're always ruminating over that horrible thing that happened before, or you have an inner critic on your shoulder who's yapping away at you, all of that. That's just thoughts right? In your head. And we have a tendency as human beings, to make those thoughts real like to really invest a lot of meaning in them to invest a lot of our identity into what goes on in our head. And in the practice of mindfulness and meditation, we learn in a very visceral way, that those are just thoughts, and they're not actually the truth. And by detaching the importance from those thoughts, right, by not holding on to them and making them our entire identity or our meaning. We open up a lot of possibilities for ourselves to be flexible, and intentional, and unflappable. And that's what I was looking for when I first approached mindfulness. So when I sit down, and right now the practice that I'm using is, um, it's called Ziva meditation. A woman named Emily Fletcher runs a program for it. It's kind of expensive. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure I'm endorsing it, although for the moment, I'm loving it. But again, I've tried at all I kind of go in and out of what have different kinds of practices. So but what I'm doing right now is 15 minutes twice a day, I sit with my back supported and my head free. And I do some breathing with extended exhales. I do some grounding and my physical senses, and then I silently in the very back of my mind, check ant a little mantra for about 15 minutes. And every once in a while I glance over at my timer. And when I'm done, I practice some gratitude, and I get up and move on with my day. And at other times, I've used bells on the Insight Timer to timeout 510 or 15 Minute Meditation chunks. And what I notice whether I have some background sound, or I'm counting, or I have this mantra is, I think, what's the pretty standard practice in meditation, or the pretty standard rhythm in meditation is I sit down with this intention to have my brain and my heart and my body all in the same place for a few minutes and just be here now. And as I sit there and breathe, my brain, especially my morning meditation, my brain is like, throw in To Do List sticky notes on a virtual table in front of me. Oh, don't forget to do this. Oh, what about that? Oh, hey, did you remember to? Yeah, you really need to do some thinking about blah. And did you remember to do blah, and oh, yeah, there's that thing? And is it on my to do list? And that's kind of the the mental chatter that goes on. And so my practice of meditation, like why it is a practice is you go, Oh, yes, that's a thought Thank you. And you watch it pop like a bubble, and you go back to counting or focusing on your breath or chanting a mantra. And you don't, I don't take that thought, Oh, hey, did you remember that you intended to get back to so and so. My job is not to pick up on that thought and say, Oh, that's right. Okay, I need to email her, I'm going to do that today, when I'm done with XY and Z. The practice of meditation is to not pick up the thought and run with it like the proverbial football. But to just let it drift, and come back to being here. And now because right now, I'm not writing that email or adding something to my to do list. I'm just sitting and breathing. And it's a little bit hard to not follow your train of thought. But it is the practice of bringing yourself back to focus is building this muscle of basically not letting your default mode, and your inner critic and your Gremlins run roughshod with you while you're not paying attention, right? Because then in my normal life, when I noticed my thoughts get hijacked by something positive or negative, I can bring myself back to where I am intentionally wanting to be. So that's sort of the work and the benefit of meditation, one facet of it in a nutshell. And what the reason I mentioned, sort of the visual of the sticky notes on a virtual table, is because for me meditation, and mindfulness is sort of like taking out the mental garbage, all of those things that I think about, they may need to happen, they may not. But having them all, as open tabs, in my mind doesn't really serve me, right. It doesn't really keep me accountable. It doesn't keep me focused. It's just mental clutter. And so, practicing mindfulness has given me all sorts of positive reinforcement for having other ways of staying on top of my work, and then being able to disconnect from work when I don't need to be working. Right. And that's something that I don't have an excellent track record of, especially as an academic, right, where no matter where I went, I would tote my laptop with me imagining that I was going to work on that article, right. So recognizing the the consistently open tab in your brain is not super helpful is one of the things that I get out of mindfulness. So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about a few things that mindfulness does for you as an individual in terms of benefits. And if you want to read more about this, I'm sure I've talked about these books before. But looking at Jon Kabat Zinn's wherever you go, there you are looking at Rick Carlson's taming your Gremlin, they're reading things by Pema Chodron, like the places that scare you. All of these things will point in this direction. This is my language for all of these things. But this is pretty basic awareness about what mindfulness and meditation does for us. Oh, and the difference between mindfulness and meditation is with mindfulness you do consistently bring yourself back to a focus, and it's usually guided like mindfulness is often a guided process. If we think of mindfulness based stress for duction, which is the, the mindfulness program created by Jon Kabat Zinn, I believe in the early 80s, at Mass General, and you can find practitioners and teachers of that all over the country. Mindfulness usually has a guide that's taking you through a process and helping you come back to that focus with meditation. It's a simple thing, it's on you, right? You're contemplating one thing and you bring yourself back. Okay, so a few things that mindfulness and or meditation can do for you as a human being in the world. Number one, increase your awareness of your own default patterns. Oh, gosh, there I go again. And as you build this awareness, you're then better positioned to shift those patterns when you need to, right. So first, we recognize and then we can intervene. And this is important for emotional intelligence. It's important for emotional awareness. It's important for your effectiveness as a person, and I think it really helps you like get off your own case a bit. Right? This notion, when I tell myself Oh, there you go again. It's like, oh, yeah, I have a pretty strong catastrophizing tendency. Like, I'm not so much a ruminator, as I am a catastrophize. Er, and so I can watch my brain when I meditate, like really reaching into the future and imagining things like why are you borrowing trouble? Or even imagining something fantabulous, right when there's a moment, here, and now to be paid attention to? So increasing your awareness of your own default patterns? This then number two, gives you greater emotional awareness and agility. So learning to meditate or to practice mindfulness, especially with mindfulness, most of the programs I've been exposed to really begin with you getting in touch with all five senses, right? So what what can you hear in this moment? What can you touch in this moment, taste, see smell, in this moment. And then once you've grounded in those senses, focusing on your breath, focusing on counting, and when you drift coming back to that physical sound of the mantra or the number, or the feeling of the breath in and out, right? It's a body of wilderness, and all of the research on emotions, right? How emotions are made by Lisa Feldman, Barrett, and other work in the emotion in the realm of emotions research, point out that they are bodily sensations that our mind gives meaning to right. So by keeping our mind and our body and our heart in the same place, we develop a richer vocabulary and a richer awareness of what's going on with our emotions and how they manifest in our body. So this means you recognize your inner state more easily, you can practice giving names to your emotions, and you can use those emotions as data for your decisions and responses. So important, right? Rather than, again, that default pattern, where will this happened? So my automatic response is just that. The other benefit of a mindfulness practice and this is part of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. It's part of the Positive Intelligence Program. I think it shows up in the headspace introductory sequence like this is a pretty common thing to bring to an early mindfulness practice, it's a big part of taming your Gremlin is learning how to turn the volume down on your inner critic, because your inner critic is one of those thoughts in your head, right? And we all have an inner critic, and I've seen it referred to as the crusher, the judge the Grambling and the inner critic. I call it the shitty committee. We all have one and they're aligning think, okay, and meditation and mindfulness because you're watching your thoughts sort of pop up, and then pop like bubbles and float away, right? They remind you over and over again a million times in 10 minutes, that your thoughts are not real. And so this when, when recognized repeatedly and experienced repeatedly helps you separate from the judgment of your inner critic more easily super important, because that inner critic makes us miserable. Right? So having a contemplative practice is grounding yourself in the here and now, grounding yourself in your body and in your essential okayness. It's building your self compassion. It's building your empathy. As you detach from the persistent belief that humans have, right, this is A Human Project, the consistent belief that humans have that what is going on in our head is real and is a fundamental part of who we are. And of course, Buddhism will say that, that attachment to your own story, that attachment to that memory, or that hope, or that experience, or that desire, like that's the root of suffering in Buddhism, and even if you're not taking a religious bent on this, but just a self awareness and spiritual bent on this, right? How miserable do we make ourselves with our own thoughts. So, if you are on an academic journey, either building your own scholarly career, stepping into leadership, or getting out, right, being grounded in yourself and in your essential okayness, understanding your emotional responses more clearly, right? All of those things that you can get from a contemplative practice are of immense benefit to you. So while as a coach, it is not my job to tell you what to do, or how to be, this is easy. You need zero equipment. Free, if you want it to be that way, meets you where you are, and can take you to pretty amazing places. So I would love to hear from those of you who already have a mindfulness or meditation practice, what is it? What does it look like? And if you don't, and are interested, let me know, several times a year I take clients through the Positive Intelligence Program, which is a super practical, easy access program for mindfulness. And I have a ton of recommendations for books and other ways to sort of dip your toe in the water or to deepen your practice, because it's something that fascinates me endlessly. So thank you so much for, again, lending me your ears. This week. I will be back in a couple of weeks to talk more about mindfulness, but from a slightly different angle. I'm going to talk about mindfulness at work as a leader as an organizational human. Take care.