The Powerful Practice You’re Already Doing (You Just Didn't Know It)

In this episode, I sit down with fellow therapist Karen Jones to explore how mindfulness isn’t just a tool for crisis moments— even a 12-minute daily practice can rewire your brain for resilience. We talk about practical ways to integrate mindfulness into your everyday routine (like mindful dishwashing and the power of posture), how to ground yourself in the present moment, and why simple curiosity is so powerful and profound. Plus, we dive into how your body mirrors your thoughts and why standing tall—shoulders back and down—can shift your entire mindset. Tune in to discover simple yet powerful ways to take up your space, calm your nervous system, and create a sense of steady presence in your life.

Mary's FREE Progressive Relaxation audio

Karen's website

2 mindful exercises

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression by Z. Segal, JMG Williams and J. Teasdale.  They have a workbook too. 

Peak Mind: Find your focus, Own your attention by Amishi Jha

Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer

A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook by B. Stahl and E. Goldstein

Greater Good Magazine: Science based insights for a meaningful life

Mindful resources

Transcript

Mary

Hi and welcome to the show. Today I'm talking to a fellow therapist. We're going to talk about a strategy that is often part of psychotherapy treatment plans and often part of your everyday life. 

From my experience it's often misunderstood, but it's one of the oldest approaches to managing emotions – like centuries old – and it's something nearly everyone already does. They just don't always know that's what they're doing. Even in my line of work, this practice only consciously made its way into my actual therapeutic approach over the past 15 years –  I've been doing this work over twice this long – admittedly, because I didn't realize I was already using it, and I had the erroneous assumption that it couldn't have that much impact. Well, as I said, erroneous. I am now totally reformed. 

Today, I'm talking to Karen Jones about mindfulness. We're going to define it. No, it's not meditation, but yes, it kind of… is. And dig into how it can be the most powerful tool in your wellness kit to holistically manage physical, mental and emotional challenges. 

If anyone has ever told you to count to 10, that's mindfulness. If you've ever consciously taken a deep breath or tried to be still or done yoga, you've practiced mindfulness. And man is it powerful. 

Y'all heard me talk about connecting to your Essential Nature and taking up your space. Well, I honestly believe those things aren't truly possible without being mindful. So let me introduce my guest today so we can start to dig into this potent life skill. 

Karen Jones is a licensed professional counselor and certified mindfulness based stress reduction teacher. She has a master's degree in behavioral sciences and a bachelor's degree in public education. Karen recently retired after 30 years as a therapist in various settings, including higher education, where she worked with young adults, a population that is close to my own heart. Not ready to stop working entirely, (to which I can relate), she founded Mindfulness and Motion LLC, where she uses mindfulness based interventions to help others set intentions for and achieve optimal mental and physical well-being. 

In her free time, Karen is passionate about travel and being outside in nature. She enjoys bicycling on trails or on the road with a local cycling club, as well as hiking and kayaking in state parks in her home state of Pennsylvania, USA. 

Welcome to No Shrinking Violets. I'm so excited to dive into this with you.

Karen

Thanks. I'm honored to be here and spend some time with you and talk about mindfulness, something I'm passionate about.

Mary

Yes. And as you heard me say, I'm reformed and I am totally in. So I think this is so powerful and I really want to sort of tease this apart and you know, give some additional information to my audience. I know for my own work with clients and I'm sure this will be quite familiar to you from your work, the concept of mindfulness, I think, is kind of misunderstood. Think people assume it means meditation. Which isn't entirely untrue, just a little bit inaccurate. So. Maybe it's a good idea if we start with the definition of mindfulness so we can have a shared framework for our discussion today. How do you frame it for your clients?

Karen

I think that with more exposure to mindfulness in our larger community, yes, we do tend to use mindfulness and meditation interchangeably, and they are not necessarily the same thing. So mindfulness, as a definition, would be that awareness that arises when we're paying attention on purpose, using those qualities of non judgment, curiosity, kindness. It's the awareness that arises when we're paying attention on purpose to the present moment. So mindfulness is a state or way of being in that present moment, awareness equality, if you will. So when we're teaching mindfulness, we're also teaching about a mindful meditation practice, which you're right that it is a separate thing. That supports that quality, that state of being, of the awareness of what's actually happening in the present moment.

Mary

Yeah. And you mentioned something that we're gonna talk on later, which is curiosity, but this idea of the present moment, so that is such a powerful idea because I know from my own work, especially most recently with college students, that clearly the highest diagnosis in treatment is anxiety. I have a lot of theories about why this is, but I think most of it comes from this crazy world that we live in. Social media is fast and the images come through in a way that our brains really haven't yet developed a way to sort of take them in. Make sense of them. Then there's always the valuation. That's part of social media that the whole point is to get likes. So it's a very different way I think of interacting with the world and I think it naturally creates this higher level of anxiety, of course along with a lot of things that we've been needing to deal with in the past four or five years with COVID and you know world events. And world events are right in our face again through social media, through the news cycle, all of those things. 

When you say present moment, I would say very few people really understand what that means. So we're either living mentally in the past and thinking about, you know, oh, why did I do that? I can't believe that happened. Or I can't believe I said that. Or we live in the future and we worry about what might happen. So I think that idea of present is really hard to access.

Karen

Yeah. You sound like you're helping me teach the beginning courses of introductory classes of the mindfulness based stress reduction program. That acknowledgement that our mind can travel so many places.

And the acknowledgement that we are in information overload often, and that wired within us, we have this ability to manage our attention. What we are attending to. So there is back to that definition, the awareness of where our attention, our focus is going. And redirecting it back to our present moment, Amishi Jha, who wrote a book called Peak Mind and studies the science of attention, says that our attention can actually be a superpower. There's not as much difficulty right now with our attention as there is with all of the information and the bandwidth we have mentioned, I don't know that our brains are equipped yet to manage all that information, right? Like how much can we handle? Our attention, though, is something that we can train. And we can train our attention to come back to the present moment when we recognize that it has gone off to rehashing the past or thinking into the future about what if and what might happen and playing out, how we're going to interact with that next person. What that does is it gets us out of our bodies and it takes us out of the present moment and what's actually happening. When we can recognize that we're in the present moment and attend to what's actually happening, the hypothesis is, and I would say this is true for me, it gives us much more choice around, OK. That old question that therapists ask. What do you have control over right now? What don't you have control over right now? What are your options? And then that power of choosing either where we're going to direct our attention or choosing what's helpful, what's healing, what's nourishing for me right now. Exploring what do I need? That's being present. If that makes sense.

Mary

Yes, it makes sense to me. I think you know, as we discuss more, I think people that are unfamiliar with this I think will start to get it. Because what I often say to my clients when we're doing something like grounding, which we're going to talk about more in a minute, grounding is just where you are right now. Being in your senses, which you sort of mentioned a little bit already, but right now in this moment we're safe. And I like to use that word because I think anxiety comes up often because our brain and basically the amygdala, which we won't go into to neurophysiology today, but there's something in our brain saying you're not OK and it's really coming from the thoughts that were having again about what happened in the past, what might happen in the future. And sometimes that rumination runs in our mind, and we feel like we're staying safe if we keep worrying, which again, that's a whole other podcast, I think, but this idea of in the present moment, nothing is happening that you're worrying about right now. You're in the present and you're safe. That's something where our young people and again, I'm going to go back to our college students, I really try to impress upon them that idea of the present moment being grounded. And so when I worked with a college population, I ran, with a colleague, a mindfulness group, and there were several activities that touched on many kinds of mindfulness concepts because this is really quite a vast.

A vast arena, even though it comes down to certain things. So. Some of these things that we did were a little bit wacky, like there was something called chicken breathing, which if we have time, we'll talk about that. But I think I'm drawn more towards that idea of grounding. You mentioned curiosity and taking up space so. I read the concept of Essential Nature like what are our unique needs? What are our ways of being unique. Even though we have a lot in common. Can you speak to some of the ways that mindfulness can maybe connect us to our Essential Nature and take up our space, or help us live kind of more fully?

Karen

Sure. As I hear you speaking, the foundations of mindfulness come up for me. So when we're talking about mindfulness, we're talking about first learning to be mindful of the body. And introducing practices and ways of being where we're paying attention to and being present in our body, whether that's physical sensations or movement or just really being present with the body. In the MBSR course that I teach, we do that formally through offering a body scan and but without being involved in formal meditation practice. Just being aware of, oh, there's some tightness in my shoulder and being present in the body. Helps us know what's going on with us, whether we're expanding in a space or whether we're shrinking in a space physically. And then we talk about feeling tones when it comes to mindfulness and being aware of whether things are pleasant for us or unpleasant or neutral. And not having to get entangled in or analyzing what those feeling tones are, but just thought wise or physically or emotionally, this is unpleasant or pleasant or neutral state for me, allows me to then have a little bit more awareness and some understanding of what's happening with me, thinking wise. What's happening with me from an emotional perspective. What's happening from a physical perspective and as we know, all of those things influence our behaviors. So that's the third foundation around mindfulness. That's important to touch. And then the 4th one when we're practicing those first three, we're beginning to note all of the things we're becoming aware of physically, emotionally, feeling tones, and the behaviors that ensue, and it gives us this awareness of when this happens. 

For me often this happens and when this happens for me, then that happens. These are some of my automatic responses. And the way I see that bringing us back to our Essential Nature is when we're practicing that kind of awareness and understanding and we're kind of tending and befriending it rather than pushing it away or avoiding it or saying we have to change that, we're just allowing it and saying Oh yeah, that's how I am or this happens for me. Is that my Essential Nature? Is that helpful, nourishing, meaningful, purposeful for me? Or is that something that's happening because of life experiences, or what society tells me I'm supposed to be? And so then we again get to make choices around what are some other options? Is this the way I want to engage right now?

 Sorry, I'm going to go off a little. Maybe what I heard you say about how we ruminate sometimes running over something a few times helps us feel safe. Protected. It's that defend and protect reaction, and sometimes that doesn't serve us well. To me, that takes us back to our awareness, takes us back to our Essential Nature and deciding how we choose to take up space in the world rather than just taking it up or shrinking back without an awareness.

Mary

Wow, so many great themes in there. Our brains are made to think so we’re very, very good at it. It's only when they go too far and we overreact and I say that part of our brain is like that smoke detector that goes off when you're just making toast. You know. The house isn't on fire. But it's important to know if there's a little smoke. 

So when we go overboard, yes, that's where some of this can kind of kick in and I love when I think about taking up your space. We sometimes do mirror our thoughts in our bodies, so if we're not aware of it... So if you're sitting kind of hunched over, or I'll think about sometimes I would be in meetings at work and I knew if I felt like there was a lot going on or I felt overwhelmed. I wasn't taking up my space. So I will often say to people stand with your shoulders back and down, shoulders back and down, because once we open up and that's kind of for our yogis in our listening audience, that's mountain pose, right. Take up your space. When you change how your body is in space, it can make you feel stronger. So I think that body part, well, all of these are so important. But that's what struck me when you talked about that. So. As we're talking about this rumination and using mindfulness as one of the tools in our toolkit, I really think of mindfulness as having two applications. One is an everyday practice, so I would say to people, take those little round colorful dots and stick them around your office space or spaces in your home. The kind you can peel off when you need to, but do that so that when you see one, you remember to take a deep breath and be in that moment. Or when you're brushing your teeth, mindfully brushing your teeth. Really tasting the minty toothpaste and feeling that brush in your mouth or even walking mindfully. Do these activities every day, but we're often thinking about the next thing, so if you're washing dishes and you are in that moment washing the dish, feeling the hot water, feeling the suds trying to get your mind used to hitting the stop button on the thoughts and being in that moment is really powerful. It can create just a calmer daily life. It regulates our cortisol, but I also think about it as a strategy, obviously, for when anxiety flares up or somebody's dealing with a highly stressful situation, however. I think it's really hard to have an effective response tool for anxiety without building a daily practice. What are your thoughts on that?

Karen

Yeah, I would agree. And I would say the research plays out. There's certainly benefit to what you're saying, that regularly pausing throughout the day. It's like it helps with our stress thermometer, if you will. Where if things are building up throughout the day, but we regularly see that dot and we take a deep breath, it does reset us and so there's benefit to that. And yet we know that if we have a regular practice and there has been research now that says if the average regular practice is around 12 minutes. So if you look on any of the mindfulness websites or articles that are promoting mindfulness, they'll often now be a 12 minute practice attached to it that. Why? Because the research is playing out and showing it doesn't need to be a 45 minute daily practice. That's something that helps folks really get the neurobiology benefits entrenched in their body mind, so that when they leave an 8 week course, they have it with them, like somebody who's put in the time to learn to ride a bike or somebody who's put in the time to learn a new skill. When you walk away from it, you’ve had that much intensive practice, it comes back when you come back to it. All that being said, the 12 minutes seems to be the goldilocks area of if we can practice that regularly. Then when we get into situations where we need to be highly focused because of a job we're doing, first responders, medical folks and emergencies, if we're somebody who experiences anxiety for whatever reason or encountering an overwhelming event, if we have that ongoing practice, then our body mind responds more efficiently, if you will. To us, pausing and taking a breath. Pausing and grounding into our feet, pausing and standing in that Wonder Woman posture that allows us to take up space, we also are much more aware of when things are changing in the thinking mind and the body. 

Mary

Yeah. And you know when you say 12 minutes, I'm not gonna lie. I'm like, that's a long time. So and you know, one of the things I think about is trying to put your phone down for 12 minutes if you're not doing something else. When I would be on a college campus, you know, and I would look around, students were walking, looking at their phones, or if they're early to class, to just sit there is really, really hard. And I think part of that again is how their brains have developed. These younger people have had some kind of screen in their vicinity, in their hands, and since they were very young.

You know when you see a “like” or you see your text dinging, it's literally a dopamine reaction in your brain. So things are stacked against us in this trying to be mindful. I'm actually working on a certification now for forest therapy because nature's so, so powerful. And I think we need to get, especially our young people, back to not being afraid of nature and to appreciate it, but that being still is so, so hard.

You know, but grounding, you know, we talked about grounding, is so powerful. And every now and then, somebody would come into me and actually have a panic attack. And if you can have them ground in that moment, it's really powerful for them. But again, it is hard to access that, especially if you have high anxiety. Without building the practice, I also find myself telling my clients a lot of times to be curious. At least one session a day. I'm saying that be. So I think curiosity in the face of strong emotions, that again is very powerful, but it's very hard to attain at first. Can you talk a little about that?

Karen

Yeah. And if you don't mind, I'm going to talk about two things that help with that 12 minutes.

So mindfulness doesn't have to be a stillness practice. Anytime we're learning something new, we start where we're at. They do want to practice stillness, so maybe they practice with just standing still for one minute and see how that goes. And it's like a workout. You don't go out and run a 5K without ever having jogged. Or at least, that wouldn't be the recommendation. So you train to build your time. 

Maybe your meditation practice starts outside in green and blue spaces because we know that automatically shifts the internal goings on in our minds and bodies when we're out in green and blue spaces. So maybe we walk on a path for 15 minutes to just pay attention to the sensations in our body when we're walking, what we're seeing, what we're smelling, what we're hearing, how the air tastes. That's a mindful practice. Doesn't have to be stillness. Now curiosity turns out again in the research, and I've mostly read research from Judson Brewer because that's somebody that his way of writing, his style of being, just resonates with me. But he has found that curiosity is one of the things that also helps motivate us to start where we're at. And he talks about curiosity, and he cites some other researchers that I'm not going to be able to name right now. They divide curiosity initially into interest curiosity and deprivation, curiosity, and it's the interest curiosity that we're looking at and building in a mindfulness approach. So deprivation curiosity is just that. We're deprived of information and our brain automatically wants to seek it out. The answer? It rumbles and says oh. You know you can get the answer to that and we have, like we've said, information readily available to us at any time of day, and so it's easy to access.

Mary

Yep.

Karen

To use maybe your gardening example as a deprivation curiosity for me would have been a number of years ago. I read that I could grow tomato plants in pots because I don't have a lot of yard garden space. And it was successful. And then I got curious about… Sorry, this is interest curiosity I jumped into. Then I got curious about, Wonder what else I could grow in pots that would produce vegetables. I kind of like this and so I was motivated intrinsically because I was really interested in what else I could do in pots with vegetables. And so that's interest curiosity. Deprivation. Just to go back would be, I recognize Mary from somewhere. And I know I've seen her before, but I don't remember. So let me Google her name and then, Oh yeah, we collected and overlapped somewhere with college counseling. Because there's information that I can just go retrieve.

The interest curiosity is where we go when we're talking about developing this mindfulness approach to life, or whether we're developing a meditation practice. So in the mindfulness approach, qualities like I said we might be out walking and where we become curious about if I breathe in, what are the different smells? And it makes us look at opportunities, possibilities, options. Creates this flexible mind approach.

Mary

The curiosity. Is a non judgmental curiosity, right?

Karen

So just collecting information and let's see. Goodness, that's interesting.

Mary

And it's often the judgment is directed at. So if somebody has a feeling or, you know, I'm worried about this or I'm feeling really anxious because I have to do this speech or I'm going to see this person and the last time I said something weird and I don't know. So that's where you try to access a sense of curiosity in that thinking process to that, wow, I'm really feeling a lot of anxiety right now. It's not bad. Not good. It just is. And invite the anxiety to kind of be there. And I often say, you know, pull up a chair and have the anxiety sit down and you can coexist with it. And you don't have to push it. So many people feel that and they try to get away from it or push it and when you when you push against something ….resistance training is weight training. It gets stronger. So that's where I think accessing that curiosity – not is it bad or good, or why am I doing this? More like wow, it just is a thing I'm feeling, this anxiety.

Karen

And and in addition to that, having folks be curious about, so if I'm feeling anxious, what else am I feeling? And this is that foundation of mindfulness of the body. And we get curious about that. How am I experiencing this in my body? Is it impacting my arms? Shoulders. I feel it in my belly and if it is showing up in my body it is showing up in the body. That's a whole shift to have people. Get curious about that. How is this showing up not just in our minds? In our bodies, and then even exploring is it coming and going in the body? Are there edges to it? Is there a kind of a rhythm? And when we get that kind of focus and interest. The amygdala, as you mentioned, may calm down a bit because we're not in alarm when we're exploring that necessarily, if we're being curious like, well, that's interesting. Actually thought I was feeling it in my belly. I also noticing that I clench my legs or my glutes. And So what happens if I unclench them? Then things calm down in the brain a bit, and maybe the autonomic nervous system gets to do its job, right.

Mary

Yeah. Yeah. So before I go into this sort of next thought I have, I wanted to circle back with the 12 minutes and say yes, it's accessible and there are different ways to do it. And I love when you said you start where you're at because too many people, especially if they have this idea …. Is this 45 minute being sitting there? You know, in Lotus position? And it's not. But if you can be mindful for 20 seconds as a beginner, that's amazing. I think reinforcing that you're not failing,  your brain's not broken if you can't do this. You said it so well that you're not going to say I'm going to go run a marathon and all you do is like, walk half a mile a day. So be patient with yourself and find ways to access a little bit of that and build it so then you have that strong tool for when you need it.

Karen

And the research is the average of 12. So over the course of a week, maybe you do 2 minutes one day and 22 minutes another day and so it doesn't have to be 12 minutes a day. The average over the course of a few days.

Mary

Yep, so do what you can do. In my practice, I typically build mindfulness into a treatment plan to address anxiety or even some attention deficit behaviors. I don't use it much for depressive symptoms and I think that's because I've had several clients tell me that it increases their feelings of depression. Do you have insight into that?

Karen

That's an interesting question. There's a whole approach called mindfulness based cognitive therapy, and it is indeed for depression. Let me see. The folks are Doctor Siegel Williams Teasdale. Three different folks originally, and they developed and again well researched program the way that they are showing it as helpful is for relapse prevention, especially. So again with somebody who comes in and they are maybe newly diagnosed with depression, we don't start with meditation practice. But we can start with teaching about awareness. Like how do you know when you're having a day without a lot of symptoms and what do your symptoms look like when they're stronger or lighter? Just developing that awareness practice the mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression. And they have workbooks and produce lots of material around it. My experience in using that with clients when I was working as an outpatient therapist would be, it really helps folks understand the ups and downs of their symptomology. Yeah. 

And so they become aware, just like we teach folks with anxiety, you become aware of when your stress reactivity is going up and if you can intervene before it gets to an 8,9,10 with some practice that brings you back down to present or helps ground. If we can help folks begin to recognize this tends to be the behaviors, the thoughts, the emotions, the physical states that I know are letting me know that I'm beginning to spiral down. Then they can also identify when I'm in a downward spiral, these are the things that are helpful for me. Are the things that are nourishing and healing, and they can have that created. And there's that mindful awareness of, oh, I'm kind of circling down. These are the things that I know would be helpful for me to implement.

Whether that's connection to others, reaching out to others, or whether that's practice, I need to get back on my sleep cycle. I'm going to work on having a routine.

Mary

That's good stuff. That's good stuff. And there's other parts in that which I think is really important. It's not solely mindfulness. It's weaving that through some cognitive work and some other things, it sounds like.

Karen

Yes. Yeah. Yes, it's an approach that, yeah, has a component of mindfulness.

Mary

Yeah. Well, you've mentioned already so many resources, and we're actually going to have links to those in the show notes for anybody that is driving or didn't catch everything, we'll have some links to that. But if listeners want a place to start, whether mindfulness is totally a new concept for them or they've dabbled a bit or they actually have some experience. What are some good books or other resources that you would suggest to deepen their their understanding of it?

Karen

Yeah. So if somebody was doing a deep dive, they might pick up the book that John Cabot Zinn wrote quite a number of years ago called Full Catastrophe Living. And and again that is kind of a deep dive, very interesting and explains all that we've been talking about. I would also say just looking on websites like the Greater Good Science website that's in California, the Healthy Minds website that is Richard Davidson and Company and at the University of Wisconsin. And then I am a workbook fan. When we're talking about, you know, people beginning something. So there's a workbook that's called a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction workbook that was written by Bob Stall and Elijah Goldstein. That's kind of a good place to start. When I again was working with outpatient therapy clients and they were interested in anxiety management and using mindfulness, there was a book called Dare, Barry McDonagh. So there's a book that he's written and then there was an actual app that you could download specifically for folks who are using mindfulness to work with anxiety.

Mary

That's a great start. And again, don't worry about scribbling all this down. We're going to have links to all of this in the show notes because it's so much good information. And Karen, I know that you do some really cool work and have a great knowledge. So before we end today, what can you share with us about the different programs or options or trainings that you have? And also we are going to have a link to Karen's website and two of her kind of resources that she has on her website. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and what you can offer?

Karen

Sure. Thanks for that opportunity. So through Mindfulness and Motion, I offer individual and group mindfulness mentoring, which is focused on really what the person identifies their need as. It's around mindfulness and growing the qualities that we have within us to achieve whatever that is that the person or group wants to achieve from a health and well-being perspective, and it can also be, I'm new to this and I just want a little bit of support with a practice. So I want a couple sessions of mentoring around how do I build my own personal practice? 

In addition to that, through Mindfulness and Motion, I also offer groups or half day workshops, presentations to folks who are in the workplace and are interested in how do I bring mindfulness into my work life and what's the benefit of that? And then it can be organizations that maybe aren't in the workplace, but they want to offer for their clientele. Coming up in March, March 31st, I've partnered with Vibe Behavioral Wellness, which is a behavioral health office in Hanover, PA and we're offering a three session, three-week mindfulness for beginners or those who want to begin. So you've practiced and you had a practice, but you haven't for a while and you just want to touch in and get a little refresher. Or you've never practiced before and you're kind of interested in learning. That information is on my website. People will need to sign up. It is a limited number of folks in person because of the space and then we'll have a limited number of people online also.

Mary

That's awesome because we do have pretty good listenership locally, but we also have listeners in several countries. So having online component in today's world is very important, right? 

This has been so amazing. We've touched on things I didn't even imagine we would, so I love that and I want to thank you for taking your time to be here today and share all of these great insights you have.

Karen

Thank you for having me. I'm go back to, I feel honored to be able to spend some time and talk maybe into some new and different audiences.

Mary

Yeah, hopefully this will be something where it can clear up some, maybe confusion or clarify some things and hopefully there will be some new mindfulness practicers that come from this. So again, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to Karen's web page. I'm also going to put a link to get my progressive relaxation audio if you want to start to access that feeling of where you hold things in your body and how to kind of let some of that go and explore a little bit of mindfulness yourself. 

So thanks for listening. Please review or follow if you don't ever want to miss a thing, and I would love to hear your thoughts, please comment or you can actually text me directly using the link above the show notes. And until next time go out and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.