Gina DiPietro
Welcome to Novant Health Healthy Headlines. I'm Gina DiPietro. Just what is mindfulness? Ask 10 people, you might get 10 different answers. In this episode, Alicia Roberts speaks to Novant Health cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Fisher, a practitioner of mindfulness meditation for 10 years, about what it means to him and the many benefits it can bring to others in difficult times.
Alicia Roberts
You're a cardiologist, why and when did you become interested in mindfulness?
Dr. Jonathan Fisher
I became interested in mindfulness as part of my own personal journey of healing from a whole number of psychological stressors that I had been struggling with for a long time. So, it was back around 2008-09, when, after years of working hard, I started to recognize that I was missing out on gaps of my life. That feeling of missing out. And there was a feeling of anxiety which I couldn't fully understand, was there at a baseline.
Then I had some family tragedy — family loss. My sister who was 40 at the time, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She was my best friend and she was my support when I was going through my own struggles with anxiety and depression. She was the one person who encouraged me to seek help, and that help was available. So, I started getting help with therapy, and then it was later on when she died that another friend of mine said, well there's this other thing that's called mindfulness, and she recommended a book to me by a Buddhist nun, whose name was Pema Chodron. So, I read that book, and it captivated me. Particularly one line, which said, “suffering begins to disappear when we can abandon the hope, or belief, that there is anywhere to hide. I resonated with that I recognized that I had spent a lot of energy hiding in various places emotionally, physically, from the challenges of life rather than learning to be with them, and I was lacking the skills, and one of the skills that was taught was meditation.
Around that same time, I googled — literally into Google — “How can I be happy again?” And then I discovered this scientific field which I had never heard of called positive psychology. So, I dug deep into the field of positive psychology and, lo and behold, one of the first books I read there, called “The How of Happiness,” talked about meditation as one of the key skills and being happy, fulfilled person. And so, I was getting these signals that maybe I should explore this thing called meditation, and it was only later as I dug deeper that I realized that there are many types of meditation — over 10 different kinds of meditation — and just one of them is mindfulness. So, part of my journey was to explore various types of meditation: mind/body practices, yoga, qigong, tai chi, all of these things which I had never learned about in my medical education or growing up. As I began to experiment with them, I was literally doing experiments on myself by practicing this thing or that thing and noticing differences. I recognized that there were changes that were happening in my ability to be with the challenges of life and also to start noticing the joys in life as well. And then slowly, other people started to recognize the difference.
Alicia Roberts
Wow, that's very inspiring. So how would you rate its effective effectiveness for you? I mean if you were at a one in 2009, where do you feel you are now in terms of happiness?
Dr. Jonathan Fisher
I think if I looked at an overall average — and you know it's not just a theoretical — part of my own journey has been to track my own sense of well-being and happiness. Again, like a scientist, I want to look at the evidence. There's a lot of judgment about happiness theory in general, because scientists and doctors may say, “oh, that's a bunch of hooey. Show me the numbers.” The challenge is that this is involves a different type of research. You can't measure the numbers, it's all subjective because no one can tell you how happy you are. So, we use measures, like you were saying, a one-to-10 scale. I'd say I'm at seven to eight, on average. With COVID, and with some physical struggles that I have, perhaps it's a five or a six sometimes. I think there's a number of reasons for that. On the one hand, these practices — and we could dive into whichever — we can focus just on mindfulness itself. There are several different angles where it helps. One of them is, it makes moments of challenging suffering less intense, less severe. On the other hand, it allows us to appreciate moments of joy and pleasure — to notice them, first of all, and then to savor them and linger with them, second of all. So, there's kind of a dual effect. There's a reduction in dealing with perceiving and responding, reacting to the challenges. And then there's also an intensifying of the positive emotions, that if we learn to pay attention, we realize we're missing a lot of them.
Alicia Roberts
For those who don't know much about practicing mindfulness, can you explain what it is and kind of what it looks like practically?
Dr. Jonathan Fisher
There are many definitions of mindfulness and if you were to ask 10 people, even teachers of mindfulness, you probably get 10 different answers. So, the answer that I would give comes from the microbiologist, who was also a meditation expert teacher, named Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is the reason that you and I are talking right now. Because in 1979, he discovered, at the University of Massachusetts, that patients who are suffering with chronic and severe ongoing pain that had failed all other therapies, he welcomed them into a clinic and developed a protocol. He taught them mindfulness, and after just eight weeks, he had achieved pain reductions for them, with them, that no one else had seen before. And so, over the next 40 years, these practices are now so widespread that they're in most major academic medical centers. And the definition that he uses, is paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, non-judgmentally. Paying attention to the present moment on purpose. Non-judgmentally. Another way of putting it is, practicing being completely aware of what's happening inside you, in terms of your thoughts, feelings, emotions — and outside you in terms of sounds, events, conversations. Being fully aware and accepting whatever's happening in that moment. without having an immediate reaction to it. So, creating some space where you can then decide how you want to respond to whatever is happening around you. So, that would be one definition of mindfulness.
In terms of how it comes into play. It comes into play, potentially in every moment of every day. So much of the suffering that we experience as humans, is because of the thoughts and reactions that we have that are happening without our awareness, so we all have this inner narrative this little voice in our head that's saying, “oh this is good, this is bad.” But so often, it's going on without are recognizing and it can drive us to do things and act in certain ways that we may not find consistent with our highest values. And so, for example, if I have a teenage son, and there are challenges that are happening, or frustrations that are happening. If I'm not aware of feelings inside myself of, let's say frustration or anger that are rising, it may be so late that I don't even catch it and I may yell in frustration, whereas if I practice mindfulness, I pause. If I hear him say something or if I say something, I notice the feelings in my body. I give...
