Mindfulness

UW Tacoma Associate Professor Jane Compson joins us to talk about mindfulness. Compson researches mindfulness and has created a program to help caregivers manage stress. We'll talk about her work and her efforts to incorporate mindfulness into the classroom. Compson will also walk us through a short mindfulness meditation.

Transcript

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Jane:

I think what mindfulness helps us to do or at least can help us to do it's a skill that you have to practice like anything else, but is that you can begin to see when you've been hooked in by a thought and not feel the needs to pursue that thought. Recognize it as maybe you can put a little bit more room around that thought. You don't have to chase it down or believe what it's telling you.

Voice over:

From UW Tacoma, this is Paw'd Defiance.

Eric:

Welcome to Pod Defiance, where we don't lecture, but we do educate. I'm Eric Wilson-Edge sitting in today for Sarah Smith. Today on the pod, mindfulness with UW Tacoma Associate Professor Jane Compson. Compson studies mindfulness and has created a program to help caregivers manage stress. We'll talk with Compson about her research and how she incorporates mindfulness into the classroom. Since these are especially stressful times, we'll take a break from the interview and listen in as Compson walks us through a guided meditation. Dr. Jane Compson, thank you for joining us today on Paw'd Defiance.

Jane:

Thank you for having me.

Eric:

Yeah. So, I wanted to start by talking about your research into mindfulness.

Jane:

Okay. So, I guess I have two wings to it. One is theoretical and one is more practical. So on the theoretical side, I'm interested in questions like, is mindfulness religious or secular? While that might sound a little bit like, "Well, who cares?" It's actually quite a big debate about that. As mindfulness becomes more popular, there are two schools that are beginning to come out as two schools of critique. One side says it's called the mindfulness like McDonald's, but McMindfulness critique. They're saying that mindfulness is in danger of being diluted and watered down. It was originally created or envisioned in the context of the ethical spiritual path. Now, you might have people who are like merchant bankers doing nefarious deals using mindfulness to be better at do their nefarious deals, right? So, you get to get the idea like mindfulness as being unmoored from its ethical foundations. So, that's the McMindfulness critique.

Jane:

On the other side of that is the stealth Buddhism critique. That's a critique that says that mindfulness has been taught in secular spaces like schools as though it's a secular thing, but actually it has its roots in Buddhism. So, people who are teaching mindfulness are actually secretly trying to convert people to Buddhism or if they're not trying to do that, they're not being honest about the fact that mindfulness is Buddhist. So, therefore mindfulness shouldn't be used in a secular space because it's religious.

Jane:

Those are two poles of the debate. In my research, I'm working on how to balance those and how to respond to those critiques. The short answer for me is that I don't think either of them are compelling, but I do think they have to be addressed.

Jane:

Then the other part I'm doing recently is about trauma and mindfulness. So, mindfulness as it's become more popular is taught in many different context and not all of the teachers who teach it are aware of the fact that many of us have trauma in our past. Sometimes some techniques, especially when you're sitting with difficult emotions, can retraumatize people, can trigger adverse responses. If you're careful and skillful, you can navigate that or avoid that altogether, but not everybody's aware of that risk. So, another thing I've been doing is trying to bring that conversation more to the fore. It's already out there a lot now, but I'm interested in helping to bring that to the light. So, those are the theoretical things.

Jane:

Then practically, I'm trying to develop a 10 hour training course called the CARE, which is training people in basic self care techniques and CARE is an acronym that stands for compassion, awareness, resilience, and empowerment. That's what I'm currently working on at the moment.

Eric:

So, this idea of McMindfulness, I wonder as someone who I have been doing mindfulness stuff for 10 years now, and it's interesting to see sort of, I wonder what your thoughts are on, I guess, the commodification of these ideas, right? It's almost like a lifestyle now you can purchase. Is that problematic or is that just like the veneer, that is just the top layer of something that is actually very useful underneath?

Jane:

Yeah. That's a million dollar question right there. I don't know the answer. My sense is that I guess it's like any tool or any training, you can use skillfully or unskillfully, right? So, I think that, I guess my intuition is that the latter of your options. Of course it comes packaged in the zeitgeist of how we live, which is a very commodified culture, but that in some context, if you get into it, it can be ultimately subversive of that culture. At least, if not subversive, then as you look more deeply, you get to ask more searching questions about your assumptions or the way that you hold the practice. Like if you're climbing up a mountain, as you get higher, then you get different views, and while you're in the lower ... before you started the trail, you wouldn't have been able to imagine those views maybe.

Jane:

So having said that, I do think there can be some really cringey examples of commodification of mindfulness, and especially when it's used in a really materialistic sense, but yeah, I think it has a process and it has its own energy. Just like if you were doing a running program for example, if you practice it correctly, then you ... by correctly I mean, you don't overtrain, you don't undertrain and you have a good coach or a good coaching program, then you can't help but get your cardiovascular strength. This is better. It goes up. Your muscular strength goes up and your fitness goes up. So with mindfulness, I feel like there is an unfolding of a process. It really does help our minds. If you are following those trainings, then that's what you feel the effects of that process in ways that you might not have anticipated. Don't know if that makes sense. Does that make sense to you?

Eric:

Yeah, they make sense to me.

Jane:

Okay.

Eric:

So, how did you get into this subject? What led you to want to research mindfulness?

Jane:

Well, it's kind of ironic because I reflect what happens in the mindfulness movement in America is that I got into it through my studies of Buddhism. So, just as mindfulness is well rooted in Buddhist traditions, not just Buddhists traditions, but it's particularly well developed there. So, that's how I first stumbled across it. Then I began to learn about the secular turn it took with things like mindfulness based stress reduction. So, I got into that and then I became really interested about how it might affect my teaching, how I could integrate mindfulness and contemplative practices into my teaching. Then it just kept blossoming from there. So, it started off as a part of my religion studies and then it's developed into something that's a more kind of not a secular as well.

Eric:

So, aside from researching mindfulness, do you incorporate mindfulness into your personal life?

Jane:

I do. I do. I should say here that at the moment in particular, weirdly, not as much as I really think I should, but yes, I do have a daily practice most of the time. I find I do it better when I'm accountable like if I'm with a group or something like that, and right now, of course that's not happening, but yes is the answer. I try. Not always very successfully, not always very good trainee.

Eric:

Yeah. I understand what you mean about, because there's this ... Right now, the pandemic, obviously, it's thrown routine and schedules and just throw those out the window. It just it's hard to find motivation and then the trick is not being hard on yourself for not having motivation because it sucks right now. So, it's already hard enough. Yeah. So, I don't know. Things that I think, "Oh, I should be doing more of that." I'm like, "Yeah, but I'm not going to."

Jane:

Yeah. Then not beating yourself up about it. Yes, exactly. That's really challenging. Yeah. I'm in it. I'm in that too, the lack of motivation thing. It's no joke. In the British tradition talking about obstacles of meditation, they have these things called the five hindrances, which are five obstacles and one of them is called sloth and torpor, and that just like, I love that because I just feel slothful and torpid a lot of the time. That's my big hindrance de-jour.

Eric:

Right.

Jane:

Yeah. Yeah.

Eric:

Yeah. It's an achievement when I've taken a shower before 3:00 p.m. Yeah, I really nailed today.

Jane:

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with me because that gives me a sense of solidarity, and I'm not the only one which helps.

Eric:

Well, there's nowhere to go, so who exactly am I going to get ... like you put a nice shirt on for. Like who-

Jane:

Yeah.

Eric:

No one.

Jane:

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. The routine is just off. Exactly.

Eric:

So, we're talking ... Right now is obviously very stressful. So, how do you see mindfulness fitting in right now?

Jane:

Well, it is extremely helpful for down-regulating our nervous systems, which are probably pretty spun up right now. I would imagine for most of us or for many of us, anyway. So even if you're just doing a couple of minutes, just a little pause when your mind's not like out there thinking about all the things, fretting about all the things, but just trying to bring it back to focusing on your inner, just one objects of your inner experience like your breathing, that slowly helps you train your mind to not be so scattered and not ... it's not just that you get hooked on all these different thoughts of the outside world, but you get hooked on them and then there's the emotional charge that comes with them.

Jane:

I think what mindfulness can help us to do it's a skill that you have to practice like anything else, but is that you can begin to see when you've been hooked in by a thought and not feel the needs to pursue that thought. Recognize it as maybe you can put a little bit more room around that thought. You don't have to chase it down or believe what it's telling you. That can be remarkably liberating and give a sense of spaciousness. Even if it's just a little chink of spaciousness right now, that can feel kind of nice. So yeah. Just physiologically, you're sitting still quietly. You're just calming yourself down. You're not taking all these stimuli, but you're slowing down, calming down and that's a relief too right now, I think.

Jane:

So, this is called stability, spaciousness and warmth. It's a really good practice, I think, for just settling down. I sometimes teach this at the beginning of class. So, I always close my eyes when I do this, but you don't have to. Get yourselves comfortable. Then you just sit in a stable position. Take a few deep breaths. Paying attention to the quality of stability, so that might be feeling your feet on the floor or feeling yourself rooted in the chair and sort of breathing into that sense of stability. If you're finding that hard to feel in your own body, you might imagine a firmly rooted magnificent tree or a mountain, breathing into and feeling that sense of stability.

Jane:

Then moving on to this feeling of spaciousness. So as you're breathing in, noticing, feeling of the air and the space in your lungs, becoming aware of the space around you, you might imagine yourself standing at a viewpoint looking over a beautiful vista or standing at the shores of a vast ocean or looking up at the night sky when it's clear. Just breathing into that sense of spaciousness, noticing how that feels and then moving onto the quality of warmth. So scanning your body and feeling if there's awareness of warmth.

Jane:

If there isn't, you might experiment with putting one hand on top of another or the other and feeling the warmth of the touch, the contact, and allowing yourself to really relax into that warmth, imagining it spreading. So, you're getting into a lovely warm, hot tub, relaxing and letting go into this sense of warmth. Then bring your attention back to your self sitting here feeling the stability, spaciousness around you and warmth. Acknowledging yourself, thanking yourself for taking this time out to practice self compassion. Then when you're ready, opening your eyes and getting on with your day.

Eric:

It's interesting, because so much of mindfulness is slowing down, calming down, but it's weird because for a lot of ... not for everyone but for a certain percentage of us, we're not getting in our cars and commuting to work and we're not in the office all day. So in a sense, life is almost sort of slowed down. There's been a forced slowdown, but I think from my experience, that's just like the external part of it. It doesn't mean that my mind has actually slowed down. If anything, it's running more like at full tilt right now for a lot of reasons. So, it's interesting to feel like physically things may have slowed down in terms of what we can physically go to. I just think that for me, it's made my brain spin about a thousand times faster.

Jane:

Yes, exactly. Me too. I can relate to that. Totally. I can get nerdy on you if you like here. There's the thing called ... what you're describing is a thing called the default mode network, which is the mode that your brain is in, when it's doing that a million miles an hour thinking and there some people, the default mode network is neutral, but for other people as a tinge of anxiety, and I think maybe also changes according to circumstance. So, the default mode network might be when I see someone passing outside without a mask, I might be thinking, "Oh wow, what if they went past my driveway? What if they sneeze? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if." That's the default mode network.

Jane:

Then when you're in mindfulness or attending to something that has your full attention, it doesn't have to be mindfulness. You are in a mode called the task positive network. When you do that, your default mode network is off and all that ... It's a switch. It's a two way switch. You're either in task positive or you're in default mode. Right? So, when you're in task positive, your default mode network is off and you're getting a rest from all that worry and flurry, right, in your mind. So, that's one of the other ways that researchers have found that mindfulness is helpful is because not only do you have the positive effect of being focused on something calming, hopefully, but also you have the rest from that chat, the mental chatter. So, that's part of its effectiveness. So, it's very normal for your default mode network to be running rampant, especially in situations like this, especially when you have so much more time because you haven't got those distractions to activate your task positive network so much.

Eric:

So, how are you doing with all this? How are you managing your self care? Are you having success getting your own mind to stop chitter chattering?

Jane:

Yeah, it depends on the day. For the most part, I think I'm hanging in there okay, and I think this is a thing that sounds like it's pretty common actually is that I'm surprised by the changeability. So, how like one day I can be like all over it. "Yeah, I can do this. It's fine." I'm much more optimistic. With work, I could be like I'm really honest, I'd be so productive. Then the next day, I'm like I've got nothing, I've just got nothing. I might have the same list, nothing's really changed, but I've just have absolutely zero motivation. So, that happens a lot. I might be grumpy one day and really chill the next. So, the swings have been surprising to me. Yes, I have been doing my practices. I've actually found that I've been doing exercise more intentionally and that has been really helpful for me because I get that cooped up feeling you get from being on Zoom or just being on your computer all day. I found that exercise is really good antidote to that. So, that's probably been one of my biggest tools.

Jane:

I was going to mention this actually in the previous point where you said about mindfulness in these times. If you're really feeling stressed out, like if you're kind of feeling flooded, mindfulness, sometimes it might not be the right thing to do. If you're completely activated right then, you might want to do something like have a walk or you don't want to be stewing or soaking in your stress hormones, right? If you're so overwhelmed that you try to sit down to do mindfulness and all you're doing is getting more and more stressed, well, then that's like not helpful. So, that might mean do something physical or it might mean ... I've been experimenting with compassion practices more.

Jane:

I found those really helpful, because I think as you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of self judgment, a frustration with ourselves. Like, how come I'm not motivated? The comparing mind like, "Oh, everybody else is working really hard today and I just can't bring myself to write a paragraph." All that kind of stuff. Right? So, a bit of learning how to manage the self recrimination. I think that's a really useful tool. So, I've been trying to do a little bit of that too, but that's also challenging because of the aforementioned motivation problems. Yep.

Eric:

Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say this because I generally think of you always, in our conversations, come across as pretty happy and just sort of run at an even speed. So, it's interesting to hear that you're having struggles too. I think for me, part of it is we're so conditioned to think that Monday through Friday from eight or nine to five, you're supposed to be working. Right? Then finding out that when you're not in a workplace setting, it is just so much more difficult, especially with this added larger stress in the unknown of what's going on. Then just being like, "You know what? This is what I've got today." Being okay with that, which is not something I think we're conditioned to think is okay. To think like, "I'm not going to get this done today, because I can't really tell you why, but it's not happening for whatever reason and I need to step away from my own wellbeing."

Jane:

Yeah, exactly. Then, yeah, we're not conditioned to being okay with that narrative with ourselves either. Right? So, then the recrimination comes down. Yeah. "Oh, I shouldn't have done that. I slacked off, et cetera, et cetera." Yeah. I wasn't trying to play with recognizing, like I realized how I have definite rhythms of working. So, there are certain times of the day where I can work better than others and there are also actually, maybe it's not so much to do with time, but it's to do with having had activity. So, I'm just not the person who finds it easy. I'm sure many of us are like this and I'm super lucky that I'm in a position where I can adjust accordingly, but I can only sit right in front of the machine for a couple of hours at most before like, I don't know, just completely lose focus and I get all kind of antsy.

Jane:

Then it's just like getting blood out of a stone. There used to be a time when I would just force myself to stay there and do that, but now I've discovered if I get up and do something totally different like go for a walk or something and then just deal with the guilt or the self incrimination and then come back, I get so much more done even though it's a short amount of time, because I've honored we're human beings with needs and you need to move and you need to eat and rest and things like that. So, learning how to honor that and recognizing that doesn't necessarily correlate with an eight to five work day is also part of my challenge and my practice, but I'm getting better at it. I'm getting better and I'm getting slightly better at not feeling guilty about it, but I'm still working on that.

Eric:

So, what's making you laugh right now? What are the things that are cracking you up?

Jane:

What are the things that crack me up right now? Well, what's the latest thing I had a belly laugh about? I've had the chance to have a few socially distance hangouts like over a camp fire over a fire pit like four of us like six feet apart and just shooting a breeze with friends and just seeing other human beings and just we get to laugh at each other. That's one of my recent belly laughs. Watching comedies on the TV or satires are things that I get into. Although right now the kind of contemporary satire is so much about current affairs, which is so depressing, but that's not my main source. Sometimes I just watch dumb animal videos on YouTube, cats tumbling down, failed jumps and things like that. That gets me. Yeah. Animal videos. Yeah.

Eric:

Yeah. I don't know if this means that I'm a sick person, but I really enjoy fail videos. I don't know why.

Jane:

Yeah, me too.

Eric:

Part of me's like, "I'm laughing at this person's pain, but I'm not turning it off either."

Jane:

I know. I too. I'm right there with you. I share that guilty pleasure. Actually, my husband really finds those hilarious. One of the funniest things I think is watching somebody else really cracking up and it just becomes so infectious. So, yeah. Yeah. What are you doing for laughs?

Eric:

So, it helps that we have two small children. Our five-year-old, he's at the point where he'll just say some really, what appears to be random to me, but it's probably not to him. The other night, I was putting him to sleep and we always have question time. Depending if he's been a good listener and if he's been kind, he might have five questions. If he wasn't being kind, he maybe just has three questions. It just depends on sort of how he did. The other night, I asked him. I said, "If you could turn into one animal, what would it be?" He thinks about and he goes, "A Bengal tiger." I said, "Bengal tiger. Why is that?" He goes, "Because they're the ultimate stealth machine." So, I'm going, "Where did that came from?" So, now I'm going to see if you have one for this next question I prepared for you, the one where I asked you to tell me a joke.

Jane:

Yeah [inaudible 00:29:10] I had to look at some things and I found when I kind of liked, because it's quite nerdy. Wait, can I remember what it is? I'm not a natural comedian. Not intentionally, anyway. Oh, yes. Why is it hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs?

Eric:

Something about they're stealing something. I'm not sure.

Jane:

Because they always take things literally.

Eric:

Wow. That is a-

Jane:

That's a dad joke.

Eric:

That is a multilevel joke there.

Jane:

Yeah.

Eric:

I appreciate that one.

Jane:

A dad joke. Yep. Or they like the animal ones. The horse walks up to the bar and the barman said, "Why the long face?" For some reason, that always tickles me. I don't know why. It's pretty simple.

Eric:

It's a classic joke.

Jane:

Yeah. Yeah.

Eric:

I came prepared for one for you.

Jane:

Oh, good. Good. Go on.

Eric:

This one is I pulled this off online somewhere. So, what did one snowman say to the other?

Jane:

Something about his nose. You smell like carrot.

Eric:

Why? Do you smell carrots? What?

Jane:

No. I think I've seen that. I think I've seen that. I didn't think of that. I just stole your thunder. Sorry. That's good. Do you smell carrot? [crosstalk 00:30:39] That's good. Yeah.

Eric:

That's a terrible joke, but I enjoy it. I've used that joke before.

Jane:

Yeah. I like that too. That's a good one. I'll put that one in list.

Eric:

So, back to the topic at hand.

Jane:

Yes.

Eric:

I know that you've incorporated mindfulness in the classroom. So, what does that look like and what kind of response are you getting?

Jane:

Okay. It looks like two different things actually. There's the kind of full meal deal if you like. Doesn't sound like mindfulness. That's really unfortunate metaphor. But anyway, in one of my classes in philosophy, religion in the environment, I integrate not exactly mindfulness, but concentrative practices all the way through. So students have a prompt each week to do in nature and each week they have a different prompt, which is like a mindfulness base prompt. Then they do that and they reflect on it. So, it complements the regular course material. They're called contemplative reflections. So, that's one where I really go for putting mindfulness all the way through the structure of the class. Then in my face to face classes, I tend to just start each session with a 5 to 10 minute mindfulness. Then we don't return to it formally through the rest of the class.

Jane:

How it's been met, well, I mean, the feedback I get perhaps I would get that feedback because people are sort of self selecting, but it's I would say 90% positive. So, students at the beginning of class seem to really like that. They often mentioned that was a really nice down-regulating moment. In the class where they do contemplative practices, people in their evaluations often call those out or something that they really enjoyed, but one thing I notice too is that the quality of their writing can be really lovely and there's contemplative postings. You feel like you're connecting with the person. They're not just writing ... jumping through hoops and you can feel there's an authenticity a lot of the time with their connection, with the subject and with what they're doing, which feels really heartening and lovely for me to read. I hope it's really fulfilling for them to do. So, I would say, I mean, I've been doing it for years now and if anything, I'm doing more and more rather than less than nurse. So, I'd say it's really positive.

Jane:

Then this last winter, I taught my care program as a two credit class pass fail, and I had 50 students in that. That was really cool because students didn't know what they were signing up for. They just thought that they were doing ... Well, they were doing an interdisciplinary arts and sciences seminar. So, they hadn't selected to be in a kind of meditation self care group, but the feedback from that was really, really positive. Students really got into it. A lot of them said I wish we had more opportunities to do this. I wish we had time in our curriculum to focus on mental health and health care stuff.

Jane:

So, I'm really heartened by that and want to ... That's part of my next future directions is to figure out ways that I could expand that. We actually got from that class, I've got a team of four students who are helping me on another research project who were really into ... five students who are really into it and want to help get it out there. So, that too I thought it was a really good sign that there's a hunger for rest and self care in our academic life. So, watch this space. We're going to see if I can make that happen a bit more with the help of my team.

Eric:

That's cool. It's cool to see that students respond so positively to it.

Jane:

Uh-hmm (affirmative).

Eric:

Yeah. Because in my own experience, I find it to be quite beneficial. Yeah. I think that it addresses ... It's not a cure all or anything for mental health issues, but it can definitely, at least in my experience for things like anxiety and stress definitely helps sort of bring me back down and get me to like a calmer place or a place where I can be a little bit more ... see things along more clearly, because I think with my anxiety, it definitely jumbles things, what I think is happening versus what actually might be happening because I was seeing through this stressed out lens, so.

Jane:

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Go ahead.

Eric:

Go ahead.

Jane:

Well, I was just thinking that one of the things in the care training, we do practice this, but we also do a little bit of the theory. I think that can be helpful too, to understand what our brains are like on anxiety. That what you described is such a classic symptom that we ... I love the way you put it. You're looking through an anxiety lens and that's distorting. Just recognizing, just even knowing that that's a thing and that you don't have to believe everything you see through that lens, I think that could be just ... that knowledge can be quite liberating. So yeah, having a mixture of theory and practice I hope is helpful and just normalizing too.

Jane:

The people like you just did so graciously sharing your experience and I think that's another advantage of this course is that people get to recognize that so many other people are dealing with anxiety or depression or other things and they're not on their own. I think that's super powerful too, but it's still really stigmatized, really hard to talk about in a lot of contexts I think. So hopefully, that will be, is starting to change, but it's challenging.

Voice over:

Thank you to our guests and thank you for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe. You can find us on Spotify, Google podcasts, Pocket Cast, Stitcher and Apple podcasts.