Masterclass with Fleet Maull, Ph.D. 12/14/24
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Talk Transcript:
Fleet Maull: I'd like to discuss the Engaged Mindfulness Institute’s approach to training mindfulness teachers this morning. I'm going to describe this from a neuroscience perspective. Our approach to teaching and training mindfulness is deeply embodied, neuroscience-informed, and trauma-informed. When we're teaching mindfulness, the most important thing is to model the practice in any way we can and the fruition, the results of the practice. We're really holding space for others and then competently introducing them to the practice, meeting them where they are, and giving them an on-ramp to the practice so that they can make a relationship with the practice and with their own mind ,and then the practice is really their teacher. We're there to hold space, provide guidance and clarity, and really let them work with the practice, develop that relationship with their own mind, own being, their own awareness, and then provide a kind of framework or context that will help an individual stay on track with their practice.
Our ability to do that really arises from our own practice. Even when we're teaching or guiding, whether we're giving a short explanation like I'm doing, we're leading a guided practice or we're answering questions or doing inquiry, whatever we're doing, while we're doing it, we're practicing. We're working with embodiment, we're training our mind, we're present, tuning in to ourselves and to those we're present with and guiding. So, teaching is a practice, and it's seamless with our own mindfulness awareness practice.
Our approach to the practice and to teaching is really at the intersection of classic mindfulness awareness and meditation methodologies, as they're taught in mainstream mindfulness in this country, which, for the most part, arose out of the Buddhist tradition.
We combine examples of mindfulness in all religious traditions, philosophical traditions and digital traditions, and mindfulness as it's taught in mainstream mindfulness.
It originally derives from the Buddhist tradition. You could say in particular from the Satipatthana Sutta and including the foundations of mindfulness structure, but you could draw from many sources as well.
So, the approach we're taking is the intersection between that and current neuroscience. Now, the great yogis of the past and all the great contemplative traditions, the Vedic traditions, the Taoist traditions, the Buddhist traditions, the Rhodes are the Vedic traditions; yogis had a deep knowledge of the human body that they developed respectively. This is very ancient, and this is before anyone had ever dissected a cadaver, which is the way Western science developed their knowledge of human anatomy. Of course, now we have x-ray and various forms of brain scanning technologies, but it's quite amazing the knowledge, the inner knowledge of the body that was developed by the yogis.
So we're not completely inventing something new here or discovering something new. Yet, with modern neuroscientific tools for brain imaging, we can examine the neural networks involved in the practice and in the qualities that we're cultivating through the practice with much greater detail and precision.
We know there are five primary networks involved in the practice, and we're cultivating the strengthening of them to facilitate healing, facilitate greater mindfulness and awareness in our lives, and ultimately to facilitate or cultivate whatever we might think of with the terms like awakening or liberation. So we know how to do this with much greater precision than ever, and we can do our practices and combine our practices with much greater precision than ever in order to accelerate the deepening of our practice, the deepening of our awareness, our capacity for focus and attention, our capacity for self-compassion, our capacity for empathy and connection with others, our capacity for emotional regulation, emotional balance, and so forth.
We can strengthen our overall well-being, and if you're familiar with my colleague Richie Davidson's work at the University of Wisconsin, they've done a lot of work on examining what are the constituents of what is called psychological well-being and the underlying neural substrates of that and being able to target those with specific practices. There's a lot of work being done in many, many research laboratories now and a lot of exploration of this intersection between mind training of various kinds and what we're learning from neuroscience, which is deepening all the time.
Now, I'm going to talk about some of these neural networks in a moment, but first I want to offer the caveat that the brain is an incredibly complex organism, the brain and the whole nervous system, an incredibly complex organism. It's one holistic enterprise. It’s all operating holistically independently. Although we can very much talk about discrete neural networks, which are physical realities and which can be examined with brain imaging, we can also talk about the brain in the sense of sort of energetic fields and think of what's going on in the brain more like the movement of waves of energy within the brain in a very fluid sense. So we can talk about it in this discrete way that seems a little bit more like talking about the circuitry in a computer or something, and we can also talk about it much more in an energetic sense of flow and the movement of waves and energy and so forth.
So there’s different ways of looking at this, but I just wanted to say that anytime we're talking about the brain, we're in danger of oversimplifying because it is such a complex organism. We know more about it than we ever have, and we also know that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot of things we don't know. We actually don't know how memory works. Western science does not have a clue how memory works ultimately. Western science still does not know how consciousness, what we experience as consciousness, we're all conscious right now. We're aware that we're here. We're aware we're with each other on Zoom. You’re aware that I’m speaking. I'm aware that I'm speaking. You're aware that you're listening. We're conscious. Western science has no idea how what we call consciousness arises from the neurobiological reality of the human body. It's called the hard problem of consciousness. They're beginning from the body because the Western scientific viewpoint is essentially materialist. So the material world is given primacy, and then, in turn out of that material reality, how does something like consciousness arise?
Of course, from a more Eastern perspective, they would give primacy to consciousness, and then this physical reality is a manifestation of consciousness. That also begins to connect across, maybe across East and West, quantum theory connects the two, to a degree, although quantum theory is still arising out of a materialistic paradigm. It gets it with the uncertainty principle and the fact that we can't separate the relationship between the observed and the observer and the exact act of observing changes.
You probably have all heard that things appear as waves or particles depending on whether they're being observed or not, and there's bilocality and non-locality and all kinds of strange phenomena when you get down to the subatomic realm. So that starts to create a groundwork of saying that there's a deeper level of reality than what appears to us as this solid discrete physical relative world reality.
Nonetheless, from a Western scientific perspective and certainly from the perspective of brain imaging, we know a lot, and we know we don't know a lot. It's very complex. So I just wanted to give that caveat and then, within that, talk about what we do know.
I'm going to talk about a number of neural networks that are very important in the practice of mindfulness. I think it's helpful for us as aspiring teachers or teachers to understand what we're doing in our own practice and how that's precisely developing certain capacities. Then, learn to teach in a very precise way that's helping others embrace the practice in that way. It doesn't mean we have to teach neuroscience. It doesn't mean we have to teach neuroscience at all. We could a little bit. We wouldn't want to get into it very much. I don't think I think it could just be a distraction. But we can teach in a way that reflects our neuroscientific understanding of the practice and its potential.
The first network I'd like to talk about is the self-regulation network, the self-regulation network, and this is for regulating our own autonomic nervous system. Most of you are probably familiar with this and that the autonomic nervous system has two branches. One up-regulates our nervous system. That's the sympathetic branch. So from a basic alertness into stress or tension. It can go all the way into panic, high stress, flight or fight, and so forth.
Then we have the other branch, the parasympathetic branch, sometimes called the relaxation branch or the rest and digest branch and this is about down-regulating our nervous system. The two are operating all the time, and there's an appropriate balance of the two for any activity we're engaged in, whether it's responding to a crisis or being ready to go to sleep and have a good night's rest, and everything in between. The wonderful thing is that the autonomic nervous system is connected with our breath, and this allows us to regulate our own autonomic nervous system by regulating our breath.
So when we breathe in, there's a slight upregulation, sympathetic branch, activation of the sympathetic branch, the heart rate accelerates, alertness. When we breathe out, there's a slight activation of the parasympathetic branch and slight deceleration of the heartbeat, and that more rest and rest and digest relaxation response. Those two are happening all the time, and because that's going on with the breath, that's what creates heart rate variability, which you've probably heard about, which is a mark of stress response. When we get too stressed, our breath gets shallow. We don't have enough outbreath, and the heart rate variability flattens out. We lose heart rate variability. For most of us, our issue around self-regulation is that we're getting too stressed, too tense, or activated, or we're getting triggered emotionally, experiencing amygdala hijack and these kinds of things, so usually what we need is more down-regulation. Generally, what we need is more parasympathetic activation. Now, there could be moments when we're feeling sluggish and we could use breath regulation to cultivate that alertness, to wake up our nervous system. We can use something called fire breathing, where we're doing quick breathing with our abdominal muscles in our nose and that wakes up the nervous system. That activates the sympathetic branch of our nervous system.
With all the stresses of modern life and all the stress and anxiety, many of us express what we need is more parasympathetic activation and generally what's called good vagal tone. The vagus nerve is a primary nerve in the central nervous system, and it has two branches. When we breathe diaphragmatically and breathe fully, it massages the vagus nerve, helps with parasympathetic activation, and gives us what's called good vagal tone.
So we can practice self-regulation and I would say self-regulation is the core foundational skill for really becoming an adult human being. I don’t just mean a chronological adult. I mean an adult who takes ownership for navigating their own neurophysiology and takes responsibility for how we show up in the world. That's what I mean by being an adult. I'm responsible for how I'm responding to what's going on within me and around me. I'm responsible for how I'm showing up in the world, and I'm not responsible in the sense of wanting to blame myself. I'm responsible for taking ownership for actually navigating this, learning how to navigate my own neurophysiology so I can be in a self-directed, self-leadership position in how I show up in life.
So self-regulation is a very important skill, and we can develop it with breath, we can develop it with good posture, we can develop it with voice and vocal tone. All these things help with self-regulation, but the primary means is really breath. Learning simple breath regulation techniques like straw breathing emphasizes the out-breath, 4-7-8 breathing, which also emphasizes the out-breath, and box breathing, where we have four parts of the breath and they're all balanced. These are some of the simplest forms of breath regulation. There are many others and there's the very advanced breath work of Pranayama and, of course, the Wim Hof work. There's lots of different types. There's very intense breath work designed to create expanded states of consciousness, like holotropic breath work. That's not so much about self-regulation. That's breathwork in service of creating transcendent experiences. So, what we're really talking about here is more in the realm of breath regulation for self-regulation in developing good vagal tones. Just having breath awareness goes a long way. Just having breath awareness.
So, to me that's one of the foundational things that we share and teach in mindfulness practices, is breath awareness. Anytime we take a full breath, and we're aware of it is a good thing, right? We could all just take one deep breath right now. Let's take a deep breath, fill up the belly as deeply as we can, and take the breath up in the uppermost part of the chest. Then just let it out like that. I'm sure as you do that you feel a physiological shift. It's like pressing the reset button for our nervous system, just taking one deep, full breath with awareness, right? So, breath awareness and simple breath regulation techniques, I think it's important skills to introduce people to in mindfulness and to be working with ourselves and also to develop a practice of generally slowing down the breath. The ideal rate of our breath is said to be five and a half seconds in and five and a half seconds out. To make it simple, I just go with six in and six out. So that's about this rate, right? So as you're breathing in, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, breathing out, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six. So that's much slower than most of us breathe most of the time, right? But we can just keep practicing any time we remember, just slow it down and breathe six seconds in, six seconds out throughout the day. Anytime we remember, just stop and just start counting for a little bit. Just do it for a little while, and if we do that throughout the day, we'll,l over time, slow our baseline breathing down. Ideally, we want to get to that place where that's our normal breath rhythm, six seconds in, six seconds out or more precisely. Five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out, or eleven seconds for the full cycle of breath.
So all these things, whether we're doing specific breath regulation techniques in longer sections or just in a moment to help self-regulate, like straw breathing, box breathing, or 4-7-8 breath, whether we're just taking deep full body breaths or other methodologies. Whether we're just slowing our breath down in general. Whether we're working with good posture, which helps with the breath whether we're speaking with a clear vocal tone, all these things help with self-regulation. If we practice them on a regular basis, this develops a more robust network in the brain for self-regulation, which involves the pre-frontal cortex, anterior-singular cortex, the insula, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. It develops a resilient, robust neural network that knows how to self-regulate on its own. There may be times when we always need to intentionally apply self-regulation techniques, but if we're doing these practices on a regular basis, our self-regulation network will do the job on its own and will just naturally be more regulated.
It will be much more difficult for us to become emotionally triggered, to fly off the handle, to experience amygdala hijack. We won't be finding ourselves in super stress and anxiety. We will be neurophysiologically balanced, and our nervous system and our brain will develop a robust neural network that's doing that in the background all the time.
So that's the first network.
The second one is the attention network, and that's fairly obvious in mindfulness practice. We’re training our attention. That's a baseline. So there's always an object of mindfulness of some kind, something we're paying attention to. This could be the breath or could be the body. In some cases, it's a moment-to-moment experience, or there's ways to work with thoughts. There's ways to work with all the different sense perceptions, but the most common is to take the breath or the body or both as the object of mindfulness, and when we notice attention wanders, we bring it back. Attention wanders, we bring it back. We do that again and again. We've all heard that in doing so, we're kind of building that muscle of mindfulness, right? Well, what we're building the muscle of is really building the attention network.
We're building the attention network, and this includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the parietal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex again, and the thalamus. We're developing a resilient network that will allow us to be more attentive all the time, have a greater capacity for focus and concentration, we’ll be much less likely to get distracted. It's harder to get distracted, right? So this network becomes resilient, and it's operating in the background all the time, and we find ourselves naturally more present. We have a greater capacity to direct our attention, and we have a greater capacity to focus on what we're doing, to be concentrated. So, this is the attention network.
Now, all these networks are interacting, and I'll talk more about that in a moment. They connect some of the same parts of the brain and some of the same activities of the brain. These networks are all operating in a holistic manner and they all interact with each other. The great thing about that is we get a synergistic effect by developing them all, and I'll talk more about that.
So, the next one is the Task Positive Network. The Task Positive Network modulates the activity of the default mode network. Many of you have probably heard of the default mode network, that it's responsible for a lot of our self-created stress and anxiety. When we don't direct our attention, and we just let the brain go wherever it wants, we let our attention wander wherever it wants. It tends to time travel into the past and into the future with worry, anxiety, fantasy, and so forth, as a running commentary about the so-called present, which isn't really the present, constantly thinking about myself, thinking about what others think about me. It's that noisy, discursive part of my brain that creates a lot of our stress.
That's the default mode network, and it's activated when we don't direct our attention and because of something called the negativity bias, it tends to go to the negative. The negativity bias arises out of the basic human condition because job one for any species is survival. So we're set up to pay a lot more attention to risk and novelty and differences, anything else. Our long-term memory ends up being full of experiences of threat and danger, and thus, we have implicit memory, and we spin things to the negative.
So, long and short, if we just let our mind wander, it's going to wander to the negative most of the time, and that's a source of a lot of stress and anxiety. No,w we're not demonizing the default network here because it has its purpose and its place. In fact, if we can free it from fear and anxiety, it can be a source of tremendous creativity. It is a source of creativity for many artists as well as scientists discovering solutions or others trying to problem solve, discover solutions or problems. Or music lyrics or a melody coming to a composer or something. All of this arises out of the default network when the default network is free of fear.
If anybody's ever been involved in psychoanalysis, or you've heard about free association, that operates with the default network free of free of anxiety. We create a safe space, get the person to really relax, and eventually, you can go into this state of free association and access archetypal imagery, dream imagery, creative solutions to interpersonal problems, and so forth.This is the activity of the default network when it's free of anxiety and fear. But for us, most of the time, our default mode network is dominated by anxiety and fear.
It's what makes it very hard to meditate when people first start to meditate.
This one is really key for us in terms of teaching mindfulness, really key. I don't know how many people have started a mindfulness practice and quit, but I would assume the number is extremely high, extremely high. In fact, I would say the majority of people who start a mindfulness practice probably do not continue it. Why? They find it difficult. They feel like their mind's racing. It's very hard to settle down. It's boring. It's hard. It doesn't seem to be producing anything very positive and thus, we don't continue, obviously.
It doesn't need to be that way. Now, people often mistakenly get the idea that mindfulness or meditation is about getting rid of your thoughts or having no thoughts, which is not the case. They struggle with their thoughts, and struggling with their thoughts produces more thoughts, more tension, and more anxiety, as we all know.
So generally, in good instruction, we train people to focus on the object of mindfulness, keep coming back to the body or breath, and just let their thoughts be and to let it resolve itself over time. You can bring your awareness to thoughts, and generally, they just kind of self-liberate. There's lots of different practices and different approaches, but the most efficacious way to have the noise of our cognitive activity lessen so that we can actually begin to relax into a practice is through deep embodiment, which engages the task positive network.
The task positive and default mode networks, to a degree, are mutually inhibitory. Again, it's a bit of a simplification, but it’s still accurate. When you activate the task positive network, the default mode network starts to go offline, and the mind quiets down quite naturally, so we don’t have to struggle with our thoughts at all. We just really focus on the body, and the mind quiets down naturally.
I'm sure you've all had the experience of doing something like trying to thread a needle where you're really focusing for at least a couple of seconds the mind gets very quiet. That's because you're activating the task positive network. And you're actually experiencing that network shift in the brain, and the brain gets really quiet.
The most efficacious way for me that I’ve discovered within mindfulness awareness practices is to really yoke our attention with the body at a deeper and deeper level. When we open up especially to the interior sensate landscape of the body, physical sensation within the body, by opening up and cultivating our capacity for what's called interoceptive awareness, which is internal perception. I don't think there's any limits to how deep that can go. There's this vast somatic universe inside the body of sensation. The entire body is a living organism, all containing neuronal cells connected to the central nervous system, including the bones, connective tissue, muscles, circulatory system, glands, major organs, lymphatic system, everything. It's all sensory and we can explore it and feel into it at greater and greater depth.
It's subtler than the external sensations on the skin because the internal sensations go to a different set of neural networks in the brain that's less myelinated and less efficient. So, the sensations are subtler, and sensations on the surface of the skin go through a different set of neural networks that are highly myelinated. That's the coating on the neurons that allows them to communicate more efficiently and so we're very sensitive to touch. Internal sensations, unless there's some extreme pai,n tend to be subtle but still experiential, and we can go deeper and deeper and deeper. Our interoceptive awareness can be profoundly enhanced and that internal landscape becomes so compelling it holds our attention quite naturally. We yoke our attention with the body, with the deeply felt physical experience of the body, inside and out, and that activates the task positive network. That keeps the task positive network engaged, and thu,s the default mode network goes offline. The brain quiets down very naturally.
So that creates what's called attention stabilization. As we're doing this, the body, mind, heart system, and nervous system are learning how to do this. There's an internal neuro-biofeedback loop going on where these systems are learning how to do this on their own. So, with any practice, we start with self-directed, intentional self-regulation. All practices begin there, but it requires effort. Over time, it requires less and less effort with this approach because the internal systems are learning how to do it on their own.
We can move from intentional effortful mindfulness effortful self-regulation, to effortless mindfulness. Which is really important because to go deeper in our practice requires relaxation. We've all heard about to begin with the right effort, not too tight, not too loose. If we don't make any effort, the mind's just going to wander around. If you make too much effort, it creates tension, right? But over time, we want to move into effortless practice. The way we do that is we train our own nervous system to do the practice through this natural, organic, internal, feedback route.
This is the attention network. Then we have, I'm sorry, that was the task positive network which regulates the default mode network.
So we have three so far. We have the self-regulation network, the attention network, and the task positive network. Then, we have the emotion regulation network, which is very connected to the self-regulation network. Basically, by regulating our nervous system, we're able to regulate our emotions.
But there is a distinct emotion regulation network as well. It's very related. All this is interdependent and interconnected. But this, over time, allows us to have a much greater emotional balance. We're still feeling our emotions. We're not repressing emotions at all, but we're not getting hijacked by emotions. We're actually much more sensitive to the subtle shifts in emotional energy. We're well aware of emotional flows and shifts and changes in mood, tone, and emotion well before they become the level where we would experience what Dan Goleman called the amygdala hijack, where the feeling brain takes control over the thinking brain and turns it over to the reactive survival brain. So, we develop natural emotional balance, which means we can experience the richness of our emotional life but in a well-regulated, well-balanced way. We're actually more tuned into our emotional life but in a balanced, well-regulated way. So that's the emotion regulation network.
Finally, we have the empathy network or connection network, and this is the neural network that's involved in connecting with others, communicating safety to others, developing openness and connection and positive relationality, intimacy where it's appropriate. It involves the oxytocin release. When we meet strangers, the default position neurobiologically is that the danger coming into our space is friend or foe.
Job one for any species is survival. So, everything is a threat until proven otherwise. That's just the way we're biologically set up. When we get messages of safety, eventually, the oxytocin release happens and we’re willing to approach, right? Whether, it's just to approach someone or whether it's eventually to shake their hand or give a friend a hug or whatever it is.
Of course, we've all heard about oxytocin and its role in creating the bonding between child and the mother or the father to a degree. This is a neurotransmitter. It’s also a stress hormone, but it’s also involved in creating connections. The mother's system after pregnancy is flooded with oxytocin. The father is, to a degree. This is a neurotransmitter that's also a stress hormone, but it's also involved in creating connections.
So, the good news is that many of the same neural networks that are involved in enhanced interoceptive awareness and deep embodiment are also involved in connection and connecting with others. So the more deeply embodied we are, the greater capacity we have for connecting with others. There's a phenomenon called neuroception where our nervous system is scanning the world around us all the time.
It's scanning through the five senses, but it's also scanning directly. What do you think it's scanning for? Well, of course, it's scanning for threat because job one is survival for any species, right? So it's scanning for threat. We're scanning the world, and when we pick up messages of safety, then we're willing to approach.
With the development of the empathy network, we're communicating safety. We're communicating openness. We're communicating connection, right? We get very skillful at creating connections, creating safety, and creating a good flow of relationship. And when there are difficult situations, difficult conversations or conflicts and things, we develop and naturally have the skills to bring a well-regulated presence to that which helps de-escalate situations, diffuse situations, and bring them back into relationality.
Now, another framework, I'm not gonna get into this today. We don’t have time but you could look at all this through the Polyvagal framework. It's a very helpful one, Stephen Porges's work. You can see how there's that green zone of optimal regulation, and of course, we're not gonna be able to hang out there through our whole lives. We actually wanna be able to live up into the next zone, the yellow zone, where there are a lot of challenges, but be able to operate there in a well-regulated way, right?
This isn't about living in a comfort zone all time or living in some protective bubble. Ultimately, it's like developing the skills to where we can be in a really challenging world, but we're still well-regulated, right? Think of a person who is really well-regulated all the time. They're almost all but immune to amygdala hijack. They just don't get emotionally triggered or out of control in that way. They're always well-balanced. They're emotionally attuned to their own emotions. They're very much alive to their own emotional life in a completely balanced way. They're not getting hijacked, and they're not getting triggered, and they're always in a well-balanced neurophysiological, emotionally balanced state. They're very attentive. They're generally well-focused, concentrated, and present. They have stabilized attention. They're rarely distracted. There is a natural task positive activation of embodiment. They have a very spacious clear mind that's open. It's not busy with distractions and thinking about other things. They're very naturally relational, open-hearted, empathic, and able to connect and tune in.
So a person having all these qualities is really well optimized. What would we call such a person? Anybody? Let me open up the chat here. Does anybody want to put something in the chat? What would we call a person having all these kinds of qualities? Self-regulated, enlightened. Yes, we might even call them enlightens, right? Enlightened, liberated.
Now, there's a lot of people studying these things, and I'm deeply involved in this research and studying myself. Even if we get to really optimizing all of these neural networks. I think we'd be getting very close to what people would think of as a self-actualized person an enlightened, a liberated person, a really optimal human being. There may still be a non-linear tipping point to go into what we think of as full enlightenment or whatever that might be. I’m one who definitely believes there is such a thing. So there's probably a non-linear tipping point, but we're going to get very close to that by developing these neural networks in that way.
We can do so in a much more precise, directed, accelerated way. In the past, a lot of us probably received some instruction of, basically, you go sit on the cushion, and you just sit there and don't do much,h and eventually, something good will happen. Well, that's a very difficult approach to practice. If you just go sit on the cushion long enough, the mind will probably wear itself out and it'll settle, but then again, you may still just be settling into a dreamy state.
I mean, without precise instruction, it's very difficult to actually make real progress with practice. We don't have to sit on a cushion for 30 years to wait for the mind to play itself out. We can do these; we can develop these capacities in a much more precise, directed way in a much shorter time, and that's good news because we also don't need to go out to a cave for 20 or 30 years. Now, if someone, if that's someone's path to do that, that's amazing and wonderful. For most of us living in the modern world, we have a lot of responsibilities and how much time can we dedicate to practice today? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? An hour and a half?
If we're going to be mindfulness teachers, we should be, I feel, doing at least an hour a day.
But even that, that's not 10 hours a day or off on retreat or living in a cave like a yogi, right?
But then there's also the micro-practices we can do throughout the day. Maybe you have a formal practice of somewhere between half hour and an hour or more, and then you're doing micro-practices throughout the day that kind of together build into another hour or so. Well, even with just that much practice, I think we can make very accelerated progress in development through these practices, much more so than we ever thought possible.
One of the reasons this is very important, especially for introducing a practice to people, is that in working with new practitioners, we can give them an on-ramp. We don’t have to explain all this stuff, but if we have this knowledge, we are good scientists, we're our own guinea pig. We're training ourselves, and we're very curious, and we're constantly studying and constantly learning about all this and experimenting with different practices and different ways of practices, we're really getting to know ourselves neurophysiologically, neurobiologically, right. Then we'll get to where we know how to give somebody a simple, easy on ramp. We'll be teaching in a very deeply embodied way, but in a simple way. This is going to give them a more positive experience, right?
Instead of sitting down and going, this is so hard, my mind is all over the place, I can't do this, feel incompetent, I must be, there must be something wrong with me, I'll never be able to do this. Instead, no, they're having an experience. Wow, this is kind of working. Oh, my mind's settling. This might be helpful. This might be useful. And thus, it's much more likely that they're going to continue with the practice. I do a lot of work in training correctional officers and some parole officers, other corrections professionals, and first responders and they consistently say, I could never do this, my mind races all the time. But we give them all kinds of micro practices to help them experience self-regulation very quickly. They go, oh, that works and that was easy. Okay, now we can add a little more, a little more, a little more.
But we have to give them the experience. We can't just say, go sit down there, sit on the cushion, sit with the posture. I know it's kind of boring, but if you do it long enough, something good will happen. That approach isn't going to work for people. And it's not necessary, okay? So there's a lot of information available for all of you to explore, and in our Engaged Mindfulness Institute Teacher Training programs, we provide a lot of this information, and we're always coming up with new ways to deliver it, make it available to you, and so forth.
But these different neural networks, they're all connecting different parts of the brain, some of the same parts of the brain, they're operating in an interconnected, independent way, and there's a synergistic effect. So when we're consistently working to strengthen our self-regulation network or capacity, we're enhancing our attention network, we're enhancing our task-positive network, we're enhancing our emotional regulation network, and our empathy network, they have a synergistic effect. So one plus one plus one plus one is not 5. One plus one plus one plus one is twenty-five or a hundred and five or whatever. They have this synergistic effect, so the results become really accelerated, and really powerful.
Now mindfulness practice done in a deeply embodied way, in the way that we teach it, a trauma-informed and deeply empowered way. I'm sorry deeply embodied way. The way we teach it and train people to teach it at The Engaged Mindfulness Institute is directly working with all these networks. Directly working with all five of these networks. There's other things we can do. We can do specific breath regulation techniques like I mentioned some. We can be doing body-mind practices, yoga, tai chi, and qi gong that will also work on these networks. We can be doing practices like EFT tapping. We can use visualization. We can use all kinds of practices, and we can develop our own practice stack, so again, this is more for you. This wouldn't be for beginners. But the idea of stacking has been around for a long time. You know, audio files used to stack up high-end components. They were designed to be able to stack one, and the other. Call that your audio stack. In the digital marketing world, we have our tech stack. It's all different platforms we use. Zoom is a platform that could be part of our tech stack. In the world of biohacking, people talk about their supplements stack, right? The different supplements they're taking every day. So here we can talk about our body-mind stack. Then there's also the idea of habit stacking.
So these come together because we can develop a routine for ourselves, which we're integrating a number of different body-mind practices, and we can move them around and do more of this, more of that one, move them here, move them here, and just keep experimenting with different relationships and how we're optimizing the development. And eventually develop that stack and develop it into a routine and bio-repeated activity. We link one to another to another, and a set of well-ingrained habits now becomes a well-ingrained routine.
Of course, over time, we can make changes and shifts in it, right? But we can get very precise about this. There's lots of different body-mind techniques we can use.
So, the idea here is to take the available information we have from the mainstream mindfulness movement and from its roots in the Buddhist tradition and other meditative contemplative traditions and what we're learning from current neuroscience. If you want to get into it, there's some related quantum theory stuff that's very relatable and connecting. But even just the current neuroscience is enough.
Start all to become good scientists in terms of our own practice and really learning to use the available practice time we have optimally to develop ourselves so we're becoming better regulated, more balanced, more present, and more focused. We're actually realizing the results of our practice, and then this is going to allow us to more effectively hold space for others. Communicate the practice to newcomers in very simple ways but ways that are informed by this level of precision or what's going to give the best on-ramp for someone into the practice, and it'll be some differentiation depending on where they are and who they are and what's going on, but still we'll be able to really give them that simple on-ramp in a very informed and much more precise way in a way that will help them start experiencing benefits from the practice right away.
Okay, so that's the basic idea and that's what we teach at The Engaged Mindfulness Institute. Let's open it up to some questions.
Audience Question about meditation and body awareness for people with body dysphoria
Fleet Maull
Yeah. So, at the beginning, when I was just guiding us through a little settling in practice, it began with, I gave people a number of options, right?
And I empowered people to direct their own practice. If being more focused on the body, feeling the body was not workable, giving someone other options. I think a good framework for this is Dan Siegel’s window of tolerance. You're probably familiar with that. But it's that bandwidth of life experience that we can handle in a relatively well-regulated way. It could include challenging things, but challenges that we're able to handle in a relatively well-regulated way. And, of course, we can get triggered out of our window of tolerance. We get triggered into shutting down. For arousal, get triggered into hyper arousal, into getting upset or tense or acting out or angry, and so forth. Going into rigidity behaviors, right? So, we want to help people practice within their window of tolerance but moving to the edges of it.
That's how we expand our window of tolerance because the window of tolerance shrinks for all of us through life, with the bumps and bruises of life, and with trauma can shrink extremely so, even to the point of agoraphobia. Most trauma therapies are about leaning into the edges of that and then leaning back, like Peter Levine’s pendulating method.
So, we teach in a way where we give people lots of options and then invite them to gradually, very safely, in their own titrated way, to empower themselves to direct their practice, to lean into the edges of discomfort, come back to where they feel okay, lean in, come back. Over time, what people have experienced and clinicians scientists, and researchers have experienced is you can gradually expand your tolerance, and that which was previously too triggering now is not so.
We can gradually reclaim a greater bandwidth of our life. With any trauma-related body issues, people can always direct their attention outside the body and use something outside, visually, auditorily as an object of mindfulness. Over time, just very gently and gradually in a safe way, a safe way for them, or a workable way for them, begin to develop a relationship with the body.
Question about Screen-related tension and stress-distracted attention, do you have some suggestions?
Fleet Maull
You're talking about screen, meaning being online, assume that's screen-related is?
Again, it's all the same skills. I've had some very interesting conversations with Stephen Porges when I've been interviewing him about our ability to co-regulate on Zoom. When we're on Zoom or some other video conferencing technology like this it's a little more difficult. Downstairs in my studio, I'm able to look up to my setup here. I'm able to look at the camera. Most of the time, I still need to look around to look at individuals here. But I have a teleprompter in my studio setup. So when I'm interviewing people, I'm looking straight at them with good eye contact. They’re looking at me instead of having to go up and down like that with my camera being in a different place.
So I think it's all the same skills. If we're on screen, if that's again what the question was about, it's using breath work. It's using breathwork. Probably using some blue light protection for eyes. I don't have mine this morning, but I wear a muffler. Here they are right now. I put them on most of the day when I'm working on the computer. I wear these glasses at night.. I have some that are even a little Darker, and these are blue light protection glasses. Oh, there are things you can put on your screen as well to protect, but other than that, it's using posture, using breath to be in a well-regulated state, right?
Yeah, same, it's all the same. Whatever the source of tension anxiety, or dysregulation, the answer is regulation techniques, and we can do that at the level of body, mind, heart, spirit, and so forth.
Any more questions?
I'll just mention one thing. I mentioned the quantum reality; it may sound woo-woo, and sometimes people put it out there in a popular impression kind of woo-woo-like way, but there is real quantum theory. It’s been around since the 1920s and 30s, and sometimes mainstream science almost pretends like it's not there, but it's very much part of hardcore science. Both the quantum theory understanding and the more Eastern understanding was this physical world we're in; it's like the outer manifestation of reality in a sense, and the further we drop back into the depths of beingness, we're approaching more the quantum level, and we're approaching a level where things are well regulated, not broken, not fragmented.
The further out you get things tend to get fragmented and broken. You get all kinds of mistakes and problems in the outer, outermost layers of how reality manifests. So, one way to heal is to plug back into source, and if you think about a lot of forms of healing, they really are about helping us sort of reconnect with sorce, whatever that might mean for us. People might understand that in spiritual terms, or in the sense that it is divine, or in neurophysiological terms.
But if you can think of, you know, we're modern if we become modern robots, which may not be too far away, but we might have a plug, a plug, right? At night, we just go plug ourselves in, like you do your computer, and overnight, the whole thing would just get, you know, we go back to the original source code, all the fragmentation would go away, and we'd be completely healed.
Well, sleep does that to a degree, by the way, that's what's going on with our brain, which is why sleep is very important. But if you think about it in terms of the deep contemplative traditions, dropping into the very depths of being. in the deep flow states, into what is called samadhi in Eastern traditions, it’s really plugging back into source creates profound healing physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, and so forth.
Yeah, if you're interested in pursuing further training with us and you aspire to really become a professional mindfulness teacher, what do I mean by a professional mindfulness teacher? You know, you might think, well, that's commercializing spirituality. No. What we mean is someone who is embracing the spirit of mastery and professional competency, and just like in any other field where there are certifications and standards. It's the idea of really honoring practice and praxis, like hopefully if one of us is a physician or psychologist or a psychotherapist or lawyer or any other professional like that, we involved in an ongoing process of self-education and lifelong learning, and we're staying up to date, so our clients are getting the best from us all the time.
That's that commitment to professional practice. So, as mindfulness teachers and meditation teachers, I think it's the same idea of having that commitment to competency and professionality and ethical standards and really being able to bring forward the best and staying up to date with everything that we're collectively learning, right? Keeping our learning up to date and also keeping it grounded in actual practice. So we're practicing every day, and our guidance is not coming from memory, but it's alive in our practice, right?
So, if you're interested in pursuing that further, that's what we're about at The Engaged Mindfulness Institute, and we have another cohort coming up of our teacher training program that will be launching sometime this spring.
For those of you who are here at this webinar will be offering you a very nice discount if you choose to enroll. So we'll be sending out an email to all of you, and if you'd like to get on the waiting list and that discount and even just put down a small deposit to guarantee your spot in the program, we'll honor that for everyone who's been here today. So you'll get an email about that. But if you have any questions about the program then you can get online, you can talk to our wonderful Julie, you can have a call with her and talk about the program.
But if you're interested personally, I feel it's one of the best programs out there. I'm a little biased, but it's a really deep program, and it's very much focused on your practice and deepening your practice as the context for you becoming a professional mindfulness teacher. It's about embracing that spirit of life of mastery and lifelong learning. And you're exposed to some of the best teachers in the field. So we have over 30 teachers that are part of the online part of the program, and you're involved in a small learning group, and we set a very high bar. We want the people who certify to be teachers we can be proud of as an organization that are getting out there and doing work in the field, and so we create a very high bar for it. Not only do you go through the program, but then there's a submitting a portfolio of practice teaching, reporting and creating curriculum designs and there's practice teaching requirements so it's a very robust program.
It's not going somewhere for a weekend and getting a certificate as a mindfulness teacher. You can do that to at lots of places around the world, but if you want to be deeply trained and on your path towards becoming a really masterful and professional mindfulness teacher, then I think you might be interested in exploring what we do.
That's all I'll say about that, but the website is engagedmindfulness.org. So you can go there, and we will send out an email to everyone who is here for this webinar today to offer you a particular discount and appreciation for your coming today.
So, I think we're beyond our time already, but somebody says, is there a POF class or something? Yeah, Path of Freedom is a curriculum that Vita designed for incarcerated individuals, and we train people in delivering that curriculum, and that's a completely different thing. An ideal thing is to become a certified mindfulness teacher and then become certified in the Path of Freedom, that's kind of really an ideal combination.
But we offer the Path of Freedom training online to anyone with an established practice; that's a separate matter.
So, any other questions? Everything I talked about today, you can easily explore, and we'll put, if you're interested in pursuing this further, documents, we can share with you and all the professional journal resources to pursue neuroscience. I'm constantly reading all this stuff. I'll read a journal article, and then I'll look down at all the references, and I'll go find those articles and read those and then go around, you know, you can go way down the rabbit hole on this stuff, but it's a personal interest of mine.
Anyway, we can provide you with the basic framework. So, you can see that from current neuroscience, we literally know about these four and five. Sometimes we talk about four, sometimes we just talk about self-regulation, attention, positive and empathy or connection network, and sometimes we add in the emotion regulation network because it's very similar to the self-regulation network, but these all, we know what they do, we know the parts of the brain that connect. We know what that produces, and we know how to target them with specific body-mind practices. We know how to do basic mindfulness practice in a way that targets all of them and then we get that synergistic impact. Personally, I believe we can accelerate our practice if we're practicing regularly, you know, half-hour to an hour, an hour and a half a day. We're practicing regularly. We can accomplish several years what people normally would have spent 20 or 30 years doing. And now still, you got to do the work.
You know, I'm not saying there's a magic bullet, but I think we can be more precise about how we develop our practice and combine various practices to target these networks and accelerate the results for ourselves and for others. And I think that's exciting. I think it's an exciting time to be alive.
At The Engaged Mindfulness Institute, we're very much traditionalists. We honor the deep contemplative traditions of East and West and are very much about keeping up with current science, so it's about integrating the two.
Okay, well, I think that's probably it for the day. I'm actually committed to going out with my wife and getting a Christmas tree, so I'm going to head off and do that.
But great to see everyone today.
Audience Comment:
I've been involved with meditation and mindfulness training for many, many years and many different formats, but you presented it so well here.
So if people are really encouraged in this training, I really encourage you to do this with The Engaged Mindfulness Institute. You're doing great work, Fleet.
Fleet Maull
Thank you. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Very kind of you. Yeah. I think it's a very direct way to help people.
I was at the post office yesterday, and I just witnessed something that was just kind of, so It wasn't very funny. You could see it a little bit funny. It was mostly sad. There was the person who was working the counter in the post office, a little small town post office here in New England.. There was a person working the counter, and I was observing them. There were three people ahead of me in line, and I'm just kind of standing there observing, the situation and um and the person working the counter was a bit cranky.
There was a gentleman who was actually next in line, and I was just looking at him and he looked cranky now I don't want to make assumptions about people, but you know, he had kind of a cranky look to him. But anyway there's another person actually at the counter being served, and he just starts talking like uh Hey, where's that uh, Jason or what's his name?I think he's the postmaster. Where is he today? Is he here? She was not really wanting to be distracted by him and answering, and she says, no, I don't know where he is, and so he quiets down, and later starts talking again. Finally, she just says, she kind of barked at him and said, “I can only work with one customer at a time, and you're very rude, you shouldn't be interrupting me, blah, blah. So she kind of barks at him and then he barks back, oh, you can't chew gum and walk at the same time, huh. Then he storms out of the place and I watched him get back in his pickup truck with his wife sitting there in a pickup truck, and I'm going, how did he explain this to her? Because he’s still got his mail, his packages that he was trying to mail. I was like, what did he tell his wife, right?
But, you know, I mean, here were two human beings, both of whom were sorely lacking in self-regulation techniques, sorely lacking in co-regulation techniques, and sorely lacking in the self-awareness around both. And they got into a conflict, which was completely unnecessary. One of them could have easily diffused with even the slightest bit of self-awareness, emotional awareness, regulation capacity, co-regulation capacity, right?
And if you extrapolate this out into the world, well, we see our world is just full of conflict and war and all the rest of it, And it's really human beings who have not been afforded the opportunity to learn to self-regulate and co-regulate, right?
You know, one of our goals in life is to introduce as many people as possible to experiences that help them develop greater confidence in their own innate goodness, the innate goodness of all human beings in all of life, and to develop good self-regulation techniques or capacities and good co-regulation capacities, and we feel this will really bring about world transformation if we can get significant numbers of people to have that context and those skills, right?
All the conflict, war, and terrible suffering we see in life really arises out of people not having confidence in their innate goodness, not having confidence in the goodness of others, not knowing how to self-regulate, not knowing how to co-regulate, and then you get all the suffering and chaos.
So, I just think this is really important work, and it's really a gift that we can learn to offer to people in really effective ways, so that they can immediately improve the quality of their lives.
We hear from correctional officers who are in a 10-week program, and over the course of 10 weeks, we hear their life is changing. They're sleeping at night for the first time in their careers, their relationships with their spouses and children are dramatically changing, the level of drama they're experiencing with their peers is dramatically changing simply by, and it's all by just simply using simple self-regulation techniques, their life is beginning to change in really positive ways.
So okay, well that's enough for today, I'm going to go get our Christmas tree with my wife.
You all enjoy your day.
Have a great weekend. We hope to see you around campus. Take good care. Thank you.
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