Mindfulness Mode
 

Mindfulness Mode

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Increase your calm, focus and happiness so you can be more relaxed, contented and satisfied with your life. For business, entrepreneurs, educators, parents. Hosted by Bruce Langford.

Episodes

293 Overcome Adversity and Reach Your Goals With Justin Schenck

Feb 4, 2018

Feb 4, 2018

28 min

Justin Schenck is a speaker and coach who has established the Growth Now Movement, an initiative he created to help millions of people reach their goals, no matter how lofty they are. Justin’s specific area of expertise is overcoming adversity; something he has accomplished successfully in his own life. Justin is also creator and host of the Growth Now Movement Podcast where he interviews guests who have overcome major obstacles.

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Most Influential Person

  • My mom, because she constantly loved others more than you could ever imagine.

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness effected my emotions; they are getting better. I was always a reactor but I'm learning still, I have a relationship coach.
  • I'm learning not to do that. I'm learning that not everybody's out to get me. I do this in a number of different ways. I will just step away and take a walk to put myself in a different mindset.
  • I try to see things from their mindset instead of mine. I try not to be so selfish about it.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • Breathing is the most important part of my mindfulness practice because if I'm not breathing properly or if I don't pause and take those deep breaths, I do that blackout thing and I don't even realize what's going on. Then I become a hot mess.
  • Breathing for me is the number one thing, it's been a lifesaver for me. Jarek Robbins, Tony Robbins son, taught me a really cool breathing technique. You take three quick breaths in through your nose, real aggressive, and then you breathe out your mouth, and then three quick breaths in your mouth and then slowly breathe out your nose. Then you repeat that. It almost actually gets you a little high. It helps you calm down, your brain starts to think a little bit better.
  • Whenever I get super stressed out and I don't think things are going to go my way, I just sit down, put my feet flat on the ground and I do that and it kind of calms me up.

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Bullying Story

  • I was never bullied. When I was twelve years old I broke my hip and a couple years later I broke my other hip.
  • Five surgeries within the time frame of three years made me almost not bully-able because it would be horrible if people picked on me. I actually just recently interviewed a guy named Justin Wren who is a fighter and he told a story about being bullied in school and it was just terribly sad at the end.
  • I've never personally experienced being bullied, but I can only imagine if the bullies themselves were just able to take a deep breath and not have peer pressure to do these things and if we realized we were all kind of the same, then I think that would help a whole lot.
  • If people were able to take a step back and be more mindful of what they're actually doing, I think we'd be much better off.
  • I had a guy email me about a year ago, saying that I'm a fraud and I get all my content from my guests and that none of my content actually comes from me. It was this long email and I thought, why are you taking time out of your day to do this.
  • I actually wrote an email back in defense and being angry and whatever, but I deleted it because I became mindful of what I was doing.
  • I just wrote him an email back and I said, thank you so much for your perspective; I really appreciate it. Why don't you just hang in there for a little bit longer and keep listening because you might like some of the things that are coming up?

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292 The Kindness Cure With Author Tara Cousineau

Jan 31, 2018

Jan 31, 2018

40 min

Tara Cousineau, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, meditation teacher, well-being researcher, and social entrepreneur. Tara founded www.bodimojo.com, and develops digital wellness tools for youth. She is affiliated with the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, MA. She is a mindfulness trainer and chief science officer at Whil, a digital mindfulness company, and serves as a scientific advisor to www.kindness.org. Her upcoming book, The Kindness Cure will be released in February 2018. It is a peerless book on kindness that exceeds any existing work on the subject.

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Most Influential Person

Effect on Emotions

  • If we had longer, I would tell you what a temper tantrum kid I was. I had a very chaotic household. I think that when I came to yoga and mindfulness in my twenties, that it absolutely changed, in my emotional life, how I react, in the world, in my relationships. It fundamentally changed them.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • Breathing is essential. A definition of breath is spirit of life and I feel that's very true. So, for me, the breath is spiritual nurturing; taking that sacred pause. And that's what Tara Brock calls it; that's why I like her so much. Essentially, we are living, breathing human beings and we're all connected to each other by the very virtue that we live and breathe in the world. So let's really attend to our breath.

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Bullying Story

  • Like I mentioned, I wrote the book based on a bullying situation. It was a situation with my daughter actually.
  • The incident was the night before senior year of high school. The kids were congregating in the woods. They’re not supposed to, but that’s where they do. It was early in the evening, 9:00 at night or something and my daughter was leaving the gathering and another girl just comes out from behind a tree and attacks my daughter.
  • It was like a girl-on-girl fight. My daughter, Sophie had no idea where this was coming from. Then the guys got called in and it was one of those weird teenage scenes. And here’s the thing; my daughter didn’t tell me until a day later. Partly because I had actually been in my office the night before and I didn’t see her come home.
  • The next day she came to my home office and said, mom, I have something to tell you. I was like, Oh my god; she crashed the car, she’s pregnant. What is a teenager going to tell you, you know?
  • She sat down and she said, I know I was not supposed to be at the woods, but that’s where all the kids were just to celebrate and she named a former friend from middle school who had physically attacked her. I was just like, Oh, my god are you ok? And she showed me the cat scratches and the fingernail scratches and the whole thing.
  • She had a picture that her friend took of her bloody nose. I said I don’t want to see the picture because I know too much about how these things get imprinted in your brain. I said I believe you. Are you ok? Do you feel safe?
  • The next day was going to be the first day of school. I asked, are you going to be ok in the hallways, in the cafeteria. She said, yeah. And I said, why do you think this happened? She goes, I really don’t know. I think it might just be an old grudge and then she started going into this compassion mode. I’m looking at her shaking my head because I literally was going to go knock on her parents' door and really ream the mother out. I was really mad. I was really upset about it.
  • My daughter was saying, well, she’s really had a hard life. I said, honey, you were assaulted and that’s not ok, but you know what, let’s just think about it. I literally called on every ounce of mindfulness training that I’d had, not to go into this reactive, tiger-mom mode. I might have five or six years ago.
  • I might have gotten in my car, knocked on the door and the whole kit and caboodle. But my daughter actually really showed … I don’t know where she got this because I think she had wisdom and inner strength that I didn’t necessarily have at her age where she could see the situation from multiple angles.
  • She also felt in this case, that talking to the school could blow it up and make it worse. I said, let’s just put that on hold because I’m the parent here and it’s ultimately the parents’ responsibility to do something. So part b of this story is that I waited a week. Then I made a meeting with the school and I just said, I know that the woods are the satellite off-campus site for these kids and that as long as they’re not on the property, there’s nothing you can do about it.
  • I said, here’s my concern; that this is going to escalate and this could cause a rift that both girls are going to be in a sort of interpersonal war and that both of them could have an unpleasant year because what happened immediately is that a lot of the girls and guys sided with my daughter.
  • That was going to incense the situation more. That’s what kind of informed the book, was that very incident because I just had one of those wtf moments where I just said, what happened to kindness.

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291 Rediscover Your Sexuality; Dr. Jane Guyn

Jan 28, 2018

Jan 28, 2018

38 min

Jane Guyn is a Doctor of Human Sexuality, Professional Sex Coach, Core Energy Coach and registered nurse. She is the author of the Amazon #1 Bestseller “Too Busy to Get Busy." She coaches women to have the sex life they've secretly desired all their lives by removing one or more of the 7 barriers to great sex - even if it's been a rocky road. As someone who's been married for over 30 years with 6 kids, Dr. Jane understands the challenges.

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Most Influential Person

  • A woman who taught a mindfulness-based stress reduction course written by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Effect on Emotions

  • The bullying story is a good example of that. When I get into a situation when I'm being triggered by someone elses hard edge, and bullying behavior, I don't want to give up my willingness to stand up and at the same time I don't want to bring an agressive stance to that person.
  • Mindfulness has allowed me to come back within myself. I think of it energetically and bring it back in and still be there as someone who's holding space.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • I'm a Yoga practitioner and I use breathing in that practice. I also use it when I meditate. I use it to get myself grounded when I fall into the gap, which I must say I'm not able to do every single time I meditate, but when I can get into that space, it feels like one of the most pleasurable experiences I have, as a sex person, that's saying something.
  • Just being in what feels like a gap between being awake and asleep and just such pure bliss. That happens when I use my breathing well and really become conscious of my breathing.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • At the time of this recording, there has been a lot of emphasis on Facebook where women are claiming their, and I'll say our experience with sexual assault or sexual harassment. It's stunning to watch my news feed as person after person, woman after woman, types up 'me too' in her status.
  • I'm honored to see so many of us claiming that so it's kind of hopeful in a way that we're all showing up with something that's been a secret for so long. At the same time, it's really sad to see so many of us who are having that need to experience.
  • For me the bullying that I've experienced in my life really had to do with ... it really started in my home. When we aren't empowered in our own homes, it sets us up for further bullying experiences and further sexual harassment, rape and other kinds of experiences where we don't have power.
  • My experience was with a father who drank alcoholically and he created a very scary home environment. Although we looked fantastic on the outside, as is the case with many of these families. We had a gardener, our home was very lovely, up on a hill. We weren't wealthy, but for the community we lived in, I felt that we were fairly well-to-do. It was all just right.
  • But when you got behind closed doors, my dad was really scary. Because of that, I ended up with a lot of barriers and a lot of armoring. It took me time and the use of mindfulness to release the barriers and release the armoring and be willing to be vulnerable with other people.
  • On the way there, I went through kind of a dragon slayer phase where I was a rescuer for people who were being bullied around me. I remember this one situation I was in, in northern California where I lived with my husband.
  • I was a newlywed there and there was this pickup truck next to us in the Safeway parking lot. A man who had two or three guns in the back rack; he had a pit bull in the front seat with him. He was a big man. And he started to beat the pit bull with his fist.
  • I got out of the car and I went over to that truck and I said, "You leave that dog alone." My husband was just terrified. He was saying, "Get back in the car."
  • I remember I was so compelled to step in. That edge kind of pulls a little of the bully energy, the fighter. It took me some time to realize that I could be in place as a safe space for someone who is experiencing bullying without bringing that hard edge.
  • And that's what I do now, in a mindful way, is to, when I see something, then I turn to the person, the victim if you will, and create a spaciousness and kindness around that person to kind of envelop that, instead of directly connecting with the person who has this hard energy. That seems to work better for me. It's a transition for me and it's a growth for me.

 

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290 We're At An Epoch Says Wellness Force Radio Host, Josh Trent

Jan 24, 2018

Jan 24, 2018

38 min

Josh Trent is an expert in the field of wellness and specifically in the area of physical and emotional intelligence. He is founder and host of Wellness Force Radio where he’s interviewed world-class experts in the fields of mindset, behavior change, nutrition, health, and technology. Josh is also the host of the Fitness Industry Technology Council’s “Fitness + Technology Podcast,” Josh spotlights the work of global fitness and wellness brands, and how their contributions through new technologies are positively influencing the industry.

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Most Influential Person

  • My grandfather. He was one of the first Italian Americans in the Marine Corp to be a Brigadeer General and he stopped me in the hallway once when I was thirteen years old. He said, do you believe in God? I said no. Why not. Well because the church has got all this control and everything. He said, Josh, do you realize that the human mind always thinks there's a beginning, middle and end? But if you look at higher intelligence or God, there is no such thing as a beginning, middle or end.

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness has allowed me to actually feel my emotions.
  • I think we have a sickness in our country where our lack of mindfulness leads to the lack of connection which leads to disconnection. Disconnection is what fuels addiction.
  • The opposite of addiction is connection. Mindfulness to me is actually connection in that way.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • I have on my arm, this [tatoo]. if I can breathe, I can chose. Because I learned this especially in the last couple of years going through business stress and relationship stress.
  • If we can all just remember to breathe in this moment and exhale. Do it right now. Then you can make the choice you really want to make and you won't be reacting, you'll be responding after the deep breath.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • This topic is timeless. I'm thirty-seven now and I can close my eyes and go right back to when I was seven years old. I was using food then to check out because I didn't have the emotional tool sense yet. I can specifically remember playing soccer on the field. Everyone was calling me fat. Look at you, fat ass. Look at you, fat kid. Fat, fat, fat, fat.
  • That word fat just hit me and it because this sore that I wore on the outside of my body. In the book, The Untethered Soul, he talked about all the thorns we have on our body. That became a massive thorn for me.
  • When anyone would point to the way that I looked, or when I looked at myself in the mirror, all throughout my adolescence, there would be this pain body around it. I look back at that time and I think, what could have been different then?
  • What could have been different in my ability to be mindful. I would have been having an open dialogue with my parent. Feeling the safety, the securety, the capacity for me to have that conversation with my mother or father at that time.
  • That wasn't there because their emotional intelligence wasn't there either. But we've already talked about this, because they did the best they could. I look back at this seven year old and I want to put my arm around him.
  • I want to say, hey man, you're so great the way you are. there's nothing wrong with you. All this means is that you're carrying around extra energy. Because that stuff on your stomach is just energy. So, do you want to do something exciting? Do you want to do something fun? Let's go burn off some of that energy.
  • But I didn't have that then. I can heal that pain body now by being the thirty-seven year-old who looks back and has the conversation with that seven year old and says, I love you, you're doing great. Let's burn off some of that energy you have.
  • Because really, depression and sadness, is just the opposite of expression in putting your voice out there. And that's what more people need. Bullying is a by-product of anger, depression and sadness.
  • You think a bully's happy? When bullies pick on other kids, it's because their homelife is crap, their married to somebody they hate, they're in a relationship they don't like.
  • Maybe most bullies are in their teens, but there can be adult bullies too. Bullying is just a representation of anger and sadness that is leaking out of someone's soul. And that is the bottom line for anybody that bullies anybody. It's a lack of consciousness. A lack of mindfulness.
  • And so the narative around bullying must change and it must change now because we're stepping into one of the most growth producing years.
  • With the potential of us growing as a collective, but also one of the most dangerous, as technology rises, as people that are in power, especially the leader of our country, do not promote a lifestyle of mindfulness and deep connection and love for other people.
  • We're at this epoch. We're at this point right now where we have to decide with our actions. If we don't, the danger is that mindfulness goes away, bullying goes up and then we have this conversation again in another thousand years. And I don't want that to happen.

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289 Darwin, Creationism, and Mindfulness With Perry Marshall

Jan 21, 2018

Jan 21, 2018

57 min

Perry Marshall is an author, an engineer and an expert in on-line marketing. He's also a thought leader in the area of creationism and evolution. His recent book, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, is a look at Perry's research and his conclusions regarding common opinions surrounding creationism and evolution. Perry concludes that neither side is telling you the whole story. Perry's Google Adwords books have resulted in the 100 billion dollar pay-per-click industry. He's written the world's best-selling book on web advertising called, Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords.

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Most Influential Person

  • Gerry Hogg - a woman from northern Ireland who taught me a keltic way of connecting to nature. One of the biggest shifts I've ever had in my life.

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness has caused my emotions to be a lot calmer. What we'd all like this to be is, now I'm going to do my mindfulness exercises and within three days everything's going to be fine. For me it really took months and years.
  • We humans are complex beings. We have a lot of garbage and we have deep closets with lots of bones and stuff. Over a period of years, the difference is profound. I used to be a bag of snakes. I'm a lot more composed than I used to be and it's nice.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • Breathing is important to me to a degree. Probably not as much as some people.
  • We have two special needs, adopted kids. Anybody that's done adoptions knows that you deal with all kinds of stuff. One of the first things that you do with a kid that's triggered, is breathe. CJ - take a breath.
  • You can do that with a CEO and everybody's going to say, take a breath. Most people will actually do that. It will work, even in a meeting - "everybody take a breath, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. It resets.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • When I was thirteen, it was going in both directions. I got beat up on by a bunch of different people.
  • I decided I was going to toughen up and not take this anymore and so i started getting aggressive with other people so you could say I was bullying him. He said to me, hey, you and me, we're going to fight after school. I thought, Oh crap. And I couldn't back down.
  • I let my ego get in my way. So we go out and we have this fight and I lost. A big crowd of kids wathcing the whole thing. At first I was doing well and then I was running out of gas.
  • He starts prevailing and then I had to give up. Now that's embarrassing. A little more mindfulness, self awareness would have helped. When he said, hey dude, I thought, this is a bad idea, but I did not have enough integrity, enough self-honesty to go, you know what, I would rather apologize to you and not get into this with you.
  • I should have said, you win, I lose. That would have been a smaller defeat than the one I ended up having. There was actually some schrapnall as a result. It was just bad.
  • I think this happens all the time with people. It's not usally a fist fight behind a school. But it could be the proverbial fistfight between companies, between CEO's.
  • These things, like, we're going into this market. And the other person saying, I don't really think you should go into that market. That's a bad idea. Then years later they lose several million dollars and they have to write it off.

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288 The Self Help Addict Author, Daniel Gefen

Jan 17, 2018

Jan 17, 2018

34 min

Daniel Gefen is the founder of Gefen Media Group and host of the top rated podcast show ‘Can I Pick Your Brain?’ where he has picked the brains of over 100 thought leaders, billionaires and celebrities. He was named the top 25 most influential influencers of 2017 and has been featured in Forbes, Inc and Influencive. Most recently he is the author of the transformational book called "The Self Help Addict - Turn an Overdose of Information Into a Life of Transformation."

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What is Spirituality to You?

  • I’m going to start by saying that the minute you say spirituality to me, it doesn’t mean anything.
  • I’m an orthodox Jew, I’m a practicing orthodox Jew and yet the word spirituality doesn’t mean anything to me because for me, it’s just another word people throw around. You have words like entrepreneur and influencer and all these different words people throw around. Spirituality is one of them. For me, it’s tough. How do you define something that’s undefinable?
  • I’ll give you an example. How do you define love? How do you explain it to someone who’s never felt love before? If you’ve loved anyone before, it’s easy to explain it.
  • If you’ve never felt love before, where do you begin to tell what love feels like? If you have not experience a spiritual moment or you haven’t experienced spirituality in your life, then I cannot describe spirituality to you because it’s an experience. It is out of the realm of comparison.

What belief led you to write ‘The Self Help Addict’?

  • That belief evolved over time. I had to rewrite a lot of things along the way. I would read something I wrote a couple of years ago and I’d say; holy crap, you wrote like that? That’s so wrong. Then I’d edit it out.
  • About a month before I went to publish, I almost scrapped the whole book. I almost had to rewrite the entire book.
  • I had an awakening where I realized that everything I’m writing about in this book is all about how to go from being a consumer to a creator. It’s all about how to go from this self-help cycle of constantly taking in more and more information and actually going and doing something with it. It’s actually taking that energy and creating something out of it. Taking all the inspiration and putting it into action; making it real.

What is the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

  • You are at the proverbial bottom of the mountain. You keep looking up and you keep saying, ‘wow, it’s so amazing’. But I’m just too scared to go up there. I’m afraid of what people will think of me if I try to climb that mountain. I’m going to make a fool of myself.
  • You see some people up there already. You have the Oprah Winfrey’s and Tony Robbins and all these amazing people up there and you’re looking up at them like they’re idols.
  • You’re saying, ‘wow, wouldn’t it be great to stand on top?’ But I can’t do that because I’m not like that. Imagine I came along and I held you hand and I said, Bruce, let’s climb that mountain. I’m going to help you to climb up.
  • And we start climbing. You actually start taking action and you start climbing and you go higher and higher and higher and you get to the top, so to speak. You get to that point where you’ve been dreaming so much to get to, whether it’s that you’ve become a millionaire. You’ve got your wife and children and you’ve got your nice big house. You’re living the American dream. It’s your mountain.
  • When you get to the top, you suddenly feel very depressed because you’ve achieved it all and yet you still feel that emptiness inside. That’s worse than when you were at the bottom of the mountain. Why? Because when you were at the bottom of the mountain, at least you had hope.
  • People who don’t take much action at least they have in the back of their minds that, if I ever do accomplish ‘X’, I’ll be happy. So at least they have that to live for.
  • The people who make it to the top, the celebrities, the athletes, the movie celebrities; when they finally hit their peak and they’re drowning in cash and they can have anyone they want. These are the people who usually overdose on drugs and commit suicide.[show-notes-breathing]

Why do people reach this point of depression?

  • Because they come to the realization that, hey, I’ve got everything that anyone could ever hope and dream for and yet I’m still feeling empty. What is there left?
  • Then they take their lives because it’s so depressing.
  • When I realized this, I realized my book was completely worthless. Everything I had written is helping them get to the top, but that’s not the whole picture. You’ve missed the point. I remember, I called up my Rabi and I also called up a few of my mentors. I told them that I would need to scrap this book and that it was not the full picture. They all said the same thing.
  • They said, Daniel, you don’t need to scrap the book, you’ve written half the equation, you just need to write the other half.

How does someone become a self help addict?

  • Self help addiction comes from a few things. Number one is doubt. You doubt yourself so what you do is you’re looking for someone and/or some thing that is going to change your life and that doesn’t exist.

What was the biggest thing you learned from writing the book?

  • The fact that things always seem like a big deal until you actually do them. Then they’re not that big of a deal anymore.
  • This book to me was this massive mountain that just went on and on and on. There was not way to conquer it.
  • There was no way to get to the top. It was just this massive beast that I could not capture. I feel like everyone’s got their beast that they’re dealing with. Everyone’s got their mountain that they just can’t seem to overcome.
  • It’s just too big. How to you do it? What I came to realize is, once I hit the publish button, the book came out and I had the printed version in my hand and it’s real.
  • This is not a mountain to me anymore. This is a book. On one hand it’s a big deal and on the other hand it’s not a big deal anymore.

How do mindfulness and self help dovetail?

  • They very much intertwine because if you look at a self-help addict and what happens in the cycle, it’s always the need for more and more information.
  • Mindfulness is just being. Being able to allow what you already know deep down inside to come forward. When you meditate, that is when the most clear and the most incredible ideas come because you’re not taking in information at that point.
  • When you’re meditating, you’re letting go. At that point when you’re able to let go and you lose any type of judgment of yourself, you lose any type of fear.
  • You’re not worried about anything. Your anxiety just drops, so you resume the default position, which is being mindful and being spiritual. When you do that, at that moment in time you break that cycle of needing anything more. You don’t need anything more. You’ve got everything you need.

Quote:

"You get that clarity of mind, that clarity of purpose, that vision, that mission and then you awaken from the meditation. The question is what do you do next? If you don’t take action then, you’ve really lost out." Daniel Gefen

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287 Heal Faster With Mindfulness and Electromagnetic Field Therapy; Dr. William Pawluk

Jan 14, 2018

Jan 14, 2018

45 min

Dr. William Pawluk, MD, MSc, is a medical and holistic doctor who is considered to be the foremost authority on the use of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy (PEMF) in North America. Dr. Pawluk has been trained in acupuncture, homeopathy, hypnosis, and bodywork. He held positions at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. He is interested in new solutions to stubborn, chronic, frustrating health problems that resolve the cause and not simply put a Band-Aid on the pain. Dr. Pawluk and Dr. Ox both agree that pain management should be focused on healing the cause. holistic pain management. PEMFs provide the most benefit and allow safe, non-toxic, self-directed, self-controlled, at-home pain management.

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Most Influential Person

  • Jon Kabat-Zinn

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness has stabilized my emotions. If you practice mindfulness enough, you become aware.
  • I have to say, I know that most doctors are not aware of the impact of what they say to patients and how they present information to their patients. They only want to present information. The information is more important than the presentation.
  • To me, doing mindfulness makes me much more aware of what I think, what I say and how I react to other people. You basically stabilize yourself from an emotional perspective.
  • You cannot ignore your emotions; that's sick too. That's not healthy. What we need to do is recognize them and just let them get washed through us and understand the reason why those emotions happen and what you can do the next time your face it.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • It is almost impossible to do mindfulness unless you breathe. I used to teach meditation as well. The first thing you teach people is to do the breathing.
  • What I found is, the more often you do the breathing, you train the brain. You train the subconscious of your intention.
  • I used to breathe for five or ten minutes to quiet everything down. The more I did it, the less time it took. Now I can basically go into a meditative state with two breaths.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • In my experience, bullying has been an issue all my life. I’m seventy-one years old now. I’ve always had bullying in my life. I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after the second world war. My parents spoke Ukrainian so we were in a sense bullied by the Germans when we lived in this camp. Then we emigrated to Canada.
  • My father had a very thick accent and so we were in a sense bullied; not physically but emotionally and psychologically. We were called DPs. DP stands for Displaced Person.
  • My family came from the Ukraine, because the Germans took them to Germany to work in the factories. But they couldn’t go back to the Ukraine because of the communists. They were essentially people without a country like many refugees are.
  • I wore glasses and was called four eyes. So how did I deal with it? You go quiet. You can get angry, you can strike back, you have that choice. But I was small so there wasn’t too often when I could strike back. I had to learn how to take care of myself. One of the reasons I got glasses is so they wouldn’t hit me in the face. It was a psychological defense mechanism.
  • I was in corporate medicine and I was bullied there. A lot of doctors are bullies among other doctors. There’s a lot of ranking that happens in medicine. Where you went to medical school, where you did your residency, whether you’re a specialist or a general practitioner.
  • You get looked down upon in many ways and you have to learn to deal with this. Mindfulness is just being aware; this person has a problem and I’m not going to go into this problem with them, but I’m just going to accept this because I know who I am. I know what I am and I know where I’m going and what I’m going to do. I’m not wrong and they’re not right. I had that in corporate medicine, I had that in medicine and you have it in your neighborhood and in the streets.
  • Bullying is everywhere. I think it’s a principle of life. You have to learn to deal with people who are trying to impose themselves on us in all kinds of ways. That’s life.

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286 Men - Unleash Your Creative Expression With Emerald Peaceful GreenForest

Jan 10, 2018

Jan 10, 2018

38 min

Emerald Peaceful GreenForest is an arts visionary. She works with men who have already earned their financial rewards and now they want to make their mark in other ways; in the form of a legacy perhaps. Emerald is founder and lead visionary of The Creative Age Consulting Group. It has been said that Emerald is 'A Voice of Clarity in the Sea of Confusion'. Emerald is also the recipient of a Be the Change Movement To Watch Award. She is the Founding Visionary of ArtWalk Nashua which is now in its thirteenth year.

Contact Info

Most Influential Person

Effect on Emotions

  • What I love about the mindfulness practices is what happens with my emotions is, I'm much better able to identify and have awareness when I am feeling something and being able to choose to acknowledge, okay, I'm feeling this right now and also be able to hold myself back one step. Enough to discern; do I need to do anything with this feeling? And be able to make a choice about that rather than be in reaction.
  • I am so much less reactive than I was once upon a some. So much less reactive.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • I love breathing. Yoga introduced me to breathing back in 2001. When I was going through the divorce from my first 'was-band'. I was also in my own spiritual awakening at that time. Breathing was absolutely essential. I would sit at my desk with my bully partner and be on the phone with my soon to be X wasband who was also yelling at me about something.
  • I had 'breathe' written in little index cards on my desk and I would just look at the index card.
  • The word 'breathe' is seven letters so I had it written in the seven colors of the rainbow. I would take one breath and just let whatever was going on, go on, while I remembered, oh, I'm going to breathe now. This is important to breathe now.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • I can tell a story about when I was in real estate. Both of my partners were bullies. During that time when we were doing that project, it was like, driving, driving, driving to get it done.
  • There was so much anger and so much dysfunction in the relationship that I had with them. More importantly, the relationship that I had with myself; I simply shut down and tolerated it or I reacted to it and tried to fight the bully or I took it in and then tried to process it at home on my own, feeling like there was something wrong with me and it was my fault and how could I make myself into a pretzel to make this not happen anymore.
  • If I had been well, and at that time I wasn't, the consciousness that I had then was exactly perfect for the time, but the me I am now, if I could go back to the me I was then, I would most definitely equip her with mindfulness tools.
  • I would also whisper into my ear that this is not about you, it is about their stuff. I'd help her to create a sanctuary for herself where, even though that's going on out there, she's clear and healthy.

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285 Visionary Yoga: Beyond Fitness to Conscious Evolution With Mariko Hirakawa

Jan 7, 2018

Jan 7, 2018

32 min

Mariko Hirakawa is an internationally known Yoga-Ayurveda Expert with over 26 years of teaching experience. She is the founder of Visionary Yoga, a personal development company dedicated to accelerating the growth of motivated individuals and companies. A former professional ballet dancer as well as an Ayurvedic physician trained in India, she is dedicated to positioning Yoga as something far beyond fitness – a technology for human consciousness evolution.

Contact Info

Most Influential Person

  • My spiritual teacher

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness really stabalized my inner world. With that came much greater confidence. It gives you self-control when you have control of your inner state.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • I'm amazed that more dance techniques don't encorporate the breathing. Breath has it's own innate energy. Inhilation is actually called inspiration. Inhiliation is literally receiving new energy from the universe. Exhilation, I call it the liberating breath, the cleansing breath, the releasing breath and for me it's a very under used resource that we all have. It's so close, and yet, because it's always there, we tend to be blind to it. Ancient systems like Yoga, and all of the mystical traditions really, use the breath as a doorway. The more we can be aware of it, moment by moment, I think the more it's enhances our quality of life and the way we show up into life.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • Yes, I have several stories about bullying. When I first came to this country I was nine and a half years old and we were in upstate New York where at that time there were very few ethnic people.
  • I think my sister and I were the only Asian kids in an entire elementary school. It was actually a boom because we got so much attention from the teachers. I think that made a few of the other kids jealous.
  • In the beginning, every morning we had to put our hand on our heart and recite the Pledge of Allegience to the United States of America. Those are some advance words like 'individual', I couldn't pronounce. I phonetically memorized it after a few months.
  • I was just mouthing it and these two kids were sitting across from the table. They were sneering at me and started to push the table towards me saying, 'you don't know what it means, you can't say it'. They started to push me and at that moment I felt so humiliated and helpless.
  • I didn't know how to counter that because ... the teacher was oblivious and so I let it get to me. I just sat there holding my tears back. If it were me now, I probably see that these kids were just acting out of jealousy. Kids can be quite cruel and it's really tough because when you're a child you're not equipped with the level of self awareness and self-confidence that allows you to fight back or to say something. I didn't have the words. I didn't know the language well enough to fight back like that. It was the first experience of being bullied and I was older than these kids because I was demoted two grades because I couldn't speak any English. It was a tough time. I think life gives us experience and it made me more determined to learn English and to work really hard to master the language.

Guest Quote

  • "Everyone's on a different level of evolution." - Mariko Hirakawa

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284 Discover The Better Brain Solution With Dr. Steven Masley

Jan 3, 2018

Jan 3, 2018

38 min

Dr. Steven Masley motivates people to become healthier, starting with heart and brain health. He's a physician, nutritionist, best-selling author and he's also a chef. Dr. Steven Masley is the creator of the number one health program for public television called, 'Thirty Days To A Younger Heart'. Dr. Masley has recently written 'The Better Brain Solution", which is the first book to show how the brain can become insulin resistant through diet and lifestyle and to make clear how and why this has been directly linked to cognitive decline and memory loss.

Contact Info

Most Influential Person

  • My step father, Chuck. He had a procedure; and had a massive stroke. I learned what dementia was. It wasn't necessary, he didn't need it. I feel badly to this day that I didn't do more for him earlier on. He said, 'don't let this happen to others'.

Effect on Emotions

  • Mindfulness is calming on my emotions. It feels like love and stability in my life when I'm more mindful. When I'm not, I tend to be more anxious and depressed.
  • I'd much rather feel loved and focused than anxious and depressed. That's a lack of mindfulness, is anxiety.

Thoughts on Breathing

  • I like taking a deep breath and filling myself with spirit. I even like to, after I stretch and workout in the morning, I like to take a deep breath.
  • I feel like green energy pours into my body when I'm taking a deep breath. When I blow out, I'm just blowing out tension.
  • I use my breath to help me in a kind of meditative, processing way of being more calm and focused. Breath to me is like breathing in spirit.

Suggested Resources

Bullying Story

  • I got bullied as a kid. I got beaten up. I got kicked around. It was not pleasant.
  • I can completely sympathize with anyone who has been bullied before. Part of it was just being susceptible. I wasn't being mindful, I wasn't being confident. It wasn't moving with purpose. Preditors picked on me.
  • Do I know what it's like to be bullied? Sadly, yes. I think we've got to stop this.
  • I think the food industry is bullying the American population today, making money off of them and killing them.
  • I think we've got to stand up to that kind of bullying and be mindful and make right choices and not let that happen. Certainly, it's happening to our children.
  • I would say the whole food industry is bullying our kids today too. When I think about it in the context of what it was like to be beaten up as a kid, and now realize what we're doing to other children today, that really gets me going.
  • I think it's time for us to stand up and put a stop to bullying. It's also time to stand up and be mindful about our food choices and not let people feed our kids, junk. And us too. We have to be responsible for ourselves too, and stop eating sugary junk and food with toxins.
  • We have to demand a clean world to live in so we can thrive and feel fantastic and be more productive.

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