1 - What is Mindfulness and Meditation?

Barbara Newell and Matthew Aldrich explore the nature of mindfulness and its relationship to meditation.  They discuss why mindfulness is so beneficial and how meditation is a practice which helps cultivate it.

Visit barbaranewell.com or thewaytowellbeing.com for more resources.  Also Barbara offers free initial consultations which can be booked here.

The Way to Well-Being is a collaboration between Barbara Newell, mindfulness + meditation teacher and a former Buddhist nun who trained under Thich Nhat Hanh, and Matthew Aldrich, mindfulness student.

This collaboration was born out of a desire to provide a more structured approach to developing long-term sustainable well-being through the cultivation of mindfulness.

As a newcomer to mindfulness, Matthew accelerated quite quickly and with relative ease in developing his meditation practice.  Upon reflection with his teacher Barbara, it became apparent that recent therapy focused on reducing emotional reactivity was extremely helpful and contributed to this benefit.  While Barbara had extensive experience and knew the immense benefit of addressing emotions in a mindfulness practice, she and Matthew noted that the traditional teachings were often missing or didn’t sufficiently explain how to address emotions.

While there are numerous books about mindfulness, the information can sometimes be conflicting, too conceptual, or just inadequate related to the actual implementation in a busy modern life.

It became apparent that a more structured approach with practical guidance and techniques could help numerous people find their way to well-being through mindfulness.

Transcript

spk_1:   0:15
welcome to the way too well being podcast, where we will explore a structured approach to realizing sustained wellbeing through the cultivation and integration of mindfulness into your life. This is Matthew Aldridge, and I'm a mindfulness student,

spk_0:   0:36
and I'm Barbara Newell, a mindfulness and meditation teacher.

spk_1:   0:41
So today we wanted to really start at the beginning. We wanted to address some really basic questions about what is mindfulness and meditation and, really, why they are important and relevant toe well being before we dive into the questions, I wanted to give you a bit of scientific perspective. They've actually been a number of studies on mindfulness, and in a recent one, researchers noted fundamental changes in the structure of the brain. After just an eight week course in mindfulness, they observed that the part of the brain responsible for our fight or flight response to stress became smaller, and the part responsible for conscious decision making became thicker. Essentially, they concluded, mindfulness enabled participants toe have a more thoughtful response to stress versus primal E. Reacting to it with this bit of background, let's get started deadly. What is I'm fullness?

spk_0:   2:01
Yeah, that's a good question because there are quite a number of different uh definitions floating around out there. Different different definitions used in different research studies. The one the kind of working definition that I use for my own practice and for teaching is that it's simply paying attention on purpose and non judgmental e to the unfolding of moment to moment experience.

spk_1:   2:32
So why is that beneficial

spk_0:   2:36
so much of the time, particularly in our 21st century kind of digital culture, the mind is leaving the body. Our body is always right in the present moment. The mind loves to wander into the past in the future, and that's not necessarily a problem per se. But when we're spending most of our time not here in our own body, we start to first of all, feel kind of divided us, and perhaps an anxiety from that divided nous that were not fully present. We're not really present for our own experience, for what's happening. The sensations in her own body 11 way that that might show up is that we we eat food that are that doesn't make our body feel good because our mind is is leaving us and saying that we want to eat that, even if the body saying please don't. Um, certainly in our relationships, if we're very busy thinking about, um, our to do list for tomorrow or what our aunt said to us on the phone last week, we're probably not very tuned in to what's happening with our partner or our child right here in front of us right now. And you'll even hear it from caregivers who work with people at the end of life that the most common regret that they hear from people is the regret that they didn't really live their life. They didn't live true to themselves. They were preoccupied with things that in the end didn't really matter and that they missed the simple joys and the simple pleasures of being there for this life that is too short and being there for the people they love.

spk_1:   4:25
So do you see mindfulness as just a tuning into the present moment? And is that something that you can willfully do? Or is it something that has to be cultivated? Um,

spk_0:   4:39
so mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. We tend to use this word mindfulness as if it means, you know, sitting in a particular position and emptying our mind completely of thought and suppressing thought. Almost And, um, mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. And so the way that we cultivate our capacity two to be aware of something that's happening in the present moment is we choose. We choose an object of our mindfulness to kind of train it on. So many of us like to use an anchor or a home base, which is the breathing. And so we intentionally bring our mindfulness to the breath on the out breath, and we stay with that for a period of time, as the mind very naturally wants to go off into the past, into the future, into an evaluation of how well were meditating. And the practice is simply to smile to that and bring the mind right back to the the object of our mindfulness meditation over and over. And every time we do that, we strengthen that sort of muscle, uh, in our ability to stay with it, to cultivate concentration and to reduce dispersion of the

spk_1:   6:02
mind. Two. When I'm lost and thought about the past or the future, are you saying that's pretty much not good?

spk_0:   6:12
Well, the key word in your question is lost. So, um, if you are choosing to bring up ah, happy memory because it gives you a pleasant sensation, it gives you a sense of remembering that you're connected to people, that there are people who love you and whom you love. That you're not alone, even if you don't have anyone around you, right in this moment, perhaps it even helps you. If something stressful is going on in your life to just calling to mind a person or even an animal or a historical figure who makes you feel inspired and energized, that's a conscious. You could say That's mindfulness of a resource. But when the mind in this more ah kind of unconscious and habitual and sadly often counterproductive way keeps returning back to that one mistake that we made in the business meeting, even though we did 20 things right, that's that's something that we're actually causing ourselves suffering, and we're even undermining our own productivity.

spk_1:   7:24
So why does that happen? Why do we kind of focus, or why does our mind kind of go off and do this?

spk_0:   7:32
Yeah, so that seems to have a lot to do with our evolution and the fact that it's fairly recent, actually quite recent and in the human species, the history of our human species that were more or less at the top of the food chain. Now, most of the time, we were prey, and we had to be very vigilant, every possible threat. Not only was it more important to react more strongly to a shaking Bush that might have ah tiger in it than to a positive thing in front of us, like a pile of fruit, but even it was very dangerous to be separated from our herd, you know, from our tribe. Um, so any small thing that might, you know, undermine our ah, are standing in our group or are are ability to be confident that the group will be there for us. That also was perceived as a threat. So these things air sort of hard wired into our brain, And the good news is that with this increasingly evolving prefrontal cortex that we do have the capacity now to choose. So there's this classic Zen image or Buddhist image of when you see a rope in the pathway and the mind can think that it's a snake and react in fear and mindfulness is what allows us to look more deeply and say no. Actually, that's a rope. I don't have to jump up and run away. Conversely, sometimes a snake we take for a rope, and it helps us to recognize if we actually do need to move

spk_1:   9:12
away from something. So we're it Sounds like we're a little bit too on edge, if you will, and thinking that there are too many threats in this modern life if you will, um, and that the reality is we're pretty safe. So how do we change our reactions is really mindfulness, and meditation is gonna calm us down. Is that the point, or is there something more to it?

spk_0:   9:44
Well, certainly that is a good enough reason on its own to practice. Mindfulness is simply to be aware of how often our mind is perhaps fixating on every little thing that we didn't say perfectly or every way that our friends instagram feed shows that their life is better than ours and we better get with it or else we won't be okay. That's that kind of fixation on perceiving every little threat and putting all our attention into responding to all those threats and kind of keeping ourselves perpetually stressed out and anxious that alone, if we simply use mindfulness to come back to this moment, feel how we are in our body right now, how it feels to just enjoy a breath in and out and recognize that actually we are safe and we are loved. That in itself can benefit our mental and physical health significantly. And that's that's a good enough reason all by itself. And on top of that, there are other benefits. And Chief among those is often said to be this cultivation of insight When the mind is ruminating, ruminating, ruminating. You know, Einstein said, You can't solve a problem using the same consciousness that created it. So when we find ourself in a stuck situation and very often what's happening actually is there's a kind of looping going on between an emotion such as worrier, anxiety or perhaps anger and then thoughts about the situation and we just keep replaying it and retrieving the emotion, and we just go around and around. We keep trying to get at it, and nothing we never get we never solve it. We never move forward when we can step out of that looping hit the reset button. It's a kind of hitting the reset button by coming into the body, feeling the breath, feeling the sensations that are in this present moment again, remembering but to a large degree, all really a swell that creates a space. And often then, if we can abide in that place for at least a few minutes, preferably more new insights can just bubble up. We get a fresh. We get a creative, a different perspective on it than we get if we just keep going around and around in a kind of intellectual and emotional looping

spk_1:   12:13
kind of. So now you've worked with students thousands of students over the number of years that you've been teaching. What transformations have you seen?

spk_0:   12:29
The biggest one, and it's such a joy to see it is when the student really gets not just until actually, but in there kind of gut say that they are not their thoughts. The thoughts are something that come and go in the mind and in our experiences in our human experience. It's not all we are and Not only are they not, are we not just our thoughts, we don't have to believe her thoughts. Maybe part of us believes them. That's okay. But there's something larger here that can see beyond what are often fearful or reactive thought patterns and have access to a larger sense of well being of connection, of caring for herself, for the people close to us and even for

spk_1:   13:26
our world. Yeah, because I think one of the things that I've learned from theory of psychology is that very often we have a lot of negative thoughts about ourselves about the world in that transforming that transforms really how you feel and how you look at the world and move forward.

spk_0:   13:53
Mindfulness helps us become aware of how we're already filtering what we take in in a situation perhaps in an interaction were already without realizing it were act unconsciously primed to search for evidence that that person doesn't respect us or, um mmm uh wants to, um wants to compete with us. Or we can already come in with a lot of assumptions that we don't even see. And then we gather more evidence to reaffirm that. And then we have a reaction that we think is the only reaction there is to have. So mindfulness helped us become much more aware of these kind of movements of the mind in these habitual patterns. And then we new opportunities, new choices become available to us when we're able to see more clearly unless, uh, unless kind of concolor the way it was less colored by, um, ways that we have always thought about things and weren't aware off.

spk_1:   14:57
Yeah, and I think that's really important because I believe in you touched on this a little bit from the evolutionary standpoint is that very much we're we're on guard, were fearful. We have We're looking at the world as a number of threats. Not really, um, with our barriers down. But our Barry's completely up, and that's the filter. Very often that we're using on at least one of the things that I found in practices seem mindfulness is all of a sudden those barriers start to go down and you can realize yes, I am safe. And yes, I don't need to feel these things as threats and just really take them in for what they are.

spk_0:   15:40
Yeah, and again you know, they're going to be ropes, and occasionally there is going to be a snake. And what it allows us to do is to not spend so much energy and really, literally harm our our heart. Um, you know, create inflammation in our body by constantly reacting and assuming everything is a snake. So allowing ourselves to relax and take in the joy, the pleasure of life and at the same time still knowing that when it is a snake, we will know it and we'll know what to do. And we don't have to add a lot of unnecessary reactivity on top of the action to simply room over, remove ourselves from the threat that we don't have to say. I'm a bad person because I went down the path where the snake waas I don't have to say the snake is something bad. I just need to remove myself. Thank

spk_1:   16:32
you, Barbara. I think this has provided a good introduction to mindfulness and meditation in future podcast. We will delve deeper into practical ways in which you can integrate this beneficial practice into your life for more information and re sources, including guided meditations. Please visit our website at the way. Toe wellbeing dot com. Detailed information about Barbara, including the assistance she can provide, is available via her Web site at barbara Newell dot com. We hope you have found this podcast insightful. Thank you for joining. Have a wonderful day.