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Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, in today's world, we're all so busy and rarely get the time to meditate and be mindful, but it can really help us get the most out of our lives, so listen closely and learn how to be more mindful.

Plus later, we'll tell you what's going on around town, but first up, Kim and Johnston is a psychotherapist and behavioral health and wellness educator. Her work is offered her the opportunity to work as a part of the interdisciplinary team in private practice, integrating biofeedback and mindfulness meditation with patients living with chronic pain. Her primary work is teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction at St. Jude Wellness Center, where she has worked for 15 years, she's passionate about the role of mindfulness meditation in helping manage chronic conditions and offering individuals and empowered weight counteract stress, field stress resilience and enhance their own health and well-being. And we welcome her to the mother's market radio show. kempston, how are you?

I'm well, thanks for having me today.

Thanks for being here.

Why don't you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today's show topic... Sure, I've been with St. Jude, as she said, 15 years and how I began this work was, I have a chronic illness myself, and in my 30s, I was in a pretty severe bike accident, it was at a time that I was doing some triathlons and really working out, and one day was on a bike ride, was in a bad accident and I came to... At the hospital, emergency room, had been out for three hours, and still to this day, I don't know how it happened, but it really changed the course of my life because after that I got very ill and developed a chronic illness. And so that made me more passionate about stress and what was going on in my life... 'cause I was raising kids, I was going to school, and I just felt like I was doing too many things at once. So that's kind of the beginning of the story. He goes from there, but that kind of gives you a base... Wow, well, you can definitely see that you are driven by your passion, and today we're talking about mindfulness meditation and it's the influence on the brain, let's talk a little bit about this mindfulness and then in the news these days to mindfulness... What is it good for and what goes on inside our brains when we are mindful? Well, we see a lot of mindfulness now on the news cover of Scientific American and Time Magazine, and back in probably the 80s on PBS, they did a Bill lawyer special called healing in the mind, and they were interviewing John Keats in who worked out of University of Massachusetts Center for mindfulness. He was actually an MIT grad, he was a molecular biologist, but he got interested in meditation and he really felt that it was something that was so beneficial to so many people for healing the body. So he began working there and many physicians started sending people to him... A lot of physicians felt that people with chronic pain or chronic illness were falling through the cracks, they had exhausted their repertoire of skills, but these folks weren't getting better, so they sent them to the stress reduction clinic at University of Massachusetts, and they started this... It's an eight-week program, which is kind of the gold standard in the field, and this is the program that I teach in that all the research is based on, so what is mindfulness and how does it influence the brain...

Okay, so mindfulness, a good working definition of that is a moment-by moment, non-judgmental awareness with a sense of curiosity, and we can break that down a little... So we say moment by moment, well, if we think about life, we're always on autopilot, we're always either in the future or the past, our minds are very seldom right here right now, and so there's this quality of just being present with our awareness in this moment, and then the second part of it is non-judgmental ly. Well, why do we care about that? That's kind of a strange phrasing, but if you think about it, us as humans, we are very judgmental, they're very opinionated about so many things, we get on the freeway or were mad about the traffic. The room's too hot, too cold. There's not enough food. So we have these opinions that are constantly going on, and the way I would like in it too is we all a lot more Yemenis, less Heins in our life. And so, when good things happen, we want more of it, when bad things happen, we wanna push it away and we don't want it, but imagine we could hold those things the same, the good and the bad, and not really be judgmental about it.

So I called this The yam yuck factor.

And then the other part of it is that we get contracted around the negative when it happens, so imagine if we have chronic pain or chronic illness, we do a lot of contracting, so mindful awareness, if we were to think about it right here in this moment, you're listening to the sound of my voice or sitting, we can feel the weight of our bodies on the chair, just being present with the sensations of the air against our skin, so that's really showing up, use the senses in a very real way of how we show up in the moment.

So secondly, as we go about our days and all of our experiences, all influence our brain, and when we bring this sense of present moment awareness, we really are showing up in the moment, and we begin to become aware that we have these habitual responses, maybe we have people that trigger us all the time, or somebody we see every day and we know they just know how to push our button, and when we practice mindfulness meditation, what we learn is over time, we're able to pause and step back, and maybe we don't feel so reactive we begin to notice I start to have a longer fuse, so the other question was, What is mindful and is good for... And so we know there's these literally thousands of studies now that show the positive impact that mindfulness practices have on our health and well-being for managing stress, anxiety for physical and emotional self-regulation, and over time, this has a very quieting and calming effect on the mind and the body.

And so I wanna talk a little bit about when we have a chronic illness or chronic pain, because many, many people in our culture right now in our society have chronic pain and chronic illness, and they don't always know what to do about it, because it can feel very disempowering, we begin to isolate ourselves more and more... We're not able to go out, so we have these mental processes, I'm not able to go to work, what's my boss gonna think I can't go to work anymore, my friends don't wanna be around you 'cause I'm constantly in pain. So the perception is, I don't like this, and how this I don't like this gets lived out in everyday life is very unpleasant and distressing, and the first thing I wanna say about that is that anxiety, fear, and despair and depression, these are all very, very valid emotions, in response to chronic illness and pain, and how mindfulness can help us is learning how to move away from this, I don't like this system of living, and to begin turning towards this, which is very counter-intuitive. And it takes a tremendous amount of courage.

So we have a choice whether we're going to be fall into that same pattern of emotional thinking and negative thought cycles and begin looking at more closely, how do we gain these skills and make a choice, because if you take your fist for a minute and you just make a contracted fist. If you do that, what do you notice about your breath? We notice that you stop breathing, you brutal... So if we think about the fact that we have this primary suffering, which is the pain itself, but then the secondary suffering is all the stuff that we keep on to that all our negative thought processes, the physical tension of contracting, and as we soften into that and we breathe into the body and we're more present with what's going on, we can all only live life one moment at a time, and sometimes those moments can become in bearable, but can you take it just one moment at a time, so that if the present moment is unbearable, maybe the next one isn't. So we soften, we notice, and we begin to see that we can have a real quality and excellent quality of life, even if we have pain, once we kind of step back and do away with all that secondary suffering, 'cause that can be a burden. And I think as you say, just really... You know, I don't know if you say own it, but just recognize it and be absolutely. Be mindful of it as you say, and don't... Do you turn toward it and you're being positive toward it.

So I wanna ask you about the new technology, and can you explain that about a way of looking at our brains and reading our minds, mris or what... Can you talk about that also with the imaging technology that we have right now, we really have to... What's an interesting fact to me is that in the last 20 years, we probably learned more about a brain research then we now have learned to date in the past at all, so when mindfulness can be a bit of an elusive quality to quantify in the brain with these MRI scans, we can actually see increasing activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is an area of the brain that actually begins to thin as we age, but it also is the area of the brain that suffers a lot of injury or degradation, I guess, is the better word for Alzheimer's patients.

So we know that as we are able to think in this prefrontal cortex, this starts Titian when we practice meditation after about cumulatively 11 hours, which if we practice 20 minutes a day, that would probably be about a little less than six weeks. That area of the brain starts to thin, and they did a study, National Geographic at one point on London taxi cab drivers, and they looked at their brains and because they actually memorize the spaghetti snarl of byways highways and all kinds of tourist sites. They looked at the pre-Fernald cortex, which the hippocampus is part of, and they saw that those people's Hippo Campi or hippocampus is, I guess, take up a much greater piece of real estate in the brain because it has to do with this visual spatial part of the brain... And what we know about brain scans is that even after these eight-week classes, they reveal that this resting state, connectivity between the network in the brain allows people to control their attention and other parts of the brain that have to do with rumination and spontaneous thought.

So what I think is most telling or most key about these studies is that people with PTSD, say folks that come back from the war who have post-traumatic stress disorder, they begin to see these changes in brain connectivity where they are less rumination and more present moment. And so one of my passions is I want to be able to use these classes for first responders and also offer maybe even scholarships to folks that have been in the military that are home from the war now, and get to attend these classes to be able to tend to some of these needs. I think it's so... So key, that's honorable. And that it is true. I think you are definitely seeing a difference, you could see a difference with the PTSD, it would make quite a difference. Let's talk a little bit about the other kind of the brain research and how fascinating it is, what are some three facts about the brain that might be fun for us to know? And again, one the things I didn't say is I'm not a neuropsychologist or neurologist or anything like that, so it is a set... Such a fascinating area, and I think some fun things to know is if we look at one grain of sand, size bit of brain, it would house 100000 neurons, a billion synapses, all communicating with each other simultaneously.

Lion, I'm like, I know.

And the second one is that in general, men sprains or 10% bigger than women's, even after... I know we all laugh about this case goes matters even after taking into account larger body size, however, the hippocampus is the part of the brain most strongly linked with memory, they're bigger and women, and so I think that's a fascinating fact.

Yeah, and here's another one we're also inclined to use our GPS trackers, but what we know now is that this not using our own innate sense of direction, actually is a skill that took our ancestors thousands of years to develop and home. And when the area of the brain involved in navigation is no longer used, these neural connections start to fade away in a way we call it, it's known as satanic pruning, so off it goal is never to be returned, so we shouldn't be using your GPS to map out every... Exactly, so we keep those going, This is really interesting information in that right now, we need to take a quick break, but more in just a moment with Kimpton, so don't go... Wait, we'll be right back.

And back to the mother's market radio show.

And we wanna remind you that if you've missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to the past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now back to our interview with a psychotherapist and behavioral health and wellness educator Kinston Johnston, and we're about mindfulness meditation and its influence on the brain, and it's so interesting, and so Kim, you mentioned that for survival, our brains are hardwired to pay more attention to negative and intense experiences than positive and settle ones, and it's so true, and we've all been there, and why is this and how can we really hope to change them in any long-lasting way, so our brains have this negativity bias, and it seems really unfair truly. Because as we evolved, we needed to avoid danger for one and pursue food, so avoiding danger was more important because if we didn't avoid danger, we're dead, and then we can't pass on our genes. So that's the most important one. So the brain is perpetually scanning our environment for danger, so this is kind of where this all stems from, we know relationally that it takes typically five good interactions to make up for one single bad one, right.

So if somebody... We go through the day five, grade things happen. Someone goes, Why are you wearing that shirt? What's the thing we're gonna focus on, right?

So painful experiences are more memorable than pleasurable ones, and so this Rumination goes on that it did not go well versus the five that went just fine, so what we are focused on in the field of awareness, when we talk about mindfulness meditation, we're talking about being present with what's happening right in the moment. And no matter what we're focused on in the field of awareness, whether it's positive or negative, we create more of that, so if we're focused on the negative, we create more of that, so if you put your hands together in with your fingers into lease... If we think about how those neurons and neuro pathways and synaptic connections all happen, if we're focused on the negative, these neurons that fire together wire together and temporary in lasting ways around the negative, if we think of it like when rain comes down and it hits the dirt, it starts to make little grooves in the dirt, and over time, those groups get more deeply etched and that's then where the water goes and creates more... Forges deeper and stronger pathways... Well, it's like that for us too, so if we think about these neural pathways, while the other analogy I like to use is, it's positive is like Teflon, pinging off of us, negative is like velcro common to us. So how do we begin to make that shift that counter-acts what's kind of in our chemistry already from birth is kind of... How do we talk... A negativity bias is the word I'm looking for how... If we think about it, the negative bias is how we learn to survive, so if we see a stick on the ground, say, and we think it's a snake, that's the better mistake to make, then thinking it's a snake, and it turns out to be the reverse, because that's what keeps us safe.

So how do we begin to shift this... We need to consciously and intentionally begin to make the shift to create more positives, and I think in a way to... I think what I'm hearing you say, and every time there's a positive, we have to... We're grateful for those positives, can you say more a little bit about the three fundamental facts about the mind and the brain as it relates to the concept of neurons that fire and fire... Together, wire together. I love that fire together, wire together and so... Yeah, and because it's so true about this whole way that we dismiss these positive things, so imagine though, that if we could knowingly know this fact that there's this negativity bias, so we say, How am I going to make that shift? And so imagine that, just take an instant say, we need to learn to just recognize and celebrate the good things that happen, whether it be... I just finished that project. And so rather than have these negative experiences that get captured in our emotional memory, because they can gradually over time, dark in our mood and our outlook, in our sense of self, we can get depressed, and so the great news is that we're not condemned for this to happen and have it stay this way, so we can instead make our brain like velcro for the good stuff of life by taking in the good, and here's three steps that can enable you to do this is one, positive facts, become positive experiences, allow yourself to really feel good about... Could be getting something done or noticing something... One example might be, if you have a humming bird feed are in the yard and you just drink your morning coffee and just sipping your coffee, you just really taking that experience, imagine you could be the human sponge for sipping this yummy coffee and watching this humming bird feed ed the feeder, and it doesn't have to be something monumental, something as simple as this, secondly to savor this experience for 20 to 30 seconds, really let it sink in and fill your body as intensely as possible, may get multimodal and more graphic in your mind and the third way would be, in addition to that is intended and sense that this experience is sinking into you almost like warm, bringing a warm glow to your body, say that this experience, you're just taking it into the body, seeing it in your mind as it's happening in the more rich you can make the experience and the longer you're able to hold it in awareness and emotionally stimulating, the more neurons are gonna fire around this particular experience, and the more times a day we can do this, and then the more... Gradually, we re-weave the positive experience into the fabric of our brains, I love that, and that goes back to visualizing and really savoring all of those and owning that positive experience and really just thanking that positive experience. Yes, and what you said about gratitude, I think is very fitting here too, and I think that brings us to the last part.

Yeah, it's almost as if something positive that happened, we just aren't accustomed to having something positive happen to us, we just kind of brush it off and just... Not that we even expect it, but it's just when something negative happens to us, it's just so like, Oh, you know, and then That's what... As you said, it attaches to us... That just ruins your whole day. And that's what we can... And when we talk about children, what are we really focused on? The positive, we don't talk to them or treat them in a way as hardly harsh as we are on our sales, this self-compassion piece and empathy is such a big part of mindfulness too, it's really learning how to be tender with ourselves.

Very good. I think we all need to hear this.

So outside of a regular meditation practice, what might be two simple tips for practices that benefit the brain that people can practice in our own lives, so one would be taking time to get out in nature, I think we're so devoid of natural sound and the way the sand feels on our toes of the grass spells when we go to the park on our feet, we kind of bypass these moments. I was on a retreat once with an executive and we were told to really put away our phones during this week, and they said, Go out and look at the night sky, and he came back in after that, and we came back into the meditation hall, and he really spoke about how he'd been looking down on his phone so much that he didn't remember the firmament of stars that was up there, and how fast and how beautiful and struck he was, and so I always say go out in nature, take it in the clouds, the rain, whatever it is. That's one big one. And secondly, I'd say connecting socially with people that really care about us, I think that really shifts our biochemistry in a really big way and also influences our well-being, and that's so true too, and I think... I would just add this, I always tell my kids this, if you think about somebody or if you have a thought about somebody, call them or connect with them, especially if you have that quick... Not just talent, can you share with us a practice that you use regularly and to help us... Are a MERSA resilient brain?

Sure.

When you spoke of gratitude, which is wonderful because this is really a big piece of this, so I have people do a two-minute free right of remembering people who keep their lives going in the web of life. It could be the cashier at the grocery store, the mail man, it doesn't have to be people you know, Albert Einstein said 100 times every day, I remind myself that my inner in our life depends on the labors of other people, and that I must exert myself in order to give, I give in the same measure as I have received and I'm still receiving. So really, even though we don't verbally tell them, I think it's such a simple thing to do, which we can do at the end of every day, and what this does is it really primes the brain to notice and acknowledge people in the web of our life as we move through our days, and this can really, really be an antidote to that negativity bias that we were talking about when challenges arise, it really gets us in the habit of recognizing good things happen every day and people really influence us, like you were saying. Well, my goodness, it is. Thank you, I've been thinking about this and you just wrapped it up in a nice pretty bow. Thank you, thank you for sharing all of this and I was more mindful as I go out into the world, so I appreciate that, Simpson. It's great having you here. Thank you for your time. And for more information, you can go to a synergy med fit dot com is synergy, edit dot com for more information about cimon Johnston. Thank you, we look forward to your next visit.

Thank you, my pleasure.

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