The Neuroscience of Mindfulness – Dr Tamara Russell, PhD

so when I begin to share any information of this sort particularly if I'm working with a diverse audience I find it's helpful to select a mindset when we're moving into new information when we're moving into maybe different models or kind of widening stretching the mind and brain in some way it can be helpful to select how we're going to engage with the information and really hold that in our minds and our hearts as we go into these kinds of discussions and particularly interdisciplinary discussions and particularly if we have expertise in it field really important to recognize and acknowledge how helpful it can be to have what I call this green container of intention openness and willingness to hear about something different and this can help us particularly if then the things that we are listening to might be provoking us or triggering us in some way and this nomenclature of green and red I'm glad to see Paul Gilbert will be speaking in a forthcoming event this this comes from his work actually green mode being the mode where we're relaxed and calm and open this is really when we can learn right this is how we want our kids to learn yeah when they're in a playful creative safe open mode this is when their brains and minds can really develop but recognizing that you know learning can also be a painful process you know particularly when they're being shown or offered things that are against the model that we already have in our own mind so for me the setup here is how can we approach some of these more challenging questions about where brain and mind might meet in a way that allows us to feel safe to explore what might be some risky territory or some challenging territory so maybe just checking in with you now whether there's some words or phrases that might be relevant for you as you come into this day the three that I really like to work with our curiosity courage and compassion the three C's having this as your mindset going into anything will will will serve you well and the topic that we're talking about today is mindfulness so I'm going to bring a little bit of context and background around the notion of secular mindfulness this is distinct from the mindfulness that we might find within the contemplative traditions where there are some very clear guidance and pathways and structures for how to develop the mind how to work with consciousness and how some of these traditions have kind of filtered through into our mainstream psychology and clinical services in the form of various sorts of programs maybe an eight-week program something like mindfulness based cognitive therapy which is being offered for depression maybe something like mindfulness based stress reduction again an eight-week program offered for chronic pain and lots and lots of adaptations that are now going on within the clinical world within the education setting within the criminal justice system and this work is referred to as secular mindfulness because it's meant to be delivered in environments where we need to take care that it's accessible and open for everybody so there is this distinction of secular and spiritual mindfulness but let's also hold an awareness that if you are doing these practices that develop consciousness and develop your mind it's possible that if you keep practicing you you begin to enter experiences of consciousness that are no longer described well by the current Western scientific models and in my work certainly what's happened in the evolution of my work as a scientist and a practitioner is really recognizing the value clinically personally for healthcare workers and for the whole system as a whole to be more interested in transpersonal psychology and what's referred to now as bio psycho social spiritual models of health but holding that lightly in mind holding that lightly in mind the circular kind of position which I tried to sort of unpack a bit in in this book hashtag what is what is mindfulness is really to say look mindfulness and the elements of mindfulness have been around in our human story for for many millennia in many different formats and certainly contemplative traditions specifically the Buddhist traditions they've done a great job of kind of making the maps but there's lots of other traditions where people have explored consciousness and mindfulness elements are woven within that so we find that in the ancient Greeks we find it in the creative traditions we find it in shamanic traditions we find it in all sorts of training whether it's body work theater training improvisation you know this notion of being present in the present moment responsive dynamic flexing to the environment as it meets you and kind sometimes kind of is missing and I think that's what the the mindfulness in its current format is really bringing to the fore but we see that there's a natural inclination of the human mind to to want to be interested and present and grow and stretch and develop but actually much of our modern world is pushing us more towards states of distraction reactivity and really being judgmental towards ourselves and towards one another so for me you know there's lots and lots of definitions of mindfulness and the cognitive scientists are still arguing about the definitions the Buddhist scholars are arguing you know there's a bit of a free-for-all going on there in terms of what people are saying is kind of allowed to be mindfulness or not and you know for me I think you know these are academic debates they're really important to have but what does it mean for the man on the street that wants to to know about mindfulness or the woman on the street who wants to engage and for me it's about increasing the probability of the amount of time in our life when we're present responsive and kind and trying to decrease the amount of time when we're distracted reactive and judgmental and it sort of sounds easy and obvious but when we try to do it we discover it's a little bit more tricky and you know often what people say when I start talking about mindfulness to them is they say well I'm kind of already doing that I I've kind of got this thing that I do and I feel really present and you know had this great conversation with my auntie she really helped me when I was writing the book she gave me an amazing space in the countryside and fed me regularly and did all those wonderful things that the aunties and family members can do for us when we're working hard and trying to share ourselves with the world and she said look I'm in the garden all the time and I'm I'm with the earth and I'm with the nature and I'm with the seasons and I'm seeing things unfolding you know isn't this mindfulness you know I'm kind of already doing it and so we we kind of looked at the model together and we said well yes there's a number of features of what you're doing there that are akin to what we would describe as mindfulness and from a neuroscience point of view your brain is doing kind of some of the things but then we kind of you know stayed interested in this question and she kind of went out into the garden and then she came back again and she said oh I think I've just realized what you're talking about actually it's more than just being present because as I was out in the garden I tripped over some some bit of gardening equipment that had been left on the on the floor and she said I noticed immediately this inner voice kind of saying like oh and what are you doing you're so stupid don't trip oh don't trip over things you shouldn't have left that there you shouldn't have left that there and when I said okay right that's it right there it is about being present but it's also then about noticing when we get into this internal in a critic dialog you know judging ourselves being hard on ourselves being overly critical overly analytic this is what pulls us away from the present moment and it's not about not reflecting on our behavior but there's this other added element of can I relate to myself in a more gentle way and that we know from the research particularly with people with depression it's that change in self compassion that really underpins all the therapeutic benefits of a mindfulness training certainly in the clinical work and Paul Gilbert I'm sure will talk you know in depth around sort of some of the mechanisms about what's happening there when we when we shift into these more compassionate modes of mind and part of that shift that's needed you know to go from being present to being in a mode where we're open and responsive and aware of how life has impacted us and aware of how our mental habits of judging and comparing and and kind of maybe getting overly analytical that's that's my wine they come from a scientific training so my analytic monkey is like really really strong it requires us to begin to flex our attentional lens to choose kind of how close we want to be with our attentional system to the experience that's going on so a recent trip to the jungle in Brazil inspired me through with nature here and I really recommend to to work with with nature as a guide because there's lots of learning there and this was something about you know do I choose to kind of just look at the surface level you know and then there's this stuff in the background that I don't really get clarity on because I'm sort of super immersed in what's happening here and now you know or can I deliberately learn to flex the aperture of my attentional lens and make a choice to say okay well there is stuff going on here but actually I'm interested in what's going on a little bit lower down in the system or maybe I'm interested in playing in the space between and this becomes more important because actually as I mentioned before our real world environment is highly distractive and technology is a key key part of that and I think maybe those who kind of grew up without technology really know what that experience is like the comparison perhaps of of how we used to live when we weren't attached to our smartphones versus today digital natives are having a different kind of experience but I really suggest that we hold in mind what that was like remembering what that was like and digital detox is of course a huge market now for retreats and books and all sorts of things and it's well worth it's well worth taking a firm hand on some of that distraction that we can manage with TAC we've got varying levels of reactivity and of course if you're working more in a clinical setting or a mental health setting you know these are people who are reacting in a way that's becoming problematic it's getting in the way of their day-to-day life they need a little bit more help and skills and training holding and then that judgmental aspect I mean we're constantly being invited to judge and compare constantly the media has a huge part to play in that so actually the the reality of the system that we live in is that it's it's doing many things that are is against our brain being mindfulness so we do need to take a firm hand there and have some discipline it's not just a case of say oh let me just drop into the space between the thoughts in my mind well you know good luck with that if actually what you're doing is running from like one clinic to another and you've got 500 meetings and you need to fire three people like you need to be an advanced expert practitioner to do that you know but what can we do to start kind of loosening up some of this stuff in order to optimize on mindfulness practice and that's the kind of key thrust in the book you know how to prepare for mindfulness and actually really suggesting that you put the bulk of your thinking in what we refer to as the approach to the cushion the intentions the awareness what is the kind of mind that you're bringing into the practice how is your training your development your experiences your conditioning how is that going to impact on the practices you choose and do and if we bring this more neuro scientific and cognitive framework to bear actually there's a lot of information out there about how we can optimize and this isn't about denigrating other traditions or other ways of doing it's about saying look if we take a neuroscientific and cognitive lens we look at the reality of the world that we live in right now how can we skillfully proceed and you know we have these amazing brains they're still largely unknown even to experts in the neuro scientific field I mean it's just such an amazing tool that we have and mostly abused and and misused in fact but this is a beautiful image from the Wellcome Trust image library of some of the fibers that connect the different parts of the brain together and this is relevant for my work because I'm interested in network modeling whole systems modeling of the brain rather than just what we used to call in the old days blah Balaji which is you know this blob does that and this blob does that well actually they're all connected they're all connected and you know that's a feature of our brain it's a feature of our world so let's be let's be interested in that my work particularly then has also been about saying well you know part of what I believe is the issue in the permanent paradigm is the separation of of mind and body and and working clinically and my own experience on my own practice the body is absolutely a fundamental part of the healing tool and UK is a little bit slow off the mark with this there's much more work going on in the states also in Australia about integrative ways of working within all of Health but particularly mental health so I draw on neuro scientific principles psychological theory but much of my learning and my own personal development has been through insights through training in the martial arts kung fu and Taichi more recently and as we go about this work you know we we do still have some fundamental questions in the neurosciences that that require grappling with and it's coming but it's slow and this is really the question about well even if I go deep into the matter of body and mind even if I really understand brain and cognitions and the models you know where is the eye in this thing here where is that sense of self in the physical matter of the brain and you know we're exploring this question and we don't really know but we know that if we do want to get to it we're going to have to plow through you know some quite a lot of conditioned habits the way our environment has conditioned our brains even now my brain is conditioned to act in a certain way because I'm on a lecture theatre and I've got a computer in front of me and all of that programming from my years of training and body cognition how my brain codes information and helps me to act in certain ways in certain environments that's all getting triggered now yes so this is habitual conditioning once we get below that layer we get to our preferences okay I got some I got some DNA in my body got some processes happening in my physical structure and my brain that mean I am kind of a certain way I run on a little bit kind of side of rushy and hyper that's that's kind of the preference from my body that's where I feel happiest but you may not be the same for you and then that place that we sort of aspire to reach which is okay what is my choice yeah have I trained my brain sufficiently to clear through habits be very clear what's cultural what I'm not interested in anymore what's not serving me becoming aware of my preferences okay that's kind of my style that's the way I love to do things but actually if I want to connect with others I need to put some brakes on that and I need to make some choices about how to share my work how to how to communicate to people how to get my intentions met whilst working with brain and mine together so my intentions really for today is to share with you this this four stage model and I use it clinically I use it to design mindfulness programs I use it to underpin most of my thinking actually around this topic of mindfulness and it lies at the heart of a group of embodiment mindfulness embodiment tools that I've been developing over the last ten years maybe and the idea is that these are really practical tools that will allow you to embody and embed mindfulness in your everyday life so I'm really happy to share this with you and interested to hear in the Q&A maybe what it triggers for you about what you think in terms of how you might apply this in your own life or how this links with whatever practices you might be doing and we'll see that there's kind of four stages that are covered in a mindful moment and when you're doing this with your brain and mind you're activating three key networks that actually form the basis of what I believe it is to be mindful and also it's the same model I use when I'm trying to understand what's happening for somebody who's sitting in front of me in the clinic distressed upset feeling overwhelmed unable to cope using that model what's referred to in the neuroscience literature as the triple Network model of psychopaths I don't quite like that phrase myself psychopathology is not really a kind of kind word in my view but it is the view that's used in the medical community and some some research and some people that are interested in these models are now saying that these three networks kind of you can figure out where there's a disruption in this in this in these three networks and that will give you a good clue as to the kind of symptoms that are sort of being I kind of describe it it's like farted out of the system you know depending where the blockage is depending on where the blockages you know there's kind of these things that gets but spat out that are the symptoms and it's the same three networks that we work in train in mindfulness so when I looked at this work it became very clear to me that it is possible that mindfulness based approaches can be helpful for pretty much anything but you need to adapt and you need to know what you're doing and you need to be clear what your starting point is because I don't believe that one size fits all so a tiny other bit of rationale here which is you know why am I so passionate about bringing mindfulness off the cushion into the real world so a big part of my work is this campaign hashtag no cushion hashtag mindfulness in emotion and part of the reason for that is because I work a lot with busy senior people I work a lot in health care doctors nurses people working in mental health care services NHS they don't have time usually to sit on a cushion for twenty five minutes that would be such a luxury and an amazing thing if they were able to do that they don't usually even have 20 minutes to kind of take a shower go to the toilet if they're working for example in a busy ICU intensive care unit and I used this slide to kind of frame this approach which is to say you know back in the old days we kind of just needed to know how to get from A to B and the task was to find the brain and body that could do that the quickest you know so hiring people was based on technical expertise getting the job done you know the ability to implement a strategy and go from A to B as quickly as possible like this Formula One car today's environment is very different yeah we're not even sure where a is we're not even sure where B is we're definitely not sure where B is then might be C D E and F coming which nobody can kind of tell us about literally the whole landscape is shifting underneath our feet and I sense that that's happening for people at the individual level as well as more systemically and it's certainly happening within British business and organizations and so you know sad to say that this kind of vehicle is it's not really what we need anymore actually it's not fit for purpose because what tends to happen in the brain particularly is when we meet a challenge the brain normally says well I know it's I'll do what I'm always doing but I just need to do it more I do what I'm always doing but I just need to put my foot on the gas more because clearly the reason that this isn't working is because I'm not trying hard enough but imagine that you're doing that in this car in this environment and that's kind of where we're at at the moment that's exactly where we're at so there's a real need for people to say look I love Formula one it's amazing Wow so fantastic so sleek and amazing and look at that a to be you know 70 seconds or whatever it's not and it's not saying this is like a bad thing it's just saying at the moment it's not the vehicle that we need so we need to check the vehicle yeah and our mind and brain and body is the vehicle and I believe that when the outside environment gets more and more chaotic this is really the time to come in words and you know in many traditions the way that we start a process of coming inwards is we go to study ourselves and we often start with the breath so many many traditions across cultures across the world might start with some form of breath practice and we're going to do a mindfulness of the breath practice now it's an invitation so you don't have to do it if you don't want to and we're just going to see what is it like to try to pay attention to the breath I'm going to give you two options if you're experienced at this you can maybe go to breath in the nostril if you're not experienced with this or you're maybe feeling a little bit more apprehensive or maybe have a breathing problem or some stuff noise or something I do suggest pop your hands onto the body so you can get a really good sense of the breath moving through the body and we'll just go for about three minutes so before we start set the intention so in whatever way you would do this I use kind of words in my head I'm sort of saying okay tomorrow there's a lot of sensations going on around you well I'd like this attention network in my brain to tune into any sensation relating to breath so this could be breath at the nostril the sensation of the air this could be breath as it moves through the body sensations related to the rise and fall of the chest the tummy or tuning in anywhere you can see or feel breath seeing how you've narrowed the focus of attention selected an object how sounds or internal thinking patterns imagery how these pull the mind and take us away from just observing the breath am i doing it right is often the task related mind wandering that pulls us away from directly sensing breath right or wrong in or out expand contract just watch so if you notice the mind has wandered going oh tomorrow that's thinking about the sounds outside and worrying that sounds outside or distracting the audience okay that's the thought that's not breath let me get back to breath the intention was breath focusing sensing before naming breath and body mind wanders very normal noticing that and coming back seeing where you are in that four stage process are you on the object watching observing no meddling no fixing no changing am I lost in a mind wander thinking about stuff am i in that moment of noticing oh hang on a minute that is not breath there I've got gone somewhere else with that that's the moment to work on the inner voice it's okay it's okay Wow look at that busy monkey mind no problem and come back just one more minute of that to control the breath so mindfulness is not the same as yoga breathing this is observing the breath just as it is so as it is it might be a short breath a long breath it might be as if he knows it might be all sorts of things allow it to be there's a sense that this is uncomfortable you can introduce a bit of counting but you've added something there to be clear I'm finishing with three breaths opening the eyes so does anybody want to give a little bit of feedback about that yes hi just maybe shout your name as well hi Mike welcome great how was that where were you in this model do you think yeah so no mind wandering whatsoever you got quite you became very absorbed in here great yeah okay how about others yes yeah where would that be on here Oh over here yeah yeah yeah great and I guess to be clear there are two types of attention practices focused attention open monitoring so those that are familiar with with with maybe more Buddhist traditions also creative practices you know we have this option to be doing a more formal focused attention training or to do a more open monitoring and a lot of my work is really on doing some of that more foundational focused attentional training and the rationale for that really is when we're dealing particularly with you know strong emotions in the body difficulties challenges that are highly arousing creating a system that that's kind of high in arousal threat mode is on actually you need a bit of attentional welly for that because those emotional states and those mind states do tend to hijack the attentional system and it's fantastic if you can kind of sit and observe and watch it all but my experience is that people who have high levels of distress and low levels of attentional training get pulled into that quite quickly and get lost quite quick so much of my work is about using grounding practices and also movement to really help hold the focused attention but an awareness that that can then become open monitoring practices yes gentleman in the back thank you hi Kevin well I mean when we're working in the clinical setting we do make an assumption that people are coming in naive to these practices and I'm aware that this audience probably is not naive to these practices the breath is a tool to use for so many reasons I mean the main one in the spiritual traditions is that it does provide a bridge between conscious and non conscious processing so we can mostly we're breathing on automatic pilot and that's right that we should do so but we have the capacity to bring this automatic process into our conscious awareness so already we're then training the neural architecture that we need to kind of switch between levels of awareness like in that picture of the leaves yeah secondly the breath is highly linked to our emotional state so if we begin to study and and engage with the breath in this way we will be gathering data and information about the physiological arousal of our system how we get agitated how agitation affects the breath how the breath is when we're calm and relaxed so it has kind of multiple functions but for me one of the main reasons about working for the breath is the breath is a moving target and a moving target is much easier for the untrained mind to pay attention to yeah same as with movement it's much easier for me to notice that my mind has wandered if I'm trying to pay attention and follow the movement of my arm and then I realized that I've been thinking about shopping for like this much and I've missed all of that sensation my body has told me that I've missed something and that my mind has moved away same with the breath you know we think that we're on the breath and then we see the mind splitting and then we kind of like I'm kind of on the breath don't worry it's all good I still got the breath there oh like who's that coming in the back of the room I hope those guys are not drilling out there oh my god bloody drilling yeah so I can see that my mind then splits because my brain is going you don't need to pay attention to this you know how to do this so that's when I'm training that's right there is when I'm training when my brain is trying to put it back into automatic and I'm saying I see you going oh no come back out what was your experience just now though I mean trying to kind of hold on to what people are in right now experiencing suspend it's in the in the middle of the breath yeah suspension of the breath yeah that's a very classical technique again I only certainly again I think I really need to contextualize this imagine that you're delivering this inside a GP office yeah imagine that you're delivering this inside a GP office and you know space between the thoughts suspension of the breath you know this is sounding a little bit kind of Yoga spirituality so you know it's fine that that can be there but lots of my work is about kind of making that bridge into mainstream health care so I do come with the more kind of concrete basic of the practices but it's interesting because I think more and more people are approaching spiritual practices and part of my work is about how do we skill the healthcare force to be more open to allowing this conversation for not freaking out if somebody doesn't want to come and say well I do this practice you know then the healthcare workers job particularly if it's somebody with a long term condition is to say how can I help you do the thing that you find helpful more even if I don't agree with it even if I'm a bit freaked out by it you're telling me that that's helpful for you I want you to do that as much as possible what do you need yes it's a different kind of shift anybody else yeah hi down at the front yeah that's great yeah somebody else had that yeah yeah yeah perfect perfect yeah so when we use the mindfulness lens we're amplifying attention yeah we're choosing to deliberately take hold of our attention it's mostly not under our control this is what people find even when they start doing a basic mindfulness of the breath how difficult it can be working with medical professionals actually it's quite sort of mildly amusing but more for me than them because they expect that they can do things brilliantly yeah they're really bright people they've been working hard they've got really great skills they're the you know cream of the crop they were selected from a levels you can do medicine you can do medicine you know they've got a strong competency identity and they try and do a mindfulness of the breath and they can't do it and they freak out yeah they can freak out and connecting to the body and the emotions and breaths is also something quite scary for many healthcare professionals who are quite dissociated disembodied and traumatized yes so that's why we need to kind of take care because we're not coming from a baseline of like normal yeah calm relaxed okay open feeling free and interested we're coming from a position of traumatised associated hopeless you know feeling powerless and yet with a huge responsibility and demand that's modern healthcare sadly currently I'm gonna keep going but there's room for other questions and comments at the end so you know actually you can work with breath but you've got options you can stick anything in here really and how I work is mostly with mindful movement because I believe it's got some really amazing properties that allow us to do this work much more efficiently but you can do breath in the body and the nostril you can do soles of the feet walking standing you can do listening which we're going to talk about in a second you can do shoulder rolls you could do mindful viewing of some beautiful artwork and and kind of I've done some work like this with the National Gallery sort of mindful viewing really staying present with noticing what gets triggered in the mind sort of pulling a bit more playful in that creative space there but then coming back and just staying with staying with a piece of artwork staying with something in nature and and just not looking at it too quickly and running away but being interested like when I put my attention on this thing what proliferate surround that and sometimes the proliferation is stuff that we need to manage the mental hygiene of the mental monkeys that we don't really think service anymore but sometimes it's that beautiful wonderful stuff of of the creative process and the insights that we can get from engaging with the world in this mindful way so this is the book that's more about movement practices not so much focusing on that today but if you're interested in that you can find that on my website or on Amazon and this is just a little example of how we use this creatively this was a project working with mums with postnatal depression so you imagine a mum with a new baby and postnatal depression if you start talking her and saying well what I need you to do is a 45 minute body scan where you lie down and you're in a nice quiet environment and you just listen to the audio and you do 45 minutes body scan they're just going to walk out the room if you even just say find 45 minutes to just do anything that you love for yourself probably they would still struggle but you know that is the starting point so what we did was we integrated the model with creativity so we were looked at combining mindful design of a creative intervention for postnatal depression and we picked sewing and we worked with some Japanese technique called Sacha Co which is really amazing for training and taming the mind you can see here every stitch is an opportunity to get that attention network really kind of zoomed in and there's a lot of tactile sensations and color and and things to hold the mind of course the minute you start performing in this way whether it's sewing or movement the judging monkeys come the comparison monkeys come sometimes we kind of drift out out of the mind was sort of zoning out or we might have some kind of creative mind wandering and insights and if you're in a full mindfulness training mode you know hardcore attention training then you need to sort of say wow look at all that stuff my mind is doing no thanks actually what I'm doing is sewing just get back to sewing oh no hold on a minute my mind is now doing bla bla bla bla bla bla no that's not sewing just get back to sewing same process is what we did with the breath same neural networks activated it's a little bit more fun there's a little bit more pulled for the attention because you're doing something and actually this this work can do the same thing as a normal training you get to see how much the mind judge judges and compares and it's doing this all the time and it's really doing it when you've got postnatal depression and it's about serious stuff like you're not a good mum and you can't care for your baby and you're doing it all wrong and you're gonna harm your child and look at all the other mums standing at the school gates and how they're doing it alright and why isn't my husband like that you know so it's all in there now what we're judging and comparing the content of it is our own unique stuff yeah and it is helpful to do a video psychology work just to know your triggers and know what's your what's your gunk that's going to come out but the process of judging and comparing is common to us all it's just what we judge and compare about is distinct so working with these mums you know we had a session which was about get it wrong so we basically gave them the fabrics and we said right we want you to today's session we're going to just basically so as badly as we can I want you to kind of take the fabrics I want you to you know screw it up as much as you can I want you to get it really really wrong every time you put the needle in and it looks like it's going to be a good stitch I want you to take the needle out again make it like wonky or like sew it together you know just make it wrong and it was actually such a hard task it was so interesting any perfectionist out there I really suggest that you ever go at this and what happened was even the material that they produced when we kind of put it on the table and we were kind of just discussing it they were judging that they're wrong wasn't wrong enough and I'm glad you're laughing because this is the correct response to the mind this is the correct response to that that mind and that's all our minds really a version of that they have it just to the nth degree these months you know look at her wrong her wrong is better than mine she got her wrong more wrong than my wrong was so you know you can see that when we're working in this way we can still do it with a kind of strong scientific model and underpinning we're bringing the neuroscience we're bringing the the creativity we're bringing the cognitive models we know a little bit about the cognition of you know postnatal depression or kind of what that what that part of mind and brain is like in OCD and psychosis in depersonalization so we can use that information to help design you know what is what is the best way to help people and can we use this model and the creative means to really draw out some different kinds of discussions and dialogue and some examples of the work here which I think you'll agree I mean I hope you agree because it's so beautiful look the space between space between this mum picked this we had some beautiful fabrics which does help I have to say but you don't need to get fancy with it but she sewed in between the space I mean any psychotherapists in the room have a field day with that probably but you know it's just beautiful work and then here you know the mums were saying look I just I needed that bit of structure to just kind of hold me together but then I was able to create my own piece on top of that again sort of a beautiful metaphor for seeking help finding help I need just a little bit of holding around the structure so that I can then explore and for me that's what I used the neurocognitive model for it's you know it's not like full fact it's a model but it's a model that provides a structure that can help you to grow and develop and then find your own way and then this was another mum a lady who was actually really struggling and it was her her therapy in that group was that she got there every week and that was enough and again in our healthcare services that's often not enough because you have to get there and you have to do the questionnaire and then you have to do session six of the well sessions and blah blah blah but actually in this mindful way of working you basically need to show up and be with the group and whatever else you can step into is great so if you happen to be near two guys Hospital what we did at the end of the program we made a big quilt and we put all the work in together the great stuff the bad stuff the mistakes and the stuff that we were really proud of the whole team as well as the people that were in the group the students that are involved everybody puts something into a big quilt and it's up on the wall at the atrium one it's going to be there probably till the end of the year then I'm looking for a new home for it so if anybody has a wonderful space where you want to have this exhibition which basically shows the quilts which was the product the output of all the mums training in the neurocognitive model and then this is kind of the story of how we did the intervention here's the even my wrongs not right piece of artwork that was selected by the group to show so this is teaching medical students we use the creativity we use the model to work with pedagogy within medicine as well and they were doing what you did mindfulness of the breath and looking at the works and and kind of being inspired by women that you know really are are up for it and they're working hard to to take care of their mind so that they can take care of their kids and you know that's that's kind of the metaphor for all of us as well especially in health how do we take care of ourselves to make us resourced for those that we're taking care of and self-care and self compassion it turns out is good for the staff as well so that's helpful you can all do that well we will come to that because emotions are certainly part of life and you know maybe people in this room have had that experience of being overwhelmed by emotions yeah when the body and the mind go into this kind of completely absorptive take over you had the experience as Chris is that Chris right you had David so you had the Kevin Kevin sorry you had the experience of being kind of quite absorbed in the breath in that practice which is amazing you know Wow wonderful like would have maybe a beautiful peaceful place to rest the mind but imagine you have that level absorption in an experience of psychotic voices and kind of true related orderly sensations you know this is a tough tough place to be and you need some attentional muscle you know to help you get out of that and so working going round and through the model is my way to help people to really kind of train that muscle and really be sure I know how to switch from attending to being lost noticing getting back attending getting lost noticing getting back and you know one type of practice is I go in I become very absorbed and I'm kind of there and I'm still fantastic if you've got some kind of emotional things that you're working through that's respite that's not working through your stuff that's an exercise to kind of help you rest and be calm but I really would then be recommending you need to be in this mindful process and moving around otherwise you don't see the landscape of mind and you won't see the landscape of mind which means you won't discover the conditioning from habits the conditioning from preferences and the places where you can make choices so just as you go into the break I want you to kind of get a sense of the application of this and one of the applications is mindful listening so this is a fundamental thing that I teach all over to my students to my clinical clients in workshops in corporate in boardrooms deep listening again huge amounts of work on this topic loads and loads of people doing it really really brilliantly for me I just thought okay how does this work with what my brain is doing I need to set the intention to listen very important if you don't set the intention deliberately then you've already kind of wasted half of what you're doing in my view so that moment where you say I'm just gonna listen when I go into the lunch break today and I meet someone I'm gonna set the intention to just listen full attention and naturally as you're listening there's a sensory information entering into your brain sounds which meets your mind which meets your memories which meets your impressions and associations and you start to then form kind of meaning and action on the basis of what the person's saying and very often very often even now maybe one I'm talking to you you're having that experience of the mind is reacting to what I'm saying resonating with what I'm saying planning questions or planning what you're gonna say to somebody else about what you heard in the talk remembering so we talked about having associations triggered this is when something coming into the brain has kind of tapped on your hippocampus and your brain is kind of going I sort of know something about this let me just bring that up for you and you can compare it to what's going on now with the thing that you know yeah it's a fundamental property of the brain it compares do I know it or not is it new or not what do I know about it or not this is why it's hard for experts to be curious yeah because the information comes in and that brain just brings a whole massive load of stuff up wow I know a lot about this so they have to work extra hard to be curious but this is a practice that can help you do that because fundamentally you're listening then you notice that your mind is doing that then you say to yourself tomorrow that's you reacting responding resonating planning blah blah blah blah or maybe I just drifted off because the person is really boring who knows but you know that's not listening is it important for me to listen come back and I'm half joking about the drifting off because you may notice that there are some people that you're talking to that you're not interested in what they're saying and it's very helpful to be aware of that because sometimes what happens when people do these developments training and consciousness training in self-awareness is that they do find that they start to cull some of their friendships yeah I don't know if people had this experience but you know when you begin to really value your energy and time including the brain energy that you're using to pay attention to be really present with someone why are you making that effort are you in a relationship that's reciprocal around this wounded healers specifically I'm talking to you because it's probable that in your social life when you're meant to be resting and restoring and taking care of yourself I imagine that you probably have lots of friends that that really lean on you and kind of drain you potentially and it's okay as long as you're choosing that but what I began to notice with some of those relationships not all of them was that it was really effortful to listen and when my mind wandered it was like extra effortful for me to get back and I just got curious about that why is that I think I'm a good listener I think I'm a nice person I'm a mindfulness therapist so you know I need to help everybody that's got problems you know Wow what are these beliefs and assumptions and are they serving me yes yeah so save your breath basically and just go deep listening deep listening mmm that's not that what's fake listening actually that was fake listening so watch out for that too I suggest I think think of this yeah so you know as always peanuts classics you know so what do you think what difference does it make you never listen anyways I was just making conversation when you make conversation you have to listen to you do so it's something about the reciprocity I think that's my main tip you know and just really begin to notice like if your mind and brain is sort of drifting in and out of a conversation you know maybe now it's not the time to have it maybe you're tired maybe that's why it's effortful and my language has really changed too with people because I do say things now like okay well I can't talk to you now but I'm walking down the street so you've got 60% attention is that sufficient for what you need yeah or if it's something really serious I say look what you're saying is really important to me and I would like to give it a hundred percent of my full attention when I'm not in an environment where there's buses going by I know that my brain can't focus here for you and this is an important conversation right is so important I don't want to have it on the phone we need to be face-to-face that is skillful skillful use of your mind and brain if it's a quick thing and doesn't need much thinking okay I can deal with it while I'm walking down Oxford Street and talking to you at the same time so it's about them being really efficient with our energy with our brains with our minds and being able to communicate in a new language with people and that's certainly something that's coming out in in the work now which is how do we deepen our shared understanding the language that we use to talk about brain modes to talk about how the brain is for us preferences what we call cognitive diversity in the workplace and also like why are we doing the things that we do yeah why am i listening to this person you know am I really interested are they really interested are we just playing some game where they come and they dump all their stuff on me and then I sit there and then I feel rubbish at the end and I don't get anything out of it now sometimes those are people that we do need to keep listening to and we need to stay engaged with but I really recommend that it's okay to take care of yourself in that moment and there might be some friendships or some scenarios where you just say this doesn't serve me well and in fact maybe it's feeding some of the more negative habits you know that get me stuck so we're pause there we've got a five minute break taking a moment to pause transition mindfully and let's do a little transitional pause coming back in again brain wise ways of learning of opening the mind is acting with awareness acting with intention choosing and selecting what your brain is doing in any given moment so breathing in breathing out and acknowledging just the morning thus far the information the break the conversations going to the loo how has that left its footprint on the mind and the body right now tuning into that as best you can what do I bring with me into now this is a more kind of open monitoring practice of seeing how activities conversations tasks and movements leave their mark on the physical body and the mind space data-gathering breathing in breathing out what's really here now bottom on the chair feet on the floor coming into those very concrete sensations of hands feet already connected to the chair posture and then breathing in breathing out revisiting your intentions that you perhaps arrived with and seeing if that's still live for you if that's still relevant for you and adjusting if you need to maybe the intention to do mindful listening really trusting that your brain can gather and hold the relevant information that you need to hear if you bring this mind listening process to the talk I'm finishing with three breaths opening the eyes so we're kind of promised something that looks a little bit like this often when we people start talking about meditation and mindfulness and to be clear those are two distinct words in my view again lots of people kind of arguing about this but for me mindfulness is one of a large category of meditation practices that can include a whole variety of things that brain and and heart and mind are doing but it is for me a foundational practice because it has at its core a need to tame and train the attentional Network and this will facilitate any other practice that you're doing yeah so I kind of have this tagline sort of like mindfulness makes everything better but you're not necessarily guaranteed like these blissed-out clear states actually the way that mindfulness makes things better is often that we just do a big load of kind of trekking through the landscape of the mud of the mind and we do kind of a lot of clearing out is really stage one of a mindfulness practice but attention training is a fundamental piece of it attention alone it's not mindfulness it's this quality of the attention which is gentle interested kindly but it has a firmness yeah we are using our brain we are engaging our brains we need to make it effort concentrate and do something we've said that we were going to be on the breath and if we're not on the breath what are we going to do about it yeah there is a success and fail of being on the breath and yet we might have a bigger intention that that kind of helps us like okay my mind wants to get really really busy thinking about all the emails that I have to send and and breath is boring and then it's at that moment I remember okay but but you you want to use mindfulness to help you transform your mind and live well and better in a less reactive way with less cortisol in your brain and better memory and better relationships and all of those things so drop that drop that thinking that your brain is telling you is so compelling it's not get back to the breath and so when we do this we're engaging three different networks of our brain and I'm really inspired by Wendy - camps work she's one of these she's the science director I think of the mind and life Institute which is a Institute that looks at dialogue between contemplative practitioners and scientists they're a bit but it's heavy in my personal opinion but they're doing great work and so she did a neuro imaging study with experienced lay practitioners these are people that are experienced working with breath practices they were predominantly coming from Buddhist traditions which which is important to be aware of and she asked them to be in the MRI scanner while it was collecting real-time data on the oxygenation of the blood in the brain which is our indirect marker of neuronal activity and she asked them to click a button when they noticed that their mind had wandered and again you know we could do a sort of a mini experiment with that now just even 30 seconds you know pay attention to the breath and just tap your finger on the desk or on your leg you know when you notice that the mind has wandered yeah you know we're kind of on the breath I mean mines gone immediately two seconds like oh god are they doing it can they do it all they understand in Guam asking it's a really kind of a fun experiment you know and it may be that you know your excellent trained and your attention is great and you're fully absorbed and your mind doesn't wander but you know actually if we're monitoring the flow of sensory information coming into the brain from the body as we breathe you know you need to be kind of staying with that present moment and the changing of the sensations and mind will get pulled every now and again and we want to get quicker and quicker at being aware of that and I think somebody mentioned that you know when we start off actually we don't even realize that we're not present we're just living in this world of kind of mind wandering and reactivity we're sort of looping over on the right-hand side of the model and then somebody says oh well why don't you pay attention to the breath and you kind of say alright okay I can do that I can put my attention there and and suddenly the attempt to be mindful illuminates a whole bunch of mindlessness we meet our mind and so then we have that option to kind of say okay well hang on a minute let me just come back let me just come back and we get quicker and quicker looping back you get quicker and quicker at looping back but we're still wandering a little bit at times and I like the work of Alan Wallace here he's got a great book called the attention revolution where he details the nine steps of what's called the schemata training from the Buddhist tradition and I think somewhere it says like schemata stage six which is basically you are a monk and you are dedicating your life to training attention in this way living in the mountains in environments where there's no other distractions and somebody is feeding you regularly you know this level of practice it's not really attainable by people that are living in the real world they might be able to have unwavering clear focused attention maybe on three breaths maybe on three breaths so that's the reality of kind of what we're talking about in terms of like what are we really doing and what is the mind really doing even sometimes when we think that we're really kind of in the breath there are lots of tricks of the mind that mean that we are actually we're kind of present but we've also a little bit stepped out of being fully present so Wendy's work for me was was really important it kind of started a whole chain of thinking and actually this is the neuroscience paper that underpins the work that I described in the book and kind of all the work that I'm doing now so huge gratitude and you can find her on I think she's on Twitter as at neuro Wendy so you know drop her a line and say hi she's really great and you know when she was doing this work she basically pulled out that the three networks involved in this are of course the attention network which is what we use to pay attention to things something called the default mode Network which is the network that's activated when our attention on an object dims and we become absorbed more in our internal world whether that's thinking memories associations whether that's deliberate or triggered automatically by something and then the moment when our brain says hello tomorrow you said you were going to be on the breath and now you're thinking about what you're having for lunch or that your tummy's rumbling or you know blah blah blah blah blah there's a conflict yeah you said you were on birth but now I'm aware of the sensations that this attention system is processing they're not from the breath so I'm just checking in I'm just checking in with you tomorrow is that what you wanted and that's called the salience Network and it's primed by our intentions which is my intention setting is really really important because the intention setting Prime's our brain to be on the lookout for breath sensations and just go oh yeah we're on the breath great-great-great-great-great breath breath breath breath breath then suddenly there's an awareness of like thinking about emails and the system goes this is not breath what do you want to do what do you want to do do you want to get back to the breath the tasks that you said you were doing or do you want to think about emails and you know literally we are going around this loop over and over again and when we do so what we're doing is we're switching between the brain networks and we can use many many different objects the suggestion is to use movement if you're in a system that's particularly busy internally or externally we've talked about using it in the applied way which is the mindful listening you can use walking static practices to go in there you can use breath you can use mantra you can put a prayer in there if you want to so your praying to God you're doing your prayers suddenly you start thinking about shopping you're not really praying anymore you notice oh I'm supposed to be saying my prayers I'm not saying my prayers let me get back to saying my prayers and many people that say prayers on a regular basis they do get very automatic with it very rote and you know the secular mindfulness is interesting because we can be secular but we can accommodate others yes so I often say this model kind of is a secular brain based model but it doesn't have a lid if you want to go into trance personal spiritual practices you can but you're fundamentally you're doing the same thing and working with a lot of medical students they come from very diverse cultural backgrounds and you know we've had a number of students from the Islamic faith in our training that we've been running at Kings and you know they they wrote some amazing amazing essays actually which I'm trying to get permission to to share some of them but it was it was coursework basically called Muslim and mindful and they talked about how the mindfulness practice and particularly the mindful movement had helped them to reconnect to core elements of their spiritual practice including really arean bodying while they were doing particularly the movements of the body during prayer because they were saying it just was totally automatic I just go to the primer and I do it and I'm kind of doing it and it's all automatic I lost the intention you know the intention about what and why am I doing this was the bigger picture what you know so there was a freshness that came back into their prayers as a result of of seeing this so so for me I think that's important but fundamentally it's about switching it's about being able to rapidly switch between different networks and different modes of attention and different types of awareness and we get to that through practice we maybe some people have a unique ability to do certain aspects of it but definitely we can all practice and a function of the brain is neuroplasticity and particularly within the attention network so the attention network is broadly comprised of two two sort of nodes we call it the frontal parietal Network so here's the frontal lobe the kind of fancy-pants thinking organizing the executive attention holding in your working memory the idea like I was going to be on the breath there's something that needs to just be kind of holding that as a goal or an intention why you then also recruit other parts of the attention network to help you sustain focus maintain see clearly not waver and a lot of that's going on in the frontal lobe the parietal lobe of the attentional system is of more interest to me because this is about spatial movement and so there's some recent research coming out suggesting as many meditators would probably already know and as some of my work also was pointing to that thoughts or a type of movements trapped in the brain and the mind so seeing thoughts as a kind of movement is a shift that's coming in the neuro scientific community and for me I believe that when we start to dig into this a little bit deeper we're going to find that actually it is important to include you know a sort of often neglected area of the attention network which is the spatial attention Network mostly people think it's more about you know where is my body in space where am I in relation to other people but those are also fundamental kind of spatial relationships aren't they where in relation to other people where is my body where is your body where do those things meet where do they not meet and so both of these are likely to be important but the majority of the work has really focused on how we can train improve and increase the efficiency of these frontal-lobe networks for attention and this has a huge value in our school system in our workforce if you're a therapist or a carer you know attention is your most valuable commodity you can't pay really for this high-quality deep and caring compassionate attention if somebody gives that to you it's an amazing gift it's an amazing gift not to be squandered and yet you know much of our modern society is about degrading that and a lot of the mindfulness work is about reclaiming reclaiming attention so one of the things that pulls our attention is the tech the external environment but the other thing that pulls us is our internal landscape and that's shown here with the nodes of what's called the default mode Network so the default mode network includes the hippocampus which is on memory regions it also has a sort of frontal parietal aspect to it but now we're kind of right inside the midline of the brain we also have this distinction here with this attempts of the brain and the mind to make sense of what's my stuff and what's other people's stuff so these regions of the medial prefrontal cortex this means kind of right inside the midline of the brain where we try to work out what other people are thinking how that relates to us how does that relate to our story we're kind of working out what would it be like in that person's shoes what what experience do I have of this we're basically creating kind of simulated environments in our mind to help us make sense of the world ourselves and others and then this more parietal region as well where there's some suggestion that that here it's connected to networks which are about helping us to understand self versus other and anyone coming from more Buddhist or spiritual traditions will be kind of triggered by that that sort of language you know where in the brain are we distinct from one another and where in the brain actually does the brain not make any distinction between self another or actually there's a function within those processes where we tease it apart many of the contemplative traditions are about getting back to a point where there is no separation around that so neuroscience and the contemplative traditions are sort of meeting and dialoguing about this and it's an ongoing piece of work if you're working with strongly conditioned mental habits that are represented by grooves of neurons firing together wiring together in highly automatic ways that a deep deep level triggered rapidly mostly outside of awareness and you know these are the habits that people might bring into a clinical setting and these are the habits people bring into work you know even if they're not in distress we're highly highly conditioned by our early environments and they impact on what we pay attention to they impact on how we use on default mode Network space and they're definitely related to how our salience network is tuned so having some of this psychological understanding from a neuro cognitive model is really really helpful when you go into your practice it's about making it quicker it's about making it more efficient and I realize that there are spiritual practices contemplative traditions where going quicker is you know the antithesis of what they're all about but my approach is really about saying that we do need to do something more quickly now we're in a major crisis a mental health crisis and you know maybe it's kind of wrong to try and speed these things huh but I'm willing to to kind of take some risks and have a go at how we can speed things up in the service of reducing the suffering as quickly as possible basically so we need to train we need to understand ourselves before we go into the training I believe that's very very helpful but how we do it I think we can be much more flexible and I use the neurocognitive model to support people to say that if your thing is dance do dance like if dance is the thing that you're going to do and I'm telling you to sit on a cushion we forget the cushion go dance yeah do that amazing fantastic you're in the body you're feeling free you're creating but have a look at that model if you want to make that mindful and you are interested in kind of going deeper into your own landscape of mind and clearing out some of that stuff then you know maybe have a session or two where you do it like this okay the rest that I can go do your freestyle no problem but you might choose intentionally to do a session major like this gardening fine fantastic great going garden have a nice time but you can use gardening for this learning and development process if you apply the model so you know a lot of this often people kind of do think it sounds simple but when they try it they realize it's not easy and that's because we meet the mind we meet the conditioning we meet a mind that has this wonderful capacity to go back to the past it can also go forward into the future amazing we can reflect and learn we can create and imagine and we can simulate but what we try to use this default mode Network particularly in modern times it's kind of clogged up often with a lot of stuff and I use the metaphor of the the plughole in the bathroom when it's got too much hair in it yeah it's I mean it's a bit of a grim image so I'm sorry to put that in your mind but I just allow that to be there because that's kind of the gist of it well that's my experience anyway so so really beginning to notice like one is all that hair that's just getting stuck in the plug impeding you know the smooth running of water from the shower down the drain and so I'm not standing in a kind of big pile of soapy scummy water and you know one is I need to kind of get a handle on some of these mental patterns and how they're being triggered automatically by mood so you know there's nothing wrong with the mind being in the future there's nothing wrong with the mind being in the past we do encourage trying to be present for a large proportion of the time but when we need to plan stuff we need to use planning Minds yeah of course when we want to learn we got to reflect on our learning and go okay what did I do how did it go well what went well what went wonky what can I do different when we're in a low mood we have a tendency to get a little bit stuck in the past yeah brain has harnessed this reflective capacity as a way to try and soothe not feeling good I'm feeling sad I'm feeling let down I'm feeling disappointed you know usually by somebody else and maybe my mind has got this idea that if I just work out what I did wrong if I just work out what went wrong there and I think it through again and again but if I just said that and I should have said that and then they would have said that and then I should have would have could a and oh it wor would have been different and I wouldn't feel like this now so it's a very normal harnessing of a cognitive capacity that we don't want to get rid of that has now become hijacked and in the service of managing mood when we first do it it really makes sense to us I don't feel good I've got a strategy brilliant engage it but what happens is that that becomes automatic in the short term it is rewarding oh that's lucky I figured out why what I did wrong there and now I just don't ever need to do that ever again and I'll never feel sad again Oh fantastic oh oh oh the system relaxes a little bit we get a reward so we do it again and again and again until it becomes automatic and maybe we're not even aware that we're sad and upset we just go directly into ruminated mode and we're targeting rumination is a key part of what they do in the mindfulness based cognitive therapy approach particularly for long long term depression people with three or more episodes is the recommendation on the other side of the scale we have the anxious mind and so anxiety in the body is a sense of not feeling certain a sense of not knowing what's to come maybe some beliefs about I I'm not I'm not resourced I'm not resilient enough to deal with challenges lots of that coming from early parenting experiences particularly if you've had an anxious parenting experience it's likely that you will not feel resourced that you can manage life's challenges because you've had a model and you're saying its network has been tuned that everything is dangerous that everything needs like a lot of care and hyper vigilance and that you need to be on top of this all the time because otherwise you won't be safe yeah so the mind that then gets honest for that kind of thinking is I call this the what-if monkey the what-if monkey is great because it generates tons and tons and tons of scenarios and in fact it tries to think through all the things that might happen and how you're going to cope with them in order to soothe you so that you don't feel anxious in the short-term very helpful so for example me today coming to give this presentation you know there are always anxieties about the tech of course and I was allowing my mind to do a little bit of future thinking you know what if the computer doesn't play the video what if my memory stick is not compatible with the thing what if my laptop doesn't you know so it is helpful for me to do a little bit of future thinking problem-solving I don't to get rid of that altogether but if I see that I've come from home and I'm still on the tube and 20 minutes later I'm still going but what if it doesn't work and what if it doesn't work and what if it doesn't work then this is not helpful use of my brain if I do not want to waste energy on that staff yeah I've looked at it I've done what I can I need to be able to let go with that but people that are in anxiety modes particularly generalized anxiety disorder other kinds of anxieties this strategy is keeping and safe so to suddenly let go of it is is the challenge and it requires some skill and some psychological holding and some safety and some resourcing to give people the skills and the stepping stones to be able to let go of that when we go into the transpersonal realm of course it's all about being with the not knowing isn't it I mean that's the main skill in these kinds of traditions how can I step into a position of like really not knowing really being open really allowing whatever is the infinite possibilities that are there that's kind of a whole nother level of dealing with with fear but it's all the same processes in the brain as far as I'm concerned current thinking the other great capacity that we have again we can use it for kind of healthy things we can use it in unhealthy ways is the as if function so this is the mind of play of creating of metaphor of imagery and sometimes we're using that skillfully to create and innovate other times we may not be using it skillfully it might be an escape yeah so this is the kid that likes to look out the window daydreaming because they're getting bullied yeah or they've got problems at home there may be some domestic abuse or something going on at home even something relatively mild like a divorce maybe not always you know they just want to check out they don't want to be there and we can do that we can actually do that to a very very high and far degree I mean in the end case its complete dissociation from the body which can arise from from different kinds of trauma it's as if I'm not here I'm not here I just take my consciousness elsewhere something is happening to my body it's not me so from a neuroscience point of view we're looking at the default mode Network here this is the networks that seem to be in operation when the attentional focus on the external world dims something compelling that was there or that we chose to attend to there is is being reacted to in some way and we have a variety of number of processes that can be used to help but also can become problematic if they're being tuned and the way that they get tuned is that they become just more and more automatic you know in our brains and in our bodies and I think that's why it's important that we work with the body as well as as well as mind and brain but the hippocampus is a small structure number seven here an internal temporal lobe structure named after the seahorse so there's the actual seahorse on the right there and here's the structure of the hippocampus so this is where we encode our memories here's where we have our stories in a nice temporal timeline that helps us to hold together a coherent sense of self over time and we find that actually with meditation practices it's not that you can grow your hippocampus but some early work showed that those who meditate on a regular basis don't have the same age-related decline in hippocampal volume so with normal aging your brain basically starts shrinking usually it's from about the age of 60 onwards you're using losing about 10% of your cortex something every 10 decades is the shocking statistic something like that you need to be worried and but meditation is the key a regular meditation practice is something that will allow your hippocampus not to shrink as quickly so within the meditation research the things that make the headlines are anything about anti aging or anti cognitive decline so this was a paper from Sarah Lazar from Harvard I think she was that then showing if you meditate you're not gonna get so forgetful so quickly quite helpful same as if you do kind of Tai Chi or any sort of body practice your body will age less quickly because you're taking care of it you're reducing the amount of cortisol in the system that's thought to be one of the mechanisms there's less damage to the hippocampus by cortisol flooding through the brain when you're in these high threat state modes and high threat state modes include the times when you're being mean to yourself internally yeah and so the hippocampus is important because it helps us to kind of store and embed memories and it's the thing that's kind of bringing up information into our default mode network when we're trying to solve problems when we're dealing with the world when we're interacting with the world all the time but it's particularly interested in in in what happens when the system is under some sort of changing state and it's under changing states when we're feeling stuff so we're looking now at this kind of interaction between what we're feeling in the body whether it's anxiety depression sadness fear and then how the mind responds to it these sort of two pieces of the puzzle what my mind does with it and what's actually happening and I share this work I think there's been an update to this study and work from Finland and I just got unfortunate I can't really pronounce the name but it's something like new but if you Google mapping body emotions you'll find YouTube ears on this and a new study where they've gone a little bit more nuanced but they are 700 people to draw on a computer where they felt an increase or a decrease in sensation related to these different emotional states and I love this map I'll read the cross for you just think this you can't see so yellow means that there's more sensation in the body as a mindfulness practitioner I'm I want more detail I want to know the time course of that I want to know exactly what the sensations feel like how they am flow over time but this wasn't a mindfulness study it was just like where do you feel it so they colored in yellow just means more of something and blue means less anger fear disgust happiness sadness surprise and neutral and then the lower one the so so called more complex emotions anxiety love depression contempt pride shame and envy well any any just kind of little popcorn comments about that yeah shame looks like spider-man what do you think that is what is that bodily sensation do you think yeah flushing of the cheeks yeah so people are experiencing some of this are kind of like physiological aspects look at this hand's anger or yes hold hands sometimes when I'm working with the medical students they like to point out you know happiness is when your whole body is singing look dancing fee yeah when we're really happy when we're like really in our flow we're activated aren't we and we're activated in the legs in the body in the feet we were like wanna move we want to we want to dance even you know when did you last stop dancing a great question but they like to point out that when it's love it's a little bit different scenario and there's more sensations in this region here and you know ditto if you're feeling contempt for somebody then you definitely don't wanna mate with them so so you can kind of have fun with this but the other thing that struck me with this was the heart you know how the heart is really involved in everything and this is where I'm more interested in moving beyond just the physiological response of the body into maybe what we might call energetic experience is but for me you know the distinction between some of these experiences say for example love and fear is I have a sense that my heart is making a movement yeah my heart swells with pride I get a sense that something is moving an opening yeah I see the kind of client list of the people that I need to see that day and maybe there's somebody in that list that I'm struggling with and I have a the doctors call this as well the experience of the heart sinking when you're just kind of like oh and it's usually around feeling incompetent I don't know what to do I don't know how to help this person oh god you know it's tough but being interested in the more subtle more nuanced movements of the body and when we can do this when we can really engage with the body in this way what the neuroscience is telling us is that we are able to grow regions of the brain that are responsible for encoding our embodied sense of emotion in the body and this is the right anterior insula the insular cortex has previously risen to fame as being involved in kind of gut brain responses and there was a huge quite a lot of research about irritable bowel syndrome looking at the Instituto cortex and the gut brain and the relationship between kind of food nutrition and stress and mental health and the Visser receptive cortex is kind of a little bit more lateral but it seems that there's a part at the front of the brain that's really at the front of the insula particularly on the right hand side which is involved in our sensing of emotions in the body and in a manner that again unfortunately it's related to years of meditation practice correlations between the size the density of that brain region and the number of years of practice so when people say like oh well if you do meditation then you become dispassionate you've got dispassionate awareness that means that you're not feeling really what the neuroscience is telling us is that you feel more yeah you feel more because you're applying this lens of attention on a regular basis to what sensory information is in your body over the day moment by moment and you're just drinking it in and with a mindful lens of attention you're not trying to change anything so that's why that breath practice is important not to change the breath what you're actually training is your capacity to hold focused attention on a moving changing object without doing anything that's how you can get all the data the minute you jump in and start messing with it you won't get all the data because you're changing things so same with the emotions in the body and just imagine that can I hold firm while I'm having a strong emotional reaction in the body not let my mental kind of monkeys run away with getting busy processing denying avoiding suppressing analyzing managing but just kind of going okay something important is happening for me it's my job to be really interested in this and how much space do you need and and I have some exercises I can share some resources with you online an exercise called going big which is in the book of mindfulness in motion which is about saying yeah when it comes give it space open and I'm just opening with my arms to help my brain understand what it is I want it to do but when I open with my mind there aren't there are no limits to what can be held and it's this idea holding that read of the distress inside an intentional green container of like I know this isn't good I know I feel uncomfortable I'm full of fear or whatever is going on but there is an eye that's not that fear there is a place where I can be where I'm not identified with that fear and before mindfulness we don't kind of get that actually the fear comes the mind comes that the tunnel vision becomes more and more narrow you know it's all about me I don't care about your ingrown toenail because I've got a paper to finish just take it over there I'm not even interested you know I'm busy with a stressful thing you know it becomes all about me and maybe anybody in the working environment might have that experience of of how it is to manage work demands when you're at home yeah needing to get works work done and trying to spend time with the family for example you know we can get very agitated and very like just leave me alone I need to do it I'm not I can't be with you I can't help you now and so for me the mindfulness work and the training is about when noticing how the length narrows and and having skills to widen it and that requires the attention sis that's why we have to train attention yeah because that movement is the attentional system being either pulled in to a identified reaction or being able to say I see there's a reaction going on there so I'm gonna go big around it here's my reaction still I'm still reacting sorry mindfulness doesn't initially make that immediately go away but I've got a bigger picture now so I can see my reaction in a bigger context okay that's helpful how important is this do I really need to get stressed about this why am i putting energy into this is this something I can just let go of whose voice is that anyways that says I should or shouldn't do that thing whereas if I'm here around it I don't get any of that I'm just like oh I need to do something and I'm I'm in a reaction so there's some work from Farben colleagues based in Toronto really really great work showing that actually what happens in a in a mindfulness training is that we have a decoupling between this medial prefrontal cortex where it's all about me and what's going to happen to me and how am I going to be safe and the insular cortex so this is work looking at what we call diffusion tensor imaging it's work that helps us to understand how networks are connected to each other during certain tasks and this work for me really really kind of resonated with what I was experiencing personally in my practice and what I saw in my clinical work which is people are still feeling but the thinking is decoupled and the thinking becomes more flexible and more adaptable and less rigid yeah so we still feel actually what happens is we feel more we have more information because now we're actually looking at the body and we reduce the impact of mental habits that are kind of trying to take us away from the present moment so not only do we manage the emotion we gather more and more data every time we do that so our emotional intelligence keeps on increasing we have greater clarity about what is our reactive mental patterns and we're able to just go okay I'm doing that thing I'm doing that thing I'm doing that thing no that's a pattern I'm not choosing that or you might say actually no that is a pan and that pan is very helpful for me now I need to use that yeah you can always bring it back in don't worry those have it's still the seeds of them we'll we'll all be there probably unless you're really practicing in an extended way so how we talk about this and the medical training is you can be a thinking feeling doctor yeah you don't have to sacrifice one for the other because often what happens when we work in health care is we prioritize the thinking and then we blunt the feeling and this is what leads to burnout and then when burnout comes you can't think straight anymore and it's just feeling all over the place yeah here a bit of a mess so it's about balance in all things and mostly were quite left hemisphere dominant so I'm very happy to hear that these are the right hemisphere anterior insula that we're feeding with this body information the right hemisphere also much more involved in kind of kinesthetic and movement practices you know I've presented today some conceptual information which is to feed your left hemisphere a little bit but as Bruce says knowing is not enough we must apply willing is not enough we must do and so a lot of my work then really is about how do we bring this into our day to day life if we're struggling to find time to put our bottoms on a cushion or we're not able to make time for a regular practice of whatever is our practice in the mornings or in the evening so much of my work now is about what I'm calling these embodiment tools for transformation their brain wise mindfulness tools that have been kind of designed to be used in the day to day world and you know pretty much will make any situation more efficient and more interesting if you're able to apply the mindfulness principles but particularly I think we do need these when we were undergoing transformation and whether that's transformation in our world in terms of the systems that we live in which seem to be undergoing rapid transformation are models of business or whether it's in our own personal self development work whether that's within therapy or within transpersonal traditions you know what are the skills that we need to learn how to move between these spaces efficiently it's not about I have to be in one or I have to be in the other or one is better than the other you can have your own views on that but the point is how do we not just get stuck here particularly if here is where we're noticing that we caught in habits and patterns that aren't helping us and a bird attention training will serve you well in any situation and you know some of my work is working with psychosis we know that there are some alterations in the default mode Network and how it's tuned in in psychosis and we're also becoming increasingly aware that maybe some some people that are undergoing a psychotic experience are in fact more in a transpersonal or spiritual crisis so then this raises the question of okay how can the transpersonal frameworks help us to understand better what people are experiencing and what does treatment look like if we come from a phenomenological perspective rather than needing to know whether the voice or the delusion or the experience is true or not so this is some of the work I'm doing now looking at transformation and how we can do it mindfully whether it's within psychosis or a project here that I'm developing at the moment looking at virtual reality near-death experiences my colleague Jose is here today so trying to understand how we can use embodiment mindfulness practices based on the model to let us navigate these new phases of mind and just remind you that when we're having challenging conversations and things might be getting triggered we might be reacting or or worried about things actually we always have the option to set the intention of let me approach kindly and see what comes thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 13,557

Keywords: Neuroscience of mindfulness, Neuroscience of meditation, Mindfulness meditation, Science of meditation, Mindfulness meditation for anxiety, Mindfulness scientific evidence, Mindfulness science research, Mindfulness brain science

Id: Fy5p-Y0xcq0

Length: 93min 33sec (5613 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019