Finding Calm: An Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation

0:03 Good evening and welcome. 0:05 Thank you so much for joining us for tonight’s webinar Finding calm an introduction to mindfulness meditation Presented by dr. 0:13 Anton Sherbakov How did I do? 0:19 Okay, good do I keep like going in and out Okay, so my name is Katie Delaney and I am the family and medical outreach coordinator for the New Jersey Center for Tourette syndrome and I will be your facilitator this evening. 0:34 Before I introduce our presenter, I wanna go over some housekeeping notes. 0:38 The audience is muted. 0:39 If you are attending the live webinar, questions can be submitted in the questions box at the bottom of your screen. 0:45 During the live Q &A, the audience will gain access to unmute themselves. 0:49 We will stop recording before this point. 0:52 At the top right of your screen, you will see a paperclip icon. 0:55 There you will find a copy of the slides and upcoming events. 0:58 At the bottom of your screen, you will see a React button. 1:02 To the right is an arrow. 1:03 When you click the thumbs up, oh, I’m sorry. 1:05 When you click the arrow, you will see a few emojis such as a heart, thumbs up, et cetera. 1:10 Throughout the webinar, feel free to use this feature to let our presenter know how they’re doing. 1:17 If you guys can give me a thumbs up, if that sounds good to you, that would be great. 1:26 Awesome, beautiful. 1:27 I just wanna make sure you guys know where it is. 1:31 And for those viewing the webinar recording, you will not have access to these features. 1:35 However, any questions you have for the presenter can be submitted through the chat box to the left of your screen. 1:40 The presenter will answer those questions on our webinar blog located on our website and jcts.org under the programs tab. 1:48 This blog will be monitored until Tuesday, April 1st. 1:52 Any personal information will not be included in the post. 1:55 The New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome and Associated Disorders, its directors and employees assume no responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, objectivity, or usefulness of the information presented on our site. 2:08 We do not endorse any recommendation or opinion made by any member or physician, nor do we advocate any treatment. 2:15 You are responsible for your own medical decisions. 2:18 Now, it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for this evening, Dr. Anton Shcherbakov. 2:23 He is a licensed psychologist in New Jersey and New York and a nationally recognized expert expert on anxiety, autism, OCD, and related disorders. 2:34 He received his Doctor of Psychology degree from Rutgers from the Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology or JISAP. 2:44 He is a board certified behavior analyst, the founder and director of Clear Step Therapy, and the founder of ThinkSight. Dr. Sherbakov, the floor is all yours. 2:56 All righty. 2:57 Well, thank you so much for the introduction, and thank you everyone for coming to learn today about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation. 3:06 I’m really excited to be here talking about this. 3:10 This is one of my favorite topics to share and talk about with people because, you know, incorporating mindfulness into your life can be just, you know, such positive influence, such a positive change in your life. 3:25 And it really doesn’t require so much as you’ll come to see. 3:30 Before I get started, one thing I want to ask folks to do is if you could find some sort of a small edible, some sort of small snack, I have a Hershey kiss here, we’re going to do a little exercise, a little mindful eating exercise in just a few minutes. 3:47 So you could grab something edible. 3:50 It could be a small piece of fruit, a berry, a little piece of candy, anything that you have readily available. 4:00 If you don’t have something available for whatever reason, grab some sort of object that you can use that you will not eat, but you can follow some of the other steps along with us. 4:12 So just wanted to give people a minute because they might need a little bit of time to find that. 4:16 But while you’re doing that, I’ll just give some introductory stuff about what we’ll be doing today. 4:21 So we have three objectives. 4:23 The first will be to learn about mindfulness meditation and how it can help to reduce stress and improve wellbeing. 4:31 We’ll practice actually a couple of mindfulness exercises together here in this webinar that you can use in your everyday life. 4:39 And I’ll share some additional resources to continue and deepen your meditation practice. 4:46 Katie, can we put up the first poll here? Is that already up? I don’t know if I can see it. 4:51 Of course, I’ll do it right now. You literally read my mind. 4:54 Okay, perfect. A pulse from people on how they’re feeling in terms of their stress. 5:02 I’m guessing if you’re attending this webinar, you may be interested in figuring out how to reduce your stress. So yeah, it’s curious to hear where people have been at. 5:13 And while we’re doing the poll, I’ll also just share the outline of what we’ll be covering. 5:18 We’ll do a mindful eating exercise, as I mentioned. 5:21 We’ll talk about what is mindfulness of benefits. 5:24 We’ll talk about it’s the mechanisms and why it actually works to help reduce stress, anxiety, and other things. 5:31 We’ll do another mindfulness of breath and body exercise. 5:36 We’ll talk about some applications to your daily life and what informal meditation is, and I’ll share those additional resources with you as well. 5:46 Okay, so I’m just pulling up my clock here so that I’m keeping track of time. 5:52 All right, how are we with the poll? 5:55 Do we have folks answers in? 5:57 Yeah, so I just closed it. 5:59 We had 11% say very low, 44% say mild, 33% say moderate, and 11% say high. 6:10 Got it, okay, well thank you. 6:12 So it sounds like a mix for those of you that are saying mild or non, great. 6:20 That’s an awesome starting point for, the bulk it sounds like we’re somewhere mild, moderate. 6:27 You’ll definitely find some strategies that you can use here to help try and reduce some of the stress that you’re experiencing in your life. 6:35 So all right, without further ado, let’s get to our first exercise, mindful eating. 6:42 So for those of you that have been able to find an object that you can eat or even one that you can’t, basically what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna try to approach this object as if you are an alien from another planet. 6:59 You happen to have the same five senses that we do, but you’ve never seen this object before in your life. 7:04 So we wanna approach it with like a total beginner’s mind and just explore it with our five senses. 7:10 And I’ll kind of guide you through this. 7:12 You can apply it to the object that you have in your hands as well. 7:16 So first, let’s begin by just looking at the object in your hands. 7:22 Try to just notice the way the light might be reflecting off of the object that you have. 7:30 See if you can notice any details. 7:33 The one that the object that I’m looking at is quite shiny and actually metallic looking. 7:40 And then you can also use your sense of touch to see what that object feels like in your hands. 7:47 Is it smooth? 7:49 Is it rough? 7:50 Does it kind of have ridges and different textures? 7:53 What does it feel like against your fingers as you explore this object? 7:58 You can also hold the object to your ear and notice what sort of sounds it makes as you touch it. 8:07 It’s a little bit strange, I know, but bear with me, just exploring this object in every way. 8:13 You can also hold it to your nose and see what it smells like. 8:21 Does it smell sweet? 8:23 Does it smell sour? 8:25 Does it not smell like much at all? 8:30 Okay. 8:30 In the case of my object, I see that there’s a wrapper on it, so I’m going to unwrap it. 8:38 Just paying attention to the sound of what that’s like. 8:43 It’s very crinkly. 8:45 You can hear it. 8:48 Now that it’s unwrapped, I’m gonna explore this layer of the object, smelling it, continuing to move it around in my hands, It’s noticing the difference with the object no longer in its wrapper. 9:06 Noticing it has a very different sound now that it’s no longer in its wrapper. 9:13 Now we can get to the step of actually using our sense of taste because we haven’t done that yet. 9:19 Now for those of you that didn’t have an edible object or didn’t grab one, obviously don’t do this. 9:23 But if you did get some sort of a treat or edible object, now is the time where you can take a bite of it, just a small bite, and take some very methodical, slow chews, and notice the flavor of the object. 9:47 Is it sweet, sour, salty, bitter, something else? 9:55 Taking another small, methodical bite, chewing slowly and mindfully. 10:07 Now, if you did have a Hershey kiss, it would probably be quite unusual for you to be eating it with more than one bite. 10:14 I usually eat these in like half of a second, right? 10:19 It’s a very different way of eating, slowly, methodically. 10:29 Noticing as you’re chewing how the texture of the object is changing in your mouth. 10:34 noticing what it feels like when you actually swallow this object that you’re eating. 10:43 Okay. I’m just going to finish chewing here and proceed forward. 10:53 Now, ordinarily, when I do this exercise live with people, I like to hear kind of about your experiences, which unfortunately I won’t really get to hear until the Q &A, but just as a quick kind of pulse, You know, did you like this exercise? 11:12 Was it different than things that you’ve done before? 11:14 If you can give us a thumbs up or another, or a thumbs down if you did it. 11:19 I don’t even know if we have a thumbs down. 11:21 It’s given us a sense of what your experience was. 11:28 I don’t know if I can see the reactions on my screen. 11:39 Okay, well, hopefully you all enjoyed that and experienced that as something different that you haven’t done before. 11:47 One of the things that I really like about doing this live is I often actually deal with raisins that I bring in. 11:52 I just didn’t happen to have any today to do this with. 11:57 And people are often surprised at how much flavor is packed in a raisin. 12:02 It’s such a mundane, everyday sort of object or treat in a lot of ways. 12:08 And when you actually eat it slowly and methodically in this way, you notice just how much flavor sugar is packed into a tiny, tiny little raisin. 12:19 So hopefully you had an experience similar to that with your object. 12:22 And if you didn’t, see if there’s something you could do that with in this coming week after our webinar today. So let me do one more. Can we do the next poll, Katie? 12:39 Thank you. 12:41 So while we’re doing that poll, I’ll just talk and define a little what mindfulness is. So mindfulness is not something very complicated at all, actually. 12:51 Really the definition of it is just paying attention on purpose in the present moment. 12:58 And this last piece is rather critical and the most difficult, which is non-judgmentally, right? So we’re so used to evaluating our experience constantly, right? Was this good? 13:10 it was this bad, was this fun, was this boring, was this interesting. 13:16 We’re so used to doing this automatically all the time, just having this narrative in our head, judging everything that’s going on, right? 13:26 And the idea with mindfulness is to try to just step back from that and just notice those judgments. 13:34 Now we can’t necessarily stop judging because we just do it automatically, right? 13:39 This apple is good. 13:40 This apple’s not good. 13:41 We just, this is how we see the world. 13:44 But trying to slow down on at least becoming aware of those judgments so they don’t drive us and control all of our behavior is one of the themes kind of inherent in mindfulness and meditation. 14:02 Okay, well, we’ll give a little bit more time in the poll. 14:04 I’m just curious to see kind of folks’ experience with mindfulness up until this point. 14:12 But I like this little graphic that summarizes this pretty perfectly, this cartoon. 14:17 You know, usually we’re much more like the person on the left here, this person who got their mind full of all sorts of different things, right? 14:28 They’re thinking about their mail and their job and maybe their kids and this work presentation, what other people are thinking about them, right? 14:36 We’re walking through our lives with so many thoughts filling up our brain. 14:43 And right next to the person is this dog, which we don’t know what’s going on inside of any dog’s head, but we might imagine that he’s just thinking about the trees and the sun, right? 14:54 And what a stark difference there, right? 14:58 Who’d imagine that the dog is much more peaceful in this moment, just enjoying this walk, the sun, the trees, and so on, right? 15:05 And the idea of mindfulness is to be in this moment more like this dog, right? 15:12 To just be focusing on the present moment, not all the stuff in the past, not all the stuff in the future that we’re worried about, just right here and now, what we’re doing in this moment, just as we did during the mindful eating exercise, just trying to focus on eating rather than the 20 other things we might be thinking about in this moment. 15:35 All right, Katie, did you close the poll yet by any chance? 15:38 Yeah, so I just closed it and we had 50% say I’ve heard of it but haven’t practiced much. 15:46 Wonderful, okay. 15:48 40% said I practice occasionally and understand mindfulness principles. 15:53 And then 10% said I practice meditation regularly but I’m no expert. 15:59 And just to let you know, when the poll was up, the audience wasn’t able to see the slide that you were explaining. 16:05 So I just wanted to make sure. 16:07 Okay, I did not know that. 16:08 Good to know. 16:08 You’ll be able to see it now. 16:10 All right, so yes, I can go back to this for a moment here, the definition of mindfulness. 16:15 So in case you missed it as I was talking, here it is on the screen, but wonderful. 16:20 So it sounds like we really, you know, we have a mix, a good, you know, half of you who really aren’t very familiar with mindfulness at all. 16:27 And this is your first introduction to it, which is very exciting for me. 16:31 Hopefully I can ignite some passion and some excitement for this practice in your lives. 16:37 And for those of you that practice occasionally or are familiar with it, hopefully this can strengthen your practice, get you engaged even more and more excited about it. 16:48 I know for me, whenever I go to a talk, a presentation or do some sort of a group meditation thing, And for me, it does always kind of like reignite my excitement for the practice as well. 17:03 So that’s wonderful. 17:05 Okay. 17:07 So, let’s talk a little bit about the history of mindfulness and how it’s come to be so ubiquitous here, at least from my perspective in the United States. 17:16 So mindfulness is a really ancient practice, meditation more broadly as a term. 17:24 There’s different types of meditation. 17:25 The one I’m talking to you all about to you all today is mindfulness meditation, more specifically. 17:32 But meditation has been around for thousands of years that originated in China and India and has been really closely associated with Buddhism historically, right? 17:44 But it really came to the United States, at least to the psychological sort of medical world in the late 1970s with this guy by the name of John Cabotin. 18:00 He founded the Mindfulness Stress Reduction Program at UMass in 1979. 18:06 And since then, it’s really taken hold to become a really foundational practice in psychotherapy. 18:12 It’s used in a lot of different therapeutic modalities such as MVCT, which is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT, DBT, dialectical and behavioral, sorry, dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. 18:29 So, you know, it’s, these days in terms of modern evidence-based psychotherapy, it is so commonly incorporated as a part of the treatment. 18:40 And part of the reason for that is that it’s been really extensively researched in lots and lots of different settings over these past 45 years or so. 18:50 And the benefits have been really profound. 18:53 Let me share what the studies are telling us. 18:57 When I first started learning about mindfulness and I’ve been doing mindfulness meditation for how long now? 19:05 13, 14 years, something like that. 19:08 It’s been quite a long time. 19:12 I was quite skeptical about all these purported benefits. 19:16 So whenever there is something that’s advertised as having such a wide array of benefits, as a scientist, I’m sort of skeptical. 19:28 I’m like, well, how can something be beneficial for this many different things? 19:32 That seems strange to me, right? 19:36 But as we’ll learn about the mechanisms of mindfulness, I think you’ll kind of come to understand why it can have such wide reaching benefits in people’s lives and why it’s caught on so widely in the psychological and medical world. 19:54 So with that tangent sort of aside, let me talk a little bit more about the benefits and kind of what the research is telling us. 20:03 So the most profound, well-established benefits that we see from dozens, probably hundreds of studies, really, is reductions in stress, anxiety, anger, and depression. 20:15 This is where mindfulness meditation has been studied very, very extensively, that there’s these really pretty significant effects on these mental health conditions. 20:27 Also along with that, oftentimes there’s an improved ability to focus, to concentrate, and also sleep, right? 20:33 Which makes sense, one, because of what you’re doing in meditation is training your ability to concentrate and to focus, and also because when you reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, you’re also going to be better able to sleep, focus, concentrate, et cetera. 20:50 The other really interesting set of findings is mindfulness meditation as actually a treatment for distress and chronic pain associated with various health conditions, such as fibromyalgia, cancer, et cetera. 21:04 These are folks for which the traditional medical approaches typically haven’t had that much additional support for now. 21:15 Obviously, there’s very effective treatments for certain types of cancers, but for just some of the pain, the distress, the nausea, difficulty sleeping, some of the side effects that can come with cancer treatment, a lot of times there aren’t very effective remedies out there. 21:32 And that was actually the original studies that John Kabat-Zinn had done in his treatment program called mindfulness-based stress reduction, showing a lot of help for folks with chronic health conditions, whether it’s in cancer treatment, again, chronic pain, various other health conditions, a lot of really positive effects there. 21:54 Also, interestingly, decreases in hypertension or high blood pressure, again, probably also linked with the decreases in stress as a result of meditation, improved positive affect, sense of spirituality, compassion, and just overall quality of life. 22:09 So not just decreasing negative things, but also increasing some positive things. 22:15 So, you know, that’s a lot of potential benefits there. 22:20 And one of the things I actually want to do now, Katie, if you could pull up the third and final poll here for us is kind of see which benefits are you all most interested in or most hopeful about in terms of your meditation practice? 22:36 Which of these benefits interests you the most? 22:41 So I just posted it, or I just launched it. 22:44 Yeah, did my screen change color? 22:46 I noticed my night mode turned on on my screen. 22:48 Can you see that on your end or not? 22:51 No, I think it looks, I mean, it looks fine regardless. 22:55 I didn’t notice it. 22:57 Okay, got it. 22:58 Yeah, it looks like it’s got like the blue light filter on for me, but that’s okay. 23:03 No worries. 23:04 We have a thumbs up from one of the attendees. 23:07 So I think it’s very good. 23:09 All right. 23:11 Reducing blue light for everyone if it is working on your end. 23:14 So that’s a good thing. 23:17 No, it’s always good to do that. 23:21 So we’ll just give it a couple more seconds. 23:31 And while the poll is going, I know you all can’t see my slides. 23:35 thank you for telling me that, Katie. 23:37 I’ll just share some other benefits, specifically actually for tics and for Tourette’s. 23:44 There have actually been some studies that have looked into whether mindfulness can be helpful for individuals with Tourette’s or with other tic disorders. 23:53 And there’s been at least two that I’m aware of that have shown some pretty promising results. 23:59 So in a 2015 study, they found that 59% of participants reported improvements in their ticks with about a 20% decrease in tick severity. 24:11 So not a home run treatment by any stretch, right? 24:14 But still a pretty significant help and something that could be a great adjunct for treatment. 24:21 And a recent 2024 randomized control trial actually showed pretty similar results. 24:27 And this one was done with a telehealth or a teletherapy delivered protocol, which is also really cool, that folks that need to come in for that. So I think that one was actually a group treatment as well. 24:39 So, you know, for those of you that perhaps have tics or friends or family that have tics, you know, this may be something that’s also worth trying with them to see if that can help them with their tics. 24:51 Yeah, of course. 24:53 So I ended the poll and we have 57% says, reducing anxiety slash stress 14% said improving focus slash concentration, 21% said better sleep, and then 7% said professional development slash requirements. 25:11 Nice, okay. 25:12 So again, a little bit of a distribution there, but the bulk kind of thinking about the benefits for anxiety and stress, which are some of the best established benefits, I would say, of mindfulness, of a regular mindfulness practice. 25:26 So excellent, thank you all. 25:27 All right, so these are some of the potential applications for ticks as well and how it may help folks with Tourette’s. 25:38 And one of the mechanisms that we think about here is just that actually increased awareness of ticks, increased ability to recognize when they’re happening can actually help to decrease their frequency, right? 25:51 A lot of times folks, especially young kids, may say they don’t even notice that they’re taking with their having tics. 25:59 So that’s probably part of the mechanism as to what’s helping there. 26:03 And also potentially reducing stress, reducing anxiety, which is often a frequent trigger for tics as well. 26:11 So definitely something to explore and to consider. 26:15 All right, so let’s talk about why mindfulness works. 26:21 So this statistic was both fascinating to me and also not surprising at the same time. 26:28 So studies that have asked people to track their sort of mental activity, often using, you know, in the past those were palm pilots, now view a smartphone. 26:37 We’re just asking people to check in throughout the day, like, hey, how focused are you? 26:41 How present are you in what you’re doing right now? 26:43 And those studies have found that about half of the time that we’re awake, we’re thinking about things other than whatever it is that we’re doing. 26:51 So yes, that includes those of you in this webinar right now who are thinking about dinner or what they’re gonna do tomorrow or what’s happening after this or whatever, right? 27:01 Because that’s normal, right? 27:02 Our minds wander all the time, about half of the time that we’re awake. 27:08 And this is an amazing feature of our brain that we can think about things that are not immediately in front of us. 27:16 And this mind wandering also has a profound and significant impact on our mental health and on our happiness. 27:25 And the correlation seems to be pretty clear. 27:27 The more your mind is wandering, the more you’re time traveling to the past and to the future in your mind, the less happy you are. 27:35 Why? 27:37 Well, I’m going to share this cartoon here to sort of demonstrate this or drive this point home. 27:44 The thing with our brains is when we time travel to the past or to the future, we don’t tend to think about positive things. 27:51 This is a really disappointing feature of our brains. 27:55 You know, it’s not that we think back to the past and think like, oh man, that trip that I took to Florida last year was like so great. 28:05 That was so fun. 28:06 The beach, my family, ah, what a beautiful time. 28:09 That’d be wonderful if we did more of that. 28:11 But what do we usually think about when we think about the past? 28:15 We think about things that we regret, things that we feel guilty about, that stupid thing we said to our co-worker last week, the embarrassing thing that we did earlier that day, or we fixate on people that have wronged us in some way, someone that we’re upset with, our grievances, right? 28:33 The guy at the gym who never puts the weights back, just always leaving them all over the floor and how annoying that is, and why didn’t I say something? 28:40 I should have said something to him, right? 28:42 Things that we’re sad about, things that we’re angry or bitter about. 28:47 That’s what we tend to think about when we think about the past, sadly, right? 28:51 And psychologists call this rumination. 28:53 We’re just sort of repeatedly chewing on some of these past events over and over again, usually in a non-productive, unhelpful, and painful way. 29:04 So that’s what we tend to do when we think about the past. 29:07 The other thing that we tend to do is we think about the future, and as we see the big block here with this little character carrying it, It’s, you know, we think about things that we’re worried about. 29:20 We feel tense, we feel stressed. 29:23 We, you know, wonder about the presentation we have coming up and are we gonna mess it up? 29:26 We wonder about, you know, our kids’ future and are they gonna turn out okay? 29:31 We worry about, you know, money or the state of the world or the environment or the economy or whatever, right? 29:40 We tend to think mostly negative thoughts or worries about the future. 29:44 we don’t tend to think about the future and be like, man, I can’t wait until, you know, like self driving cars and I could just get in my car and I’ll drive me to work while I take a nap or man, you know, this thing in the future will be so cool. 29:57 The world’s going to be a better place, right? 30:00 We don’t tend even if we’re generally optimistic, we don’t tend to think about the future and think of positive things that are going to happen. 30:08 We think about like negative bad things that are going to happen. 30:12 And this actually isn’t bug. 30:14 This is really how our brains are sort of meant to be if we think about the biological evolutionary perspective, right? It’s sort of dangerous to be comfortable, right? 30:25 The cave man or woman who’s sitting in the cave thinking, like, you know, everything’s good. 30:31 I got, like, a couple of vegetables here and some meat. Like, things are all right. 30:35 And wasn’t worrying about the future and the potential drought coming was gonna end up in a lot of trouble, right? 30:45 So for our ancestors that survived, they tended to be sort of neurotic, right? 30:51 Like anxious, stressed, worried, trying to predict bad things that could happen. 30:58 And so this is just kind of how our brain works. 31:01 But we are not trapped to always operate in this way and that’s kind of what this graphic is getting at, right? 31:09 There’s this little character in the middle here that’s not in the future, they’re not in the past, and they’re trying to just be in the present. 31:16 And that’s what mindfulness is all about, right? 31:19 To go back a few slides here, it’s this cartoon, right? 31:22 It’s walking through the field and just being here in the present moment. 31:27 It’s being with the trees and the sun and the grass and not in all the million other things that are occupying our minds. 31:34 Now, of course, we have to do some worrying about the future. 31:38 We have to do some planning. 31:40 We should do some reflection about the past. 31:43 But mindfulness is about trying to just spend some more time in the present, right? 31:48 Not all of our time. 31:49 That’s impossible, but just some more time in the present where we’re just here, right? 31:55 Because the other piece of it is when we’re time traveling, and I do this all the time myself too. 32:01 I’m not perfect. 32:01 No one is. 32:02 You know, we’re not as engaged in the current life activity that we’re doing that actually might be quite nice I know it’s just sadly all the time when I’m like reading my kids a book that I’ve read like 50 times before You know, it’s such a nice calm pleasant moment of my day where I’m reading, you know Cat in a hat for the 50th or hundredth time at this point And my mind just can’t help but wander to like junk, right? 32:29 to the stuff in the past and the present, past and the future that I’m worried about or, you know, bitter about, rather than just enjoying that moment with my son reading The Cat in the Hat, right, which is a lovely book, it’s a wonderful book, and a wonderful moment with my son that’s quite precious. 32:46 Right, so this mind wandering, this time traveling just, you know, robs us of being able to enjoy the present moment. 32:54 And so really mindfulness is about training yourself, practicing just being in the present moment more. 33:00 That’s really what it’s all about in a nutshell. 33:04 And in order to do that, one of the things that we have to learn to do is turn off what we might call autopilot, right? 33:13 Most of us spend much of our lives on autopilot. 33:17 What does that mean? 33:19 It’s when we’re not making necessarily conscious or intentional choices about what we’re paying attention to, what we’re thinking about, what we’re doing, right? 33:31 The most obvious example of this is when we get in our cars and drive. 33:36 And for most of us, right, we kind of get to our destination. 33:39 We listen to some music, a podcast, whatever, the radio, right, and we don’t necessarily, we’re not like aware of every single turn we’re taking or what we’re doing. 33:48 We’re sort of just on autopilot, right? 33:50 We’re just going. 33:52 But we actually operate a lot of our life that way, we’re just sort of, you know, reacting to whatever is happening. 34:01 But slowing down, becoming more mindful, turning off that autopilot is about, you know, really refocusing on what’s in front of us, and having the choice to respond, right, to choose what we’re doing, rather than automatically pulling up our phone when we’re standing in the elevator, you know, waiting or, you know, standing in line at the store, we say to ourselves, you know, what do I want to do right now? Do I want to pull out my phone and go on TikTok? 34:27 Or do I want to do something else? Do I want to look around? 34:30 Do I want to reflect on the trip that I took last year with my family? That was quite lovely, right? We can choose something else. 34:40 And it allows us to tune into the pleasures of everyday life, which is my personal favorite part of mindfulness meditation. I feel like it helps us to enjoy our everyday more. 34:52 Because there’s so many wonderful things that we miss out by not being present by not being tuned into what’s happening around us. 35:01 Alright, just by, you know, using the react button there, just want to get a sense. Are people with me so far? 35:07 Does this make sense? 35:14 Yep, we got a whole bunch of thumbs up. 35:16 All right, good, good. Let’s keep going then. 35:21 Let’s talk about, we’ll start with formal meditation strategies. 35:25 These are usually what people think of when they think of meditation or mindfulness. And there’s some different practices that you can do. 35:35 One of the most common ones is what’s called the body scan. 35:38 So basically it’s sort of exactly what it sounds like you go through your body part by part. 35:44 So your feet, your legs, you know, your knees, your hips, your abdomen, your shoulders, your arms, paying attention to each part of your body, noticing the sensations that are present. 35:56 This can actually be really, really, really relaxing. 36:00 A lot of folks that I worked with over the years like doing it sort of before they go to bed, like as they’re getting ready for bed to calm and relax their body. 36:09 There’s something called the minute breathing space, which is a very quick three minute, just as it sounds, meditation, which we’ll actually do in about two minutes. That’ll be one of our practices for today. 36:23 There’s sitting meditation, which is another one that people commonly think of when they think of meditation. 36:29 So, you know, sitting perhaps with your legs crossed or something like that, focusing on your breathing, being quiet and still, that’s a very common form of meditation. 36:38 There’s loving kindness meditation, where you focus on, you know, spreading love and kindness to yourself, visualizing that both to yourself and to others, important others in your life, that can be a really warm sort of just enjoyable practice to bask in some self-compassion, some self-love. 37:01 Walking meditation, where you’re focusing on just the movements of your body, on your surroundings, on nature, if you’re in nature. 37:09 That’s one that I really love doing. 37:12 And mindful movement. 37:14 So a lot of folks are probably familiar with yoga. 37:16 Yoga is a meditation practice, or can be a meditation practice, as it’s most often done. 37:23 Again, they’re focusing on the movement of your body, gentle stretching, and things like that. 37:30 And part of why I wanted to list these out for you all is just to dispel the notion that meditation is just about sitting with your eyes closed and focusing on your breath. 37:41 Now, we are gonna do that in just about a minute, and that is one excellent and easy way to meditate, but there are dozens, hundreds, or infinite ways, really, to practice mindfulness meditation. 37:54 But without further ado, let’s do one more practice, because I love making things engaging and interactive as much as I can, rather than just talking about it. 38:04 So for all of you who are here with me today, if I could ask you to just get into a comfortable seated position, close your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so, wherever you are. 38:18 I’m going to close my eyes as I’m leading you all through this exercise. 38:25 Let’s begin just by taking a deep, long cleansing breath by breathing in through the nose. 38:36 long breath in and a long exhaling breath through the mouth allowing your body to approach a place of stillness then becoming aware of the thoughts that are present in your mind right now what are you thinking about are you thinking about the future about the past you having judgments perhaps about this experience or about yourself. 39:17 This is boring. 39:18 This is hard. 39:19 I don’t know if I can do this. 39:21 I like this. 39:22 This is relaxing. 39:24 Just notice whatever the dialogue, the thoughts are in your head. 39:29 There’s no need to change them or argue with them, respond to them. 39:34 Just notice what they are. 39:40 Noticing any sounds that might be present in your environment. 39:44 Doesn’t have to be totally quiet to meditate. 39:47 that doesn’t matter. 39:51 You might hear the background noise of some TV or some other people or something outside. Noticing those sounds. 40:08 Then shifting your attention to your breath. 40:13 Noticing it coming in through your nose, coming out through your mouth. See if you can notice that flow of breath. 40:33 Where do you notice at most, is it in your nose, the back of your throat, your chest, somewhere else. 40:48 You may notice your mind wandering as you try and do this and that’s okay, that’s normal. 40:54 Just gently bring it, your mind back to your breath whenever that happens. 41:08 Then let’s expand the sense of awareness to include your body as a whole. 41:14 Notice the position of your legs, your feet, your hands, your shoulders, your head, your facial expression, your eyes, just becoming aware of your body, any sensations that might be present, maybe warmth or coolness, relaxation or tension, noticing whatever is present right here, continuing to breathe, perhaps imagining the breath spreading out all through your body, circulating through your bloodstream, going down to your toes and out through your mouth. 42:13 In just a few moments, we’ll bring this exercise to a close. 42:18 But before we do that, thanking yourself for taking the time to be still in this way. 42:26 And whenever you’re ready, opening your eyes, trying to bring a sense of heightened awareness to the next few moments of your day. 42:37 All right. 42:39 Thank you for joining me on that. 42:42 I just want to get a sense, what did everyone think? 42:45 Can you share some of your reactions with the button on the screen? 42:55 A whole bunch of hearts and thumbs up. 42:59 Good. 43:01 So I’ll just share, because I can’t ask you live yet, but I’ll ask during the Q &A. 43:07 A lot of folks do experience this exercise as relaxing, but other folks it might actually be anxiety provoking or challenging. 43:16 Some people feel that they’re not doing it right or they can’t clear their mind or they feel tense or you know whatever. Any number of those experiences are normal and okay. 43:29 Sometimes when you go to meditate you’ll notice that your mind is really loud and busy and all over the place and that’s okay. 43:36 You can’t do meditation wrong. That’s one of the things I love about it. 43:40 It’s just about being aware of of whatever, whatever right now is. 43:45 And sometimes your head is busy with a million things going on. 43:49 And that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. 43:51 The goal is not to have an empty mind. 43:53 The goal is just to keep bringing your attention back to the present. 43:58 Every meditation you do is gonna involve your mind wandering a thousand times and you bringing it back a thousand or a thousand and one times. 44:08 That’s really, that’s really what it’s about. 44:10 So there’s no way to do it wrong. 44:13 So if you take nothing else away today, I hope you take that away, that whatever you’re doing is okay and that there’s value in slowing down and being still always. 44:25 So, okay. 44:26 Let’s talk a little bit about how to adapt this for children. 44:31 So the more formal meditation that we did, that three minute breathing space, you’re not gonna do this with young kids. 44:40 excuse me, mindfulness in general can be done with kids as young as four years old. 44:45 They generally have the sort of the capacity and oftentimes even the interest to engage with it in a meaningful way, but you just do short, more interactive things. 44:57 You might do something like a slow motion snack, kind of like the mindful eating exercise that we did. 45:02 You might, you know, blow bubbles with them and have them really focus on seeing what it’s like as the bubbles expanding, as they’re breathing out, how it can contract as they stop breathing, how it forms as it pulls away, things like that. 45:16 Doing a mindful nature walk, slowing down, noticing the crunching of the leaves and the smells of the forest and things like that. 45:24 Looking for shapes and clouds, doing breathing with images like pizza breathing is one thing I like to do with kids that love pizza. 45:33 So like imagining you’re smelling a delicious pizza pie, And then blowing on it, because pizza is always hot when you first get it fresh, right? 45:42 Blowing on it to cool it down, things like that. 45:44 So those are all, you know, mindful exercises that you can do with kids. 45:50 Adolescents, you know, teens, they may enjoy more structured and lengthy meditations, but you know, you’re not going to do those with young kids. 45:58 I want to share some informal mindfulness you can do as well. 46:02 So I just shared the list of the formal meditation practices. 46:07 And we actually just did a formal meditation practice, a very brief one. 46:11 They can be as long as 20, 30, 45 minutes, hours if you want to. 46:15 But informal meditation typically is with your eyes open. 46:20 And it’s just kind of integrated into your everyday life. 46:24 So I have a little cartoon picture here of a person brushing their teeth. 46:28 That’s a great way to integrate mindfulness into your life. 46:31 So if there’s routine activities you do every day, like brushing your teeth, going down the stairs, opening a door, going for a walk, taking the time to just focus on doing that activity and really paying attention to it, like feeling the toothbrush in your mouth, feeling the little bubbles of foam as you’re brushing, right, you know, really being present in that moment rather than thinking about, you know, all these other things you might think about when you’re brushing your teeth. 47:00 And just try to notice how much your mind wanders when you’re doing routine boring things like brushing your teeth, taking a shower, walking down the steps, cooking pasta, right? 47:11 Things that are very easy for you. 47:13 How much our minds wander during that time and instead choosing to focus on the moment when you do them. 47:21 Just taking five mindful breaths is a very easy way to do a quick little mini meditation. 47:26 And so just a slow, deep breath and taking a few in a row. 47:35 I just did one for the sake of brevity. 47:38 Eating or drinking and only eating or drinking. 47:41 Most of us, sadly, we don’t just eat, right? 47:46 We eat and watch TV. 47:48 We eat and do work. 47:50 We eat and do chores. 47:51 We eat while we drive, not a good idea usually. 47:55 But so rarely do we just give our full attention to eating. 47:58 I bet many of you have had the experience of eating some kind of sweet treat that you like, like ice cream or chips or something, and looking down and being like, who ate this, who ate my ice cream, right? 48:08 Because you were just like not even paying attention. 48:10 You were just like, you know, shoveling it into your mouth and not really even enjoying it, right? 48:15 How sad is that? 48:17 You know, really making an effort to do this at least periodically. 48:21 It doesn’t have to be for every meal. 48:23 Being mindful as you’re waiting in line, looking around rather than pulling out your phone immediately. 48:28 Paying attention to tightness in your body. 48:30 I’ll often notice my shoulders up at my ears in the middle of the day, you know, they’re like all the way up here. 48:35 And I’m like, woo, I gotta let those shoulders down, release some of that tightness. 48:40 Taking a couple of minutes in your car before you step into work, before you step home, whatever the case might be, right? 48:46 Just easy, everyday routine things where you could just slow down and pay attention, right? 48:52 Rather than being on autopilot. 48:54 So I would seriously, if you’re, you know, someone interested in meditation, this is oftentimes a really great place to start. 49:01 It’s really easy and it’s things you do every day, right? 49:03 So it’s sort of easy to remember to do these and make them part of your routine. 49:10 You guys will have my slides, so I won’t go into this in much detail, but just ideas for mindfulness with your kids at school or at home, things you can do. 49:18 You can do guided meditation recordings, mindful snacks, stretching breaks, sensory jars, taking a minute to practice gratitude, mindfully listening to something. 49:28 These are all quick, easy activities you can incorporate with your kids, school or home, et cetera. 49:36 And then last but not least, before we switch to our Q &A, I wanted to share some resources with you all. 49:42 I’m a big fan of the different apps out there for mindfulness. 49:46 The top two up there, Medito and UCLA Mindful are 100% free. 49:51 Download them, they’ll guide you through meditations like the more formal one that I did with you second today. 49:58 There’s Headspace and Calm, which are a little more sophisticated. 50:03 They got a lot more content. 50:05 They’re subscription-based. 50:06 They do have free stuff on the app as well, free meditations you can access. 50:10 They’re really, really well done, but you can start out with a free meditation app. 50:14 There’s really no need to pay for one off the bat unless you want to. 50:19 YouTube, especially finding good meditations for kids. 50:21 just type in meditation, mindfulness, kids, teens, meditation for anxiety, whatever you’re looking for help with, there’s going to be just great ones on there. 50:32 They’re really not hard to find. There’s at least thousands, if not millions of meditation videos on YouTube. 50:40 A bunch of great books, two by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I would recommend, as well as this one by Mark Williams and Danny who created the Mindful Space Cognitive Therapy Program and some links to audio recordings from research centers for mindfulness at UCSD, UCLA, and the University of Vermont. 51:01 All right, and with that, I’m thinking let’s switch to the Q and A. 51:08 Let me take off my slides here. 51:15 Okay, there we go. 51:19 Thank you so, so much. 51:21 That was wonderful. 51:22 So, um, we’re going to hop into Q &A first, I’ll ask the submitted questions, and then we’ll switch to the verbal Q &A, which is when we will stop the reporting. 51:34 So one question we have is, someone said, I have heard that meditation and neurofeedback have similar benefits. 51:44 Do you know anything about that? 51:49 They can. 51:51 I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on neurofeedback, but it’s sort of in the broader category of biofeedback. 52:00 And that involves a lot of attention and focus on your body as well. 52:08 And so, yeah, I would say, you know, neurofeedback has some emerging evidence for benefits and like attention and concentration as well. 52:17 I would say the evidence base for meditation is probably quite a bit stronger at this point. 52:25 Another question we have is, I understand all the doom and gloom, but what about thinking of the positive during the past and present? 52:33 Meaning as a family, we try to build memories and talk about them often, and we talk about our hopes and futures as a family. 52:41 Beautiful, absolutely, yes. 52:42 No, I think taking the time for positive reminiscence, making plans for the future is a beautiful thing and often something we actually have to do intentionally. 52:54 I wish our brains were wired to think about positive things and reminisce positively by default, but they’re just not for, I don’t know, 99% of us. 53:07 I’m sure there’s exceptions to that rule, but yeah, absolutely. 53:11 taking the time to time travel, as I’ve been calling it, to intentional places is a wonderful thing. Absolutely. It’s more so about where our autopilot tends to take us. 53:23 Autopilot tends to take us to the doom and gloom. Understandably. Okay. 53:31 So before we switch to verbal questions, for those watching the recorded version, thank you so much for attending. 53:38 Please complete the survey. 53:39 An archive recording of this webinar will be posted to our website njcts.org under the programs tab. 53:49 The blog is now open and accessible under the archive webinar. 53:52 All questions submitted during the recorded viewing will be posted there. 53:56 Our presenter will be answering all questions posted until Tuesday April 1st. Any personal information will not be included. 54:03 Our next presentation will be rest easy skills to help fall and stay asleep presented by Dr., presented by Ms. Jillian DeTiberius. 54:13 It’s scheduled for Wednesday, April 30th at 7 p.m. 54:17 Eastern Standard Time, with the recording the following day, Thursday, May 1st at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. 54:24 We offer professional development certificates for school professionals and school nurses that attend the live and recording of the webinar. 54:32 To register for either time, please visit njcts.org slash webinars. 54:36 And with that, I’m going to stop the recording.