[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us
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Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate variability podcast.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: I'm Matt Bennett. Just here to do a quick intro, an exciting announcement this week. We're going to do a replay episode this week with our interview with Dr. Ron Siegel right when his new book came out. I've been a fan of Dr. Siegel for years now. He's been one of my real teachers around trauma, neurobiology, mindfulness over the years. So to be able to interview him was just such a joy. You'll hear that come out in my voice over and over in this episode. So this is one of my favorites.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: We have just such a huge back.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Catalog now that we're at episode 142, and I know not everybody's heard some of the earlier episodes, so it's great to bring this one to folks that haven't heard it. If you have heard it, give it another listen. I was reviewing it before this and it was just like me going back in time to relearn some of these great lessons that Ron both puts out in his book, but also shares with us on this episode. The big announcement is Dave Ena and I are launching a training series this year. We're really excited to announce this. Our first training is April 25. It's heart rate variability and daily life, where we really look at if you're an individual using heart rate variability, just some really key things to think about as you integrate HRV tracking and biofeedback training into your routine, into your wellness, into your health routine.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: So looking at that from the individual.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: But also from the clinical perspective, if you are a therapist or a coach or a medical provider utilizing heart rate variability, just how to do that effectively, what are you looking at? What's the data mean?
And really exploring this topic. So again, that's April 25. It's a three hour training. We do offer ceus from the American Psychological association on the link that I will share, that will link to the training series. You can go into the description. It says what states and what occupations those continuing education credits are good for. Also, if you're a podcast listener, if you use the code optimal at checkout, you will get 25% off. So we wanted to share that with you.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: So optimal at checkout. So again, I'll put the link to.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: The training in the show notes. Also, I'll give you that code as well.
And we would love to have you join the podcast.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: We're also doing one later on this.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Year on HRV and healthy breathing. If you've ever heard Dr. Dave Hopper, Dr. Ina Hazad talk about healthy breathing, it is a knot. You can't miss that one. Pain management in HIV, another great one. So many people deal with chronic pain or inflammation. Great episode or a great training for that. And then the final one is something near and dear to my heart, trauma and heart rate variability later on this year. So you can see all the dates.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Sign up for those.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Again, that code optimal will work for 25% discount for all of the training. So we would love for our listeners to join us. We try to price these very competitively, especially for continuing education credits for those that need them. So with that said, thanks for joining us this week. I'm going to play this great episode that Ron had with us and enjoy.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Welcome friends to the heart rate variability podcast. I am back here with Ena and Ina. I am so excited you hooked us up with today's guest. Dr. Ron Siegel has know first time I've ever met Ron but has really helped inform my work on trauma informed care over the years. Ron, I'm not sure how many talks I've heard you give. I was just trying to figure out how many books I have on audible from you but just really have been inspiration and a teacher of mine. So to connect with one of my teachers who I could have spent the rest of my life probably reading everything you put out and never meet you. So this is a great honor for us to have you on this show and I'm so excited for our conversation today.
[00:04:59] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Yeah, Ron, I think I could gush about you for the next 60 minutes, which I'm happy to do. So. But I love for you just to maybe give our audience a little bit about your background and before we kind of dive into your work, just sort of where you're at and how you sort of got there in your journey.
[00:05:23] Speaker C: So I'm a psychologist by training and I'm also a longtime meditator, having picked up mindfulness practices really when I was a kid, when I was about 1718 years old. And I've had the privilege I trained in and have been teaching in the Harvard medical school system for several decades. And I've had the privilege of being part of a group that actually started as a study group decades ago of psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers who are interested in how what we know from contemplative practices might inform our psychotherapy work and how what we know from modern neuroscience and modern clinical explorations, how that might actually inform some of the ancient wisdom traditions that these contemplative practices came from. And so my work, even though I've done other things, like as the chief psychologist of a community mental health center serving basically underprivileged kids and their families, I've spent many decades doing work with chronic pain and psychophysiological or stress related medical disorders. But the focus I've had most in recent years has been on writing and teaching about this interface.
What can we learn about how to optimize psychotherapy and health from the world's ancient wisdom traditions? And how might these traditions evolve in the current context of modern science and clinical work?
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Awesome. I would love to bring you into this, and like I said, I could gush for 60 minutes. How Ron's works informed my thinking.
And what I love about Ron's, the ancient tradition stuff I find is just fascinating. It's kind of a hobby to read about Buddhism. I'm a huge fan of Taoism. It's really informed me and these ancient traditions across all kinds of cultures. Ena, as you think about on sort of the cutting edge of the biofeedback arena that I don't think anybody would necessarily call ancient traditions, but more of bringing technology into this field, I just love. How has Ron's work really informed your thinking where you're looking at this intersection with technology?
[00:07:52] Speaker D: Absolutely. So you're looking for me to now gush about Ron for a while?
Happy to do that.
I've been learning for Ron for a couple of decades at this point, and I guess for me, the crossover is in the way that both mindfulness and biofeedback get at self regulation.
They're both aiming to achieve a similar, maybe the same goal, but they're doing it in slightly different ways, and they're doing it in a very complementary way.
I guess. Mindfulness is more top down, biofeedback is more bottom up, but they're meeting in the middle in helping people find better ways to regulate their physiology, better ways to regulate their emotions and their cognitive processes.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: And Ron, sort of same question to throw at you. We're in this time of, I think every time I Google biofeedbacks or there's another ring or watch or strap, obviously, we're trying to bring some of this science to the table as well. I'd love to. As somebody who's really versed in a lot of these ancient traditions, especially when it comes around mindfulness practice, I'd love to just get your reflection on the world that we live in.
I haven't counted them, but I imagine there's over probably 1000, if not 10,000, mindfulness apps out there. Google mindfulness and Spotify or YouTube. A million things pop up.
I'd love to kind of start our conversation about where you see the intersection of your work that you've done over the years and your study of these ancient traditions and the sort of modern technology that just seems to be coming out every day.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Well, I think these are all attempts to solve a common problem. And this common problem goes back millions of years to our evolutionary history as human beings.
Our brains evolved essentially to help us to survive and to help us to reproduce and to propagate our genes. Anything that might have developed in the brain by accident through mutations and the like, or even through what we call epigenetics, which is changes to the brain that happen based on our environment, and changes to gene expression that happen based on our environment, that any of those that didn't facilitate surviving and successfully reproducing, they'd get lost. It's the ones that help us to survive and reproduce, that get preserved. And two things that have really, really helped human beings to survive are our emergency response system. Our ability, when we're in a pinch, to either fight freeze, which we do sometimes, or flee, and our capacity to think right, to imagine what might happen, to reflect on what's happened in the past, and to strategize what's going to help me to survive optimally in the present. And each of those systems is marvelous, brilliant, incredibly useful for survival. You put them together, and we have a bit of a recipe for disaster. Because what's happening is this system, the fight, freeze, flight system, which was designed to protect us from the lion or tiger out there, is now activated every time a fantasy of something going wrong passes through our minds. And we have, on top of this, a real difficulty, which is what's been called the negativity bias, which, well established by cognitive scientists, which is that our brain isn't just our thinking capacity, isn't just some neutral observational machine or some computer, but it has this really strong bias to remember bad things and anticipate them happening again. As my friend Rick Hansen puts it, the brain is like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. The bad ones stick, the good ones slide right off the pan. And if I can just go into this a little more, because I know it's a little bit, but I think this is really how to understand how both mindfulness practices and biofeedback come together and why they're so necessary.
If you could imagine us out there in the african savannah looking at an ambiguous stimulus, let's say it's a beige shape behind some bushes, we could make one of two types of errors that roughly correspond to type one and type two errors in modern scientific research. We could look at this shape and say, oh, my God, it's a lion, when it's really just a beige rock. That would be a type one error, right? A false positive. Or we could say, it's probably a beige rock when it's really a lion. Now, we can make countless type one errors and still survive to talk about it and pass on our dna. One type two error, thinking it's a rock when it's a lion, that's the end of our DNA line. So we developed this very, very strong bias in our thinking to remember the bad stuff and anticipate it happening. We might imagine that there were happy hominids back in the day holding hands and exchanging stories about dynamite sexual encounters and luscious pieces of fruit who didn't have this negativity bias, right? But they were not our ancestors, because statistically, they died before they got to reproduce. Our ancestors were the ones wandering around the savannah going, oh, my God, it is a lion. Not one of those poisonous snakes. Another cliff. Oh, that plant with the spines. Remember what happened to Uncle Tommy last know those were our ancestors? Because that is actually good for survival, but it is absolutely miserable for our well being. And whether you start in through the doorway of biofeedback or you start in through the doorway of mindfulness or other meditative practices, it doesn't take long to notice, oh, my God. My mind is constantly agitated. I'm constantly worrying about things. I'm constantly in a state of tension or constriction. What's this all about? Well, it's not that you're particularly crazy.
Maybe I'm particularly crazy, but it's not that you're particularly crazy. It's that this is our evolutionary gift, our evolutionary inheritance. This is simply how it is to be wired as a human being. And it sets us up for so many difficulties, not just subjective discomfort, although that's a big one, but it robs us of creativity. It makes it hard to sleep. It interferes with our sex lives.
It causes a whole host of disorders like chronic musculoskeletal pain of every sort, from the neck down to the back and the knees and shoulders and elbows.
And it causes eczema and other chronic skin disorders. It causes all sorts of gastrointestinal distress. This accident really sets us up for a lot of trouble. So it's not such a surprise that cultures worldwide tried to figure out a way to work with this. And one of the things they came up with was meditative practices, which actually work to step out of the thought stream a bit so that the organism has a chance to return to a baseline a little bit closer to what other animals that don't think as well as we do experience most of the time, which is when your dog is lying there after eating, he's, or she's probably not worrying about the 401 and am I going to have enough money to make it into retirement, stuff like that. Because other animals don't have this symbolic thought gift and curse, right? So these meditative practices are designed to help us calm down. We can talk about the different ways that they do help us not to have every thought generate this. And another avenue is the whole world of biofeedback, of basically finding some indicator to show us when we're in one of these arousal states, when we're in our emergency response system so that we can experiment with, gee, how do I get that indicator to calm down a little bit? And through trial and error, we learn how to do that in biofeedback systems. So biofeedback systems are in many ways a modern attempt to do what? For thousands of years, cultures have been trying to help people to do, because whether it's four and a half million years ago or now, we've had this problem for a very long time.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Amazing. So this is just in my free time. I love to read and study history. Not an expert at all, but I wonder, one of the questions, I think, with your knowledge, and I love the story, I use similar examples to talk about that negative bias.
Do you see in your study of these ancient traditions, was there just a point where we hit, like there was enough safety, that we lived behind walls, that there was enough food around, where we got to the point where we're like, okay, maybe this is not functional anymore, we need to breathe. Have you found anything in your studies historically about.
And I know written history came probably after some of these traditions started, but do you have any insight to what made us stop long enough from running away? From that beige thing on the horizon to think, hey, maybe we should develop techniques to overcome and handle this anxiety.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: It's hard to know what the origins are of some of these practices. There are clay figures, we've got written records of this going back two and a half thousand years. Really? In buddhist traditions. There are clay figures found in the indian subcontinent of people in full lotus posture that go back over 5000 years. So it looks like they were doing this in yogic traditions quite some time ago.
But recorded history is not that long, right?
Our ancestors arthropithesis is like four and a half million years ago, and we're talking about 5000 years ago.
So I don't think we know.
There's some speculation that meditative practices evolved cross culturally, in part to aid in hunting, that humans weren't very good at running after prey. They were much better hanging out quietly with a spear and waiting for prey to come near them. And if you could self regulate so that you weren't spooked by all your thoughts, and you were able to actually just sit there and wait for the prey to come calmly and quietly, that would have an advantage in hunting. So the speculation about that. But I don't think it's an accident that virtually all of the world's cultures have some often religious or philosophic tradition that's basically about how to calm oneself, how to be less reactive in this way. And I think it's just because of the accident of these two survival mechanisms, both of which are so powerful and so helpful. The other thing is, we still do need our fight or flight response, right? If you step off the curb and there's a bus barreling down the road, it's super helpful to be able to leap out of the way quickly. It's just, it gets activated nowadays so often by symbolic threats. Right.
I'm afraid I'm going to be embarrassed. I'm afraid I won't do a good job in this podcast so that my heart starts beating more quickly. We're afraid we're going to get a bad performance review at work, or we're simply afraid that we're going to be uncomfortable.
The temperature is changing and I'm starting to get cold, or uhoh, I think I'm afraid somebody's going to reject me and I'm going to feel sad.
This system, which originally was designed to help us respond in an emergency to physical threat, is now activated by every conceivable symbolic threat. And many of those are actually threats to our self image, right? We like defend our self image with the same or even greater enthusiasm than we might defend our bodies against an assault. And we can get into this. My most recent main project has been writing a book about how we're tortured by these self evaluative thoughts we were just talking about before we started. It's called the extraordinary gift of being ordinary, finding happiness right where you are. And it's about all these symbolic threats to who we think we are and all the striving we do to try to keep our self esteem afloat, which keeps us terribly stressed out as well. And interestingly, almost all the world's religious and wisdom traditions have warned this isn't a great pathway to well being. Trying to build yourself up, trying to have good self esteem, trying to be a winner in whatever area, and yet we all fall into it quite regularly.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So I wonder, because I wish I could do this with my own journey around mindfulness. And basically my answer to this question would be just breathe, because that's what I probably needed. But I know you've been practicing mindfulness. I believe you threw out 17 when you may have started this. I wonder what today's Ron would tell 17 year old Ron with all the wisdom, now that you're a world class, like one of the go to experts on the science and the practice of mindfulness.
If you're like me, looking back, I just kind of laugh at that person back there trying to do this for the first time. I just sort of wonder for that 17 year old Ron, who may be some of our listeners right now, just starting a practice, what would the wisdom that you've accumulated over the years, what would that conversation be like to give maybe some insight and instruction to your 17 year old self?
[00:22:44] Speaker C: It's an excellent question.
The first thing that comes to mind is an experience that I have with mindfulness retreats, whereas a situation in which you decide to ramp up practice and spend a week or some period of time all day long doing variations of mindfulness practice. And I lead these retreats for therapists sometimes and sometimes for the general public, and I've participated in a lot of them. And when I was younger and I was participating in them, I was very taken by transformative states of mind, by these moments in which thoughts actually kind of quieted down. And I was really tasting food and really noticing nature and was so engaged in this way and basically was getting kind of stoned on meditation practice, was really sort of enjoying the altered state of high sensitivity. And I thought of that as the goal, and I would intensify the practice to try to get those states back. And it took me a while to realize that, no, that's not exactly the goal. The goal of these practices is to really see how our minds make ourselves miserable, to really see the patterns of thinking, the patterns of reactivity that cause psychological suffering, with the goal not just of being humiliated, but the goal also of if we can see the patterns clearly enough, then maybe we can make different choices. Maybe we can actually change the way we relate to things. So that, for example, if I start to notice in my mindfulness practice that I'm constantly comparing myself to other meditators, and I'm convinced that they're able to follow their breath and they're able to stay focused, and I'm a basket case who can't do this at all because my mind is a wild monkey jumping around from window to window in a chaotic house, that realizing that, oh, it's the propensity to be comparing myself to others all day long that's causing myself the misery. It's my getting addicted to wanting to be good at this, wanting to be better than others, to start to see the dynamics of the mind that are revealed in mindfulness practice. The more I could see that, the more then when that would come up again, I'd have a little bit greater flexibility, a little bit more of a chance to realize, oh God, there I go, comparing myself again. Oh, there goes the mind again, worrying about, in this case, how am I doing? And self esteem, that kind of thing.
I think the thing that I would want to point out early on to the 17 year old self is it's not about getting high. It's not even about getting calm necessarily, although that is one of the things that happens in the practices and is a benefit. It's about really gaining insight into our craziness, into how all day long we make ourselves miserable with various patterns that we're in, and it's okay to see them, even though it's upsetting, because we can learn from them. And everything becomes gris for the mill of awakening, of becoming a little clearer, a little saner, a little bit less caught in patterns that are destructive to ourselves and others.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Awesome.
With your most recent book, with the extraordinary gift of being ordinary.
Tell me after reading, I believe it. Was it the mindfulness solution?
As I say, if you want to take a master class in mindfulness without it being watered down, because I think a lot of times mindfulness is just a word that you've probably seen this in your career, just gets thrown around so much on so many things.
I look and recommend your book as sort of this master class, that if you don't have a whole lot of expertise in this and you want to develop a lot of expertise in this, I think you do just a great job in that book, helping folks go, if they're starting at zero, going to 60, and getting that knowledge.
So you've got all this and then looking at the gift of being ordinary. So I would love to hear. I always love to ask authors, because I always, usually find that there's insights along the way into a book journey, that maybe you discover something yourself along the way. And I just kind of, how do you come to this topic? And were there any insights that you came away from this project with?
[00:27:27] Speaker C: Well, it's a great question, and you've actually set up the context beautifully, because I've been practicing mine from this since I was basically an adolescent, been writing about it, studying about it. I've also been a clinical psychologist, working with patients, and some years ago was in my own therapy for some time. And you would think that all of these enterprises would lead to either something like a coherent sense of stable self. Right. Or the mythical elixir of security. Right. No longer being insecure, no longer caring about other people's judgments of me, no longer caring about how my achievements were going or not. And there I was in my 60s, still hooked on all this stuff, still having my appraisal of myself going up and down. As a good friend of mine and of Ena's, Paul Fulton once put it, he's around my age and very wise and competent psychologist. And he once said to me, yeah, my sense of myself as a psychologist is about as good as the last session if it went well. I think I'm really good at this. Hey, I'm a great psychologist. Look at all my experience, how it's come to fruition here. If it went poorly, I should turn my attention to playing music, which he also does quite confidently, but that this is not my calling. And noticing the same thing for me about everything, whether it's how I did in a podcast, and not that I'm getting graded, but my own evaluation of this, how my last session went, how many people showed up at a workshop that I attended. I'm going up and down, up and down, thinking, what's up with this? So my first hypothesis was, well, I never got over being picked last for teens in elementary school.
And maybe I'm not saying that isn't a component, but my other hypothesis was, no, there's something more universal about this, because as I looked over my caseload and I realized, gosh, everybody who I work with, and they're at all levels of external measurement of success, everybody's struggling with this, right? Everybody's trying to feel good about themselves. They're trying to get the next success. So as to rest for a few moments in the feeling of, I'm okay, or maybe I'm even better than okay, I'm special. But basically to try to ward off the, oh, somehow I'm no good in one area or another. It's not necessarily about professional achievement. Everybody gets hooked on different things. For one person, it's how popular I am. Do people like me? Do people really know me? Who like me? Or do they just like an image of me? For somebody else, it's about artistic ability and sense of style or taste. For somebody else, it's about moral issues.
Am I a good person? Am I a good son or daughter or sibling or parent or husband or wife?
Among meditators, this gets really simple, really silly in a way. Among meditators, it's like, who's less concerned with ego?
Who's less self focused and concerned with self esteem issues, which is absurd. It's just taking the same energy and applying it to becoming free from these things. So it was really my realization that I'm still caught in this that got me interested in, are there reliable pathways out of this? And what do we know from evolutionary psychology? What do we know from clinical work? What do we know from contemplative practices? How can we free ourselves? So, frankly, it was a bit of a self treatment book, the whole project. At one point, I sent an email to my editor and I said, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, this work on this book is really productive. I'm really feeling somewhat less self preoccupied, somewhat less concerned with keeping my self esteem afloat. The bad news is, I don't need to finish the book. Who needs another book?
She thought I was serious.
She thought I was serious. Serious said, no, this topic is useful. It really is.
Don't abandon the book. And I didn't abandon the book, but there was some truth to it also, that this is part of our motivation for so many things. So that was actually the inspiration. It was like, how come the mindfulness practices haven't quite worked for me enough in this particular arena?
And as I looked around, how come, gosh, we all get hooked in this because we're like fish and water. This society gives us so many messages suggesting, if only you could be more successful, fill in the blank. In terms of the realm, you would be happier. And it's in part because we are for a few minutes, right? Like when we, let's say you feel this podcast goes well, and I feel it goes well. Well, we're going to leave this podcast feeling better about ourselves for a few minutes, right, until the next thing comes along and we feel like, oh my God, I just did a terrible job at this. Or my kids yelling, or on and on and on.
[00:32:59] Speaker D: That is such a good point, and I think so incredibly important. I can't wait to read this book and give copies to everybody around me.
Even with biofeedback, we see this all the time. When I'm working with super competitive people, athletes, elite military, high level executives, there is a competition. Is my hiv higher than all the other people, or is my hiv higher than my teammates? Or how do I compare?
One of the most common questions I probably get is, how do I do better than someone else?
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:33:39] Speaker C: Look, I'm a psychologist, a meditator. I wrote this book, and my first response to checking out my HRV is, what are the norms and how do I fit?
[00:33:52] Speaker D: That's right.
And those norms are conveniently there, right? So you can use them to evaluate and judge yourself, to connect with your previous point that the symbolic danger has become so much more prevalent than the physical danger, that statistic that floats around, that there is a lot more people are concerned and afraid of public speaking than they are people who are afraid of death. So at a funeral, as Jerry Seinfeld quips, at a funeral, people would rather be the ones in the casket than the ones giving the eulogy.
There's something very upside down on that one.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: True. I think in fairness to the diversity of the world, there are people who are in situations where it really is dangerous, where survival really is an immediate issue. But in the developed world, that's not most of the population, most of the time.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: So I'm really fascinated with, and I think Ena's work, like around flair, really gives me a really good tangible tool about mindfulness, both as a practice and a skill set. And I don't know if I even know how to frame the question right. But I've started to compare it to growing up playing basketball.
We practice free throws a lot. And to me, to this day, as a fan, free throws are the most boring part of basketball. Unless you're like, in the last couple of minutes of the game, I don't even know why we do them anymore. It's just like, shoot, it from where you're at. If you make it, then let's keep the game going.
But I practice free throws because I'll be honest, I never get really excited for my morning mindfulness practice. I'm always glad I did it, but I'm not like, oh, I cannot wait to wake up and do mindfulness, and maybe I need to get there my own journey, but it's building also what I found, this set of skills. So while my daily mindfulness practice might be practicing free throws, I do that to carry this set of skills with me into the game when things get stressful. And again, Ena's work with flair. And really, I think any sort of structure to think about those skills. I'd love to ask you, sort you again, trying to prevent people from just throwing mindfulness on top of everything they do, because I think we lose something if we just totally water it down. I wonder, thinking about mindfulness as a skill set, I just love to kind of throw that out there to sort of get your thinking and insight. Obviously the practice is important, but do you see it going beyond that as a set of skills people can use tangibly throughout their day?
[00:36:44] Speaker C: Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think your experience of, gosh, I don't feel like sitting down and doing it, but I feel better after I've done it. There's an analog there to a lot of forms of physical exercise, right?
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:37:01] Speaker C: Do you feel like getting up and going into a cold swimming pool or going to the gym as opposed to going to the fridge much of the time? No, the fridge is more appealing than the gym.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:13] Speaker C: However, we have this repeated experience that when I do go to the gym right afterwards, I feel better. And then it's kind of nice that when I'm crossing the street and a car is coming, I can run across the street and I have the energy and I can go up the stairs and I can lift things and I can bend and I feel awake and alert. So we notice all these benefits from it. Mindfulness practice is a lot like that. The actual practice of meditation can be a mixed bag because invariably, when we're going through our day, we're distracting ourselves from hundreds and hundreds of painful experiences. I would say for me, more than 50% are actually in this self esteem regulation area, that they have something to do with either feeling afraid of something or not so good about myself or something like that. But those are kind of painful experiences, so they get pushed out of awareness, or we have a frustration or an interaction with somebody that goes poorly painful. We'll push that out of our awareness. When we sit down to meditate, everything we've pushed out of awareness comes back. As one of my patients put it quite aptly, when we bury feelings, we bury them alive. Right? And another patient said, and the hole is never deep enough, that this is our reality. We either stay agitated, stressed and distracted, or if we do, allow ourselves to have open space through formal mindfulness practice, or even for that matter, taking a walk in the woods, all these things are going to come back into awareness, and the things that are going to come back are often going to be painful. So we're sort of deciding we're going to open ourselves to some discomfort for the goal of not being stressed all the time and being able to integrate these and being able to increasingly have the courage to feel pain as well as pleasure. Those skills, the ability to feel pain as well as pleasure, and not to be always in fight or flight, those are enormously helpful skills to bring into everything else in our life. But the process of getting there. Yeah, it's hard. The same way, going to the gym. Yeah, it's hard.
Especially if we feel tired, even though afterwards we may feel more energized.
It's hard to get ourselves to do this. I will say that coming back to sort of mindfulness and biofeedback, what they both have in common, is finding a way to relax a bit.
Our emergency response system, the sympathetic nervous system, being aroused. And we might ask, so what's the benefit of that? Well, one is, of course, to not ruin the body with all the stress related disorders. But there are others. There's a discussion in neurobiology these days between the distinction between panoramic and focused vision. And panoramic vision is kind of the way we literally look at the world when we're not under threat. We're taking a walk and we notice the birds, especially if we're on a path that's clear. We notice the birds, we notice the trees, we notice the play of light, we allow ideas to come in and out, focus vision is, did I hear a gunshot? Is there a hunter here in which we're just focused on the threat? When we're in fight or flight, fight, freeze, flight, we're very much focused in our vision.
We're narrowly paying attention to the threat. The same thing is true when we're in a drive state of hunger or thirst or even sexual interest, where we're focused on the thing that's going to satisfy the desire. And in those states, I mean, they're useful states, they have their place in life. But if we're chronically in those states, we never have the access to creativity, really, that comes from having a more relaxed perspective, taking this kind of panoramic vision. So one of the things about trait mindfulness, in other words, having it be in our nature to be more mindful, is we have more moments that are like, know my friend and colleague Judd Brewer, who runs the research arm of contemplative practices at Brown University. Nowadays, Judd talks about just noticing when our general body posture is one of constriction and tightness versus openness and receptivity. And, yeah, when we're in sympathetic arousal, it's like this. When there's more parasympathetic activity, it's more like this. And it's a sort of very accessible biofeedback, if you will, that we can do by just watching our bodies. Of course, this gets amplified and sensitized if we use actual biofeedback device, devices that either look at muscle tension or look at heart rate variability, or look at one of these variables to give us the feedback.
Something else I'd like to say about this trait, mindfulness, is this whole art of learning how to be with discomfort. Because when we're sitting and meditating and discomfort comes up, and it could be an itch or an ache, or it could be a wave of sadness or a wave of shame or a wave of an emotion, we increasingly start to relate to both the emotional and the physical as moment to moment sensations. Right? Because discomfort is ultimately a moment to moment sensation. If I maybe do this as an exercise, because I think it's an important illustration, if you're not in a car and you're watching this, you're not driving, just close your eyes for a moment and take a breath or two and generate a little bit of sadness. Not the saddest thing ever, but just a little bit of sadness.
And notice where you feel it in your body, and even put your hand over the part of your body where you feel the sadness, just to feel it as a bodily sensation and notice, oh, yeah, sadness is a bodily sensation, isn't it?
And then generate a little bit of anxiety or fear. Again, not the worst thing ever, but just a little bit of anxiety or fear.
And notice where that is in the body and put your hand over that area and feel that sensation.
And then try anger. Little bit of annoyance. Again, not the worst thing ever. If you're a really nice person and you never get angry, just think of somebody. Of what somebody in the other political party said, whoever that might be for you, you'll get angry and feel the anger and just notice where that is in the body. Maybe put your hand over that.
And just to include pleasant things now generate a little bit of joy, something that brings you happiness.
And notice that as a bodily sensation, and put your hand over the area where you feel the joy, and you can open your eyes again.
And I don't know if this is your experience, but my experience is, gosh, all of these emotions, they have a somatic signature, right? There's a sensation in the body where I feel this one. Things we do with mindfulness practice is we practice just staying with it, just feeling it that way. And as we do, our capacity to be with the feeling increases. And this becomes enormously useful for living a life, because if you think of what you're afraid of, for example, most of what we're afraid of, we're afraid something's going to bring up an upsetting feeling, something bad's going to happen, and I'm going to feel upset.
And so we go into fight or flight out of fear of that happening. Well, if we get more and more accustomed to being able to be with our sadness, our fear, our anger, our joy, our sexual interest, whatever it is, if we're able to allow all these different experiences to arise and pass, we're going to spend a lot less time being afraid of it. Freud, who obviously he reflected his times, but he said something that was very interesting. He said, a lot of our anxiety is signal anxiety. We're afraid of some feeling that's going to come up. We're afraid of some memory that's going to come up, something we've pushed out of awareness. We're afraid it's going to flood into consciousness, and we're going to get upset by that. Just noticing that brings an awful lot of freedom. So there's that level where mindfulness as a trait winds up helping us out. It also helps us out simply practicing coming back to the present moment. Take a moment to think about something that frightens you. Shouldn't take long. Got it. Okay. Whatever that is, is it the past, the present, or the future?
And you'll probably notice that you're afraid of something in the future. Sometimes people say, no, I'm really frightened about something that happened this morning. But on closer analysis, it's, I'm afraid I'll be incarcerated this evening for what I did. This morning is more the problem than this morning, because the morning's past. It's like, what are the future consequences going to be so, the fact that in mindfulness practice, we're constantly bringing our attention back to the present. Back to the present? Back to the present. We actually discover that we can take refuge in the present and that the present is actually safe, even though the future is terribly uncertain. Again, exceptions. If we're actually. If somebody's attacking us, if we're really running out of food, okay, but if we're in a reasonably safe circumstance, the present is safe. It's these fantasies of the future that's the problem. And finally, and this loops back to the extraordinary gift of being ordinary and the need to work with our self appraisals and our addictions to trying to feel good about ourselves.
When you think of the thing that made you anxious, I don't know how many of our listeners were thinking of global climate change being the problem. Now, global climate change, arguably is a big problem, but that's not usually the first thing that comes to our mind, right. The first thing that comes to our mind is something happening to me or my loved ones, right. Something much closer in. So if we can gradually shift our focus from what does this mean about me and what does this mean for me to a little bit of a broader perspective of really looking at the good for all and the planet and the world, a little bit broader perspective. And to actually experience ourselves as part of this larger world rather than experiencing ourselves as an isolated, separate me, that's going to help a lot. And interestingly, all the traditions that evolved mindfulness practice, they were always in what we might call a spiritual or religious context. That was about identifying with something larger than yourself. Because our fight or flight gets activated when it's about me. When we have a broader view, we're less in fight or flight. So there are all these different ways that mindfulness practices actually work to shift our relationship to our life and shift our relationship to our world. And they do the process of helping to not be so reactive, not to be in this sympathetic reactivity so much. Not purely through focusing on relaxing, but rather shifting our relationship to life so that we don't experience life as so threatening anymore.
[00:49:24] Speaker D: That makes so much sense. And bringing heart to viability into this, again, kind of from that other end.
When we are able to increase our heart durability in the moment, or we're trained to increase our heart durability over time, it increases that sense of safety. And then there is less need to be focused on what does this mean for me? Then we're able to open up to what does this mean for the world and for the greater good, et cetera. So when we combine mindfulness and HIV practice together, it probably optimizes that internal state of being able to disengage from me, me and being able to open up to the world.
[00:50:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
There's a very interesting observation about people who've experienced trauma that relates to what you just said.
A lot of times, people who've experienced trauma find themselves triggered by innocuous stimuli. They're innocuous on the surface, but because of the person's association based on something bad that happened, it connects to a memory, and suddenly they find themselves in full blown fight, freeze flight response. The interesting thing that happens when our body is aroused that way, we secondarily interpret it as, I must be in danger. In other words, William James wrote about this, the so called father of american psychology around 1900. We said that, well, actually what happens is we experience this arousal state, and we draw conclusions about the state of the world or the state of our condition in the world based on the arousal state. So if we're hyped up, I must be in danger, and then our minds go down the path of thinking about everything that could go wrong and all that. But when we are calmer, our minds do that less. So it is interesting how we can approach this from different angles. If we learn simply how to calm ourselves more, our minds are going to spin less in this way.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
I know we're getting close to time here, so I could not leave without asking this question, and I'm so glad I'm in the position to do this. What does your mindfulness practice look so what does the day of Ron Siegel look like as far as where you've evolved your practice to be?
[00:51:56] Speaker C: It's very variable. To tell the truth. It really depends on the week and on the month. I go through different phases with this.
I will say it's enough of my life so that whenever I'm in any kind of open space, in other words, where there isn't some focus, goal oriented task that I have to pay attention to, I'm bringing my attention back to sensory reality. So that, for example, we had a big snowstorm here. This is January, it's New England, and I was out cross country skiing. And the mind goes in all different directions, all sorts of thoughts. But moment by moment, I'm cross country skiing. I'm trying to bring the attention back to the sensations of the legs moving, looking at the trees, taking a breath, that kind of thing. And that's somewhere in the interface, the intersection between formal practice and informal practice, because I really am focusing on trying to be present, and yet I'm also doing something else. I'm cross country skiing, if you will. So that is the most universal part. The other universal parts that I think of is no matter what I'm doing in terms of rhythm of formal practice, when I go to bed at night, I'm meditating. I'm lying there, I'm following the breath and seeing what happens with that. As to my structured formal practice, it varies a lot. When my plate is full, it dwindles a lot, and I'm not doing a lot of it. When my plate is emptier and I'm on vacation and I have open space, it becomes much more regular.
Maybe 45 minutes of sitting at a time doing that. Luckily for my work, I get to teach people mindfulness practice, so I have a lot of opportunities.
Just came back from leading a retreat for a week in Costa Rica where many hours of the day we're doing some form of mindfulness practice, and after a while of having done this, I can be leading the group. And I'm pretty much, it's not that different from just practicing on my own. In other words, how to speak out loud. The instructions is sufficiently well practiced that I'm mostly meditating and also guiding the group at the same time.
I consider myself blessed and privileged that I get to have my work often be the practice. But the actual rhythm, it's really quite variable. And I share that partly just to be honest and partly to encourage people that if you find your practice waxing and waning, that's okay. Just keep coming back to it again, the whole realm of self judgment and, oh, I'm a horrible meditator.
That tends to get in the way of optimizing the experience. It doesn't add a lot.
We don't do well by beating ourselves up for failing. We do much better by saying, it's okay. Everybody has wax and wanes. But one of the things I notice is when I'm meditating more, I'm saner.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:58] Speaker C: Notice I didn't say I'm sane, but I'm definitely saner than I am when I'm not.
Sometimes it's like I have to wait till I'm really crazy. We're seeing myself as being quite reactive or having trouble sleeping. That's like, all right, Ron, you got to go back to know the same way. One could fall off the exercise wagon and realize, gosh, I got winded going up the stairs. I got to go back to the gym.
[00:55:27] Speaker A: Well, and I think it's just great to hear you ebb and flow as well, because like I said, my motivation, I've been pretty steady now for about 15 years, but before that, it's like. And I was beating myself up because I was bad at mindfulness, which is sort of ridiculous, but that was the mindset that I was in, and I think a lot of people get there. I think I saw a nugget of research, and if it's wrong, I'd rather not share this. But it's like almost being bad at mindfulness early on in practice, where you catch your mind wondering and bring it back to focus, actually may have showed some neurobiological advantages. So when I learned being bad was being good, I needed that cognitive just nugget to say, oh, okay, so I can really stink at this and still get benefits.
[00:56:18] Speaker C: To loop back to the title of the book, anything that can help us to feel okay about ourselves as an ordinary human being stumbling through life is going to be a good I.
And, Matt, you as well. You're a.
You know, most of our clients or patients, they come into treatment secretly wishing for a whole new personality. Oh, it would be such a relief if I didn't have to be Ron anymore, if I could be like those other people who are good or sane or like this. And if treatment goes really well, what happens is, when people are ready to end, they're very much who they were at the beginning, only they've made friends with that person, and they're okay with being the particular constellation of genes and environmental history that is them. And they even experience themselves as lovable with all the quirks and craziness. And that's what we're inching toward here.
We're really inching toward.
Can we appreciate, I've heard it expressed recently, I find this really helpful in clinical work, to change the conversation from what's wrong with me to what happened to me that formed this being the way this being is here. Because, of course, we all come to who we are quite naturally, by genes and by everything we experience in our lives and to the extent to which we can be friendly in our relationship toward the organism that we happen to be.
That's what we're trying to do by feedback, and it's part of self improvement in a sense. But that self improvement, I think, needs to happen in the context. I once heard a Zen master paraphrased as saying, you are perfect just the way you are, and there's room for improvement, and it's kind of holding those two together lightly enough. So yeah, we can keep working on stuff and we can do it in a general context of loving acceptance.
[00:58:30] Speaker A: I love it. I think that's a great way to start to wrap up.
Let me make sure I get all this right. The extraordinary gift of being ordinary. It looks like it's on preorder right now.
Why do I have this one yet?
[00:58:45] Speaker C: I don't know when the podcast is going to come out exactly, but it's available on Kindle at the moment and the print copy as of January 31, 2022. But my understanding is that print copies are going to be available within a couple of weeks.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Awesome. And I plug the mindfulness solution as my recommendation to folks that want to. Like I said, the word I use is a master class in understanding mindfulness and really applying it as well. But let me ask you a question. I don't want to put my conclusion of your work as forefront, so let me ask you two questions. One, what if I'm new to this mindfulness thing? Which of Ron's books should I pick up? And like I said, I answered for me, it was mindfulness solution. Maybe a more advanced practitioner. Besides the new book coming out, which it sounds like we all need, where would you recommend in your work that those two groups might start?
[00:59:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I think for most people, the mindfulness solution, everyday practices for everyday problems, is a good place to start. I mean, basically the first half of the book sets up why mindfulness practice and how you get one started, how you build it into your life. And the second half of the book is all about how we would use these practices to work with everyday problems, anxiety, depression, interpersonal challenges, the challenges of aging, stress related medical disorders. It really goes through a wide range of difficulties that we run into living alive and how we might use mindfulness practices for that. And it's written for the general public, although it's also used by clinicians, because it does talk about these different problems and how you might deal with them, whereas the latter book, mindfulness, is one of the tools that's in it for sure, because we want to really catch ourselves in the act of this constant social comparison and really see how we get caught in it. And we want to use the mindfulness practices to be able to heal. The past hurts, because when we've got injuries, whether it's being picked last in teams in elementary school, or perhaps more profound injuries, unless we can heal those past injuries, then everything new now that reminds us of it is going to get us going. So that, for example, if a person experienced a lot of rejection in their family of origin, well, of course they go through the world hungering for acceptance and fearing rejection. And we have to be able to go back and feel and heal. The past hurts in order to free ourselves now, to not be so stuck on self evaluation and not to have our thermostats so much on the outside of the room where other people can control our feelings about ourselves by tone of voice or what have. So mindfulness practice plays a role there as well. But in this more focused project of is there a way I can get out of my own way and maybe be at peace, more and more connected to others and more engaged in life, rather than worrying so much about how I'm doing?
[01:02:12] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, you can go to Dr. Ronsiegel.com to find all this. We'll put Ron's bio with a lot of links in the show notes as well, so that will take you to his work. And Ron, I want to thank you one as a fan. Thank you for all the work that you've done. Like I said, you've been a teacher for me for years, especially around the intersection of mindfulness and trauma. And I just appreciate your work.
And just an open invitation if you can think of anything you'd like to talk to Ina and I about, we would love to have you back on as a guest. This has been quite an honor for me, both professionally and personally, to have this time with you.
[01:02:57] Speaker C: Well, thank you. It's been a delight. You've asked thoughtful questions, Ina, you've made really useful, insightful contributions, and I appreciate having the time with you both.
[01:03:09] Speaker A: Awesome.
[01:03:10] Speaker D: Thank you very much. Ron, thanks so much. Really delightful hour.
[01:03:13] Speaker A: Yep, and thanks everybody for joining us again, optimal hrv.com or the heart ratevariabilitypodcast.com. You can find all the show notes. And please, we love any questions or feedbacks too. So thank you. And thank you, Ron and Ena for joining us.
