Wellness Mini-Session | Basics of Mindfulness for Self-Care and Managing Difficult States

Laura Buckner:

Welcome, everyone. We’ll get started in just a moment.

Hello, hello and welcome to our 20-minute wellness mini session. Today, we’re going to be talking about the basics of mindfulness for self-care and managing difficult states. We’re really glad to have so many of you with us today.

Just briefly wanted to share that this session is hosted by the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. We provide support to local educational agencies to foster safe, healthy, and supportive learning environments. This is just one piece of all of the work that we get to do in California, and we’re really excited to share this with you and hope that, if you’re interested, you can learn more on our website.

So today, I’m very pleased to welcome Serena Hoenig from the UCLA Mindful Center. With over 15 years of health and wellness experience, Serena brings a strong foundation to her work facilitating healthy lifestyles. She’s currently embracing the journey of motherhood with her toddler, which is an experience that continues to inform and deepen her mindfulness practice.

Serena is a UCLA Semel Institute trained mindfulness facilitator. She offers secular, evidence-informed teachings that emphasize mind, body awareness, and integration. Informed by her lived experience with ADHD, she thoughtfully incorporates successful accommodation strategies to support diverse learners.

Serena holds a bachelor of science in exercise science and has served as a community leader for the past 10 years, supporting the growth of youth and women’s rugby. So lots of experience. We’re so glad to have you here with us, Serena. And I’m going to turn this session over to you.

Serena Hoenig:

Thank you so much, Laura. It’s great to be here with all of you. I’m going to start with a grounding practice. I invite all of you to go ahead and take three deep breaths. We’re going to make our out-breath longer than our in-breath. So we’re going to inhale. And when you exhale, you want to do it audibly like fogging up a glass. So do that two more times.

I invite you to feel where your body is making contact with the furniture. Maybe you’re taking a standing break on the floor where your feet are on the floor. Notice the steady earth below. And if you’re feeling any tension in your body, go ahead and feel your neck, maybe your back, stomach. Maybe you want to do some shoulder rolls. Just honor your body’s need to stretch or move right now. Just noticing what’s here in our body as we sat down so many other things to get here today.

So I like to define mindfulness as paying attention to our present moment experience with openness and curiosity, the willingness to be with what is. And you’ll notice that I didn’t say that you had to be quiet or clear your mind or be perfectly still or in a certain position.

For me and for so many others that I’ve met, the realization really transformed my practice. So knowing that I don’t have to be a certain way, act a certain way, have certain thoughts allowed me to show up more authentically. And by listening to my body’s desire to move, it went from this rigid practice or this perfectionism or fear of messing up into this flexible and embodied, this really living and moving experience of meditation and mindfulness. And it’s given me the permission to change and to honor what I need in this moment or in this moment or in this moment.

So the science behind and the research behind mindfulness has a couple of different tiers or a couple different silos. So when we think about the psychological health and the research of mindfulness, we know that there’s decreased anxiety or decreased depression, emotional reactivity, less rumination in our thoughts. We know that there’s increased in wellbeing or the positive affect and concentration. In our physical health, we know that there’s better immune system function and our quality of sleep increases. We can also decrease our blood pressure through mindfulness and through practicing mindfulness.

Every time I go to the doctor’s office, I do that grounding practice before I get my blood pressure taken. So I do those breaths. And my doctor, she just knows that about me now. And I’ve actually tested with her where I’ve raced into the office and I haven’t been able to settle. And I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, let me take my couple of breaths.” And we’ve done a before and after. And yeah, we can see in real time my blood pressure decreasing. So it’s a fun practice to do even with her.

And then we know that the structure of our brain can change and the function of our brain can change. So with longtime meditators, we’ve seen a thickening of the prefrontal cortex. And you don’t have to be a longtime meditator either. So there’ve been an eight-week study with meditators who were novices, and we’ve also seen a more gradual thickening, but still a thickening in that prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention or emotional regulation for empathy and even bodily awareness. We’ve seen it even in corporate settings or educational settings that there’s been improved communication or improved work performance.

And in those education settings, we’ve seen children having improved social emotional skills and executive functioning, decreased stress in students around test taking. And then importantly, we’re seeing reduced stress and burnout in teachers as well.

So the science is really strong here. It might be newer. There’s not as much research behind it or as many years of research behind it, but the research is strong of what we do have.

And I know we have a short amount of time here today, so I really want to get into the thick of practicing self-care for navigating physical pain or emotional difficulties, which we’re all experiencing. Inherently, life has these ups and downs, whether they’re really big ups and downs or smaller ones, spilling our coffee or having a cold. Excuse me, I am struggling with a cold today. So if you do hear me kind of cough, just want to make that known. And so when we come to the practice, when we come to what we might say the cushion or the chair, we can get these benefits even in the short term. It doesn’t have to be a long-term process. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It can be these five-minute breaks. It could be a 30-second break. It can be taking those three breaths before opening an email.

And so I really want to have the experiential practice with you today, and I want to invite you to do a meditation with me, something a little bit deeper. And so go ahead and sit back into your chairs, get into a comfortable position. Again, feel that rolling in your shoulders, the stretching in your neck, honor what’s here for you right now.

Go ahead, take a couple of deep breaths.

You may notice that I have my hand on my chest. For me, finding my anchor or finding my breath is helpful to physically feel it when putting my hand there.

We use an anchor, what’s called an anchor in meditation, something that holds us back into our physical body or back into the present moment. So I invite you to find an anchor. It could be your breath where you might feel the strongest in your chest, maybe in your belly or in your nostrils. It could be the sound in the room. Maybe your breath doesn’t feel so neutral right now. So it could be the sound of the room, maybe the humming of your computer, maybe the wind outside of your window, or it could just be your body seated in this position, standing in this position. Whatever you can make note of strongly and return to, we’re going to call that our anchor.

And this anchor, I like to think of the anchor of a boat. So imagining a boat out at sea dropping an anchor deep into the ocean, and at the bottom of the ocean, it’s very still. While at the top of the ocean, top of the water, it could be waves, there could be some just gently rolling waves, it could be choppy waters, there could be a storm, but our anchor coming back into this present moment kind of creates space for whatever is happening up at the surface. We can imagine the storm at the surface as our emotions. We know that the storm will pass. We know that there’s kind of safety in the ocean below, deep where the anchor is.

If we imagine ourselves looking up from that anchor, we can simply witness the experience of the storm. We can witness those emotions rather than being exposed to them or to the elements of the storm.

Letting your body settle into the idea of being this anchor at the bottom of the ocean, noticing the calm in your body, the calm in your breath. As one breath ends, another one begins without effort. The sounds in the room are there without effort.

I’d like you to bring something to mind that’s mildly difficult. Don’t pick the hardest thing. So think of something like dealing with a cold or your child is sick or traffic, maybe a difficult email you have to attend to, something that’s very mild. As we’re here on the bottom of the ocean in our calm space or in our less turbulent space, when you bring to mind that mildly difficult thing, are you noticing any emotions coming to the surface? Are you noticing any tension in your body? You can be here without trying to fix it, just noticing.

As you notice the emotions coming up, are they in any area specifically? Your tension in your neck, a knot in your stomach maybe, tightness in your chest?

Now we want to imagine seeing this emotion or feeling this emotion from that space deep in the ocean, and this emotion is up on the surface, this bodily feeling, this tension. We just want to create space between the intensity of that storm. Allow ourselves to witness it rather than it overcoming our body.

Can we name the emotions that are coming up? Stress, fear, frustration, anger. When we can name the emotion, it takes the power away, kind of turns on our thinking brain and reduces that emotional reactivity. We can say, “Oh, this is what frustration feels like. Oh, yes, stress. This is where I feel stress, tension in my shoulders. This is just a storm that will pass.”

And as we’re witnessing this, naming it, can we give compassion to ourselves similar to how you would to a friend? Of course that is hard to deal with. Of course it’s frustrating. Maybe we can place a hand on that part of the body we’re feeling it. I’ve had my hand on my chest this whole time and hold our belly. I’m here for you. We can be here and hold this together.

Can I hold this sensation with kindness? Can I hold this emotion with kindness? There’s no need to banish it. We know it is a storm that will just pass. And we be with things as they are in this moment.

And you can bring your attention back to your anchor, back to your breath, your body, the sounds in the room. I invite you to take one more breath with awareness and then open your eyes.

Thank you for your practice. I’d love to hear how that went for you. You can share in the chat.

Remember, we can do those grounding practices at any point, before an email, before leaving your car and going into your home, reminding ourselves that there’s no tigers chasing us. Taking those deep breaths reminds our body.

Thank you so much. Laura, back to you.

Laura Buckner:

Thank you so much. And I see some comments coming into the chat. So thank you, Serena, for spending some time with us today.

For those of you who are interested in the UCLA Mindful Center, they also have an app where you can download some basic meditation, and they also provide other Zoom or virtually based sessions such as this. So if you’re interested in continuing and exploring some of their offerings, there’s information here on your screen. The QR code will take you to the UCLA Mindful webpage where you can also get access to all of those other resources.

And again, you can learn more at strongerconnections.wested.org about other mindful … I’m sorry, mini sessions coming up and other educational opportunities that we offer.

And just want to close out, there’s a short poll popping up. We appreciate you letting us know how today went for you. And you can always contact us at [email protected].

So thank you again, everyone. Thank you so much, Serena, for sharing with us today, and we hope you all have a wonderful afternoon. Take care.