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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Christopher Willard. Chris is a clinical psychologist. He teaches at Harvard Medical School and is the author of over 18 publications for children and adults, an internationally sought-after speaker and mindfulness educator. Chris is the author of several books with Sounds True, including Growing Up Mindful, Raising Resilience, Alphabreaths, and a new book which is the subject of our conversation, How We Grow Through What We Go Through, a book that focuses on post-traumatic growth.
Chris leads our conversation with a lot of humility, and also his signature enthusiasm about the latest science and clinically proven mindfulness-based practices that help us regulate ourselves or as Chris refers to it, attend and befriend ourselves after difficult events occur. The conversation is loving and helpful. Take a listen. To begin with, Chris, and as a way for you to introduce yourself to our audience, tell us a little bit how as a young person in college, you first got introduced to mindfulness meditation.
Christopher Willard: Well, it’s a funny story, a long story. The real full story is I’d done a few years at college and was struggling a lot with depression, with anxiety, with substance abuse. I basically dropped out of college to, I don’t know, you could say find myself, you could say get my shit together, depending on what kind of frame you want to put on that. Continued to spiral downward into addiction and was, actually had just gotten kicked out of a halfway house. My parents didn’t know what to do with me. They basically dragged me on a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh back in 1998 or 1999, not knowing what else to do with me. My first few days of sobriety, we’re trying to walk mindfully, breathe mindfully, and do all that in this incredible retreat with Thay.
It was just absolutely, as you can imagine or as you’ve read, just totally life-transforming for me. Suddenly I felt happier. Suddenly life had meaning. Suddenly I could see sort of in color and not just in shades of gray. Suddenly the incredible Thay’s teachings around interbeing, in particular, really shook my system and shook my soul to the core and realizing that every action I took influenced so many other people and vice versa and really wanted to live a more mindful life. And being young, also, like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to teach everybody about this.” But first having to get my own act together, I guess, as you’d say. And I then got sober and got other help that I needed and things like that after that retreat. But that’s how it started, which is not a story I’ve shared more publicly until recently, but that’s really how it started.
TS: You know, I went so far and I’m going to say this because I think it shows how far you’ve come and how far the mindfulness practice as an anchor in your life has taken you. But I read online that you were actually a heroin addict at a certain point before discovering mindfulness practice. And I wonder, would you go so far as to say that meditation saved your life? Is it fair to say that?
CW: I absolutely would. I was a daily IV heroin user. There was something about these practices that brought a sense of peace in a different way. And then what they brought was a sense of hope that there could be life without this, that there could be some degree of peace without heroin, without that lifestyle and everything that went along with it. And over time, what I found for myself is that hope– with enough practice, with enough other practices and recovery meetings and support in that way and other people around me that that hope, what happened is it turned into faith. And I was like, “OK, if I keep sitting, if I keep doing this next right thing as they say, then actually things will continue to get better.” And then I had faith that that would continue to happen and then it started to snowball outward from there.
And then discovering more practices beyond just Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness practices, which to me actually have infinite depth, but that also then discovering other ways of practice, other ways of healing for myself were incredibly transformative. But I would absolutely say that these practices changed my life. Ironically, I think one of the things that was interesting, as you’ve alluded to this earlier with Thich Nhat Hanh was thinking about the impact we have and thinking… I was still very politically-minded and social justice-minded when I was struggling, but I was thinking about the way that my addiction and buying heroin, what that was doing to neighborhoods. As vegetarians are doing everything right in these other ways, but thinking about the impact ecologically. But I was thinking this is having an impact across the world what I’m doing.
This is creating suffering. This is creating child labor. That sounds a weird abstract thing that would get one sober, but that was actually really a big part of it was seeing actually the ripple, not just on myself and my immediate people who loved me and that I love. But actually seeing that larger ripple, too, of “This is creating devastation thousands of miles away from me and suffering thousands of miles away from me, as well as to my parents, to my friends, to myself.”
TS: Now you’ve gone on, Chris, to become a clinical psychologist and you teach at Harvard Medical School. Tell us a little bit about that and how that came to be from what you’re describing now this first introduction to mindfulness meditation.
CW: Not a linear path, but thematically linear, I think. Getting sober and pulling myself together and then finding what was meaningful to me, which really had been two things. One, writing and creativity, and two, mindfulness were really what were so important to me in contemplative practice and wanting to find a way to share these with other people against the fundamentalism of the converted or the zealotry of the converted.
I was like, “I got to teach everyone mindfulness, there will be world peace.” And then that led to being a teacher for a while and teaching young people, trying to teach young people some of these practices. And then from there, shifting toward clinical psychology, writing a first book called Child’s Mind that really came out of my doctoral work. I was like, “I’m not going to just let my dissertation sit on a bookshelf and collect dust.” I actually got How to Get Your Book Published for Dummies and I did exactly what it said, and that became Child’s Mind.
And then suddenly finding myself in the midst of a wave. I think that one can talk about luck, and I think in some ways luck is a synonym or even a euphemism sometimes for privilege, and there’s a lot of that. I’m a white cis male and all of that that sort of helped me along. But that there was also some right place, right time there with the explosion of interest in mindfulness carrying forward and continuing in this excitement that I had also in terms of then having a number of great friends and mentors who worked at Harvard Medical School inviting me to work there as well and teach there. It’s been just such an amazing, I don’t even want to say rollercoaster, it’s mostly been ups, but such a fun ride and one that I feel grateful that I’m able to hopefully help other people at the same time.
TS: Now your latest book, I think I lost track a little bit. Is it your 18th or your 19th book?
CW: Somewhere in there.
TS: Somewhere in there. How We Grow Through What We Go Through, and it focuses on post-traumatic growth. And of course we hear a lot about post-traumatic stress, unresolved trauma, intergenerational trauma. What is post-traumatic growth?
CW: Yes, this concept really excited me. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was suddenly, like many people, pivoting with everything in my life. From doing workshops on mindfulness to suddenly being asked to do workshops on resilience, workshops on trauma and the effects of the pandemic on individuals and on all of us collectively and diving into the research and suddenly finding, “Oh my gosh, wait a minute.”
So many people experience trauma and actually more people experience post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic stress. And actually most of us really end up experiencing both if you’ve experienced some kind of trauma, and that there are certain conditions under which that growth is likely to happen. And what it means is feeling a greater sense of spirituality, feeling a greater sense of connection, feeling more wisdom, feeling a sense of growth after a challenging incident, feeling more meaning in life. These kinds of things.
I always want to be cautious when I talk about this because one of the concepts that I think thankfully came up more during the pandemic into the popular consciousness, and I think in the self-help and spiritual space, is the idea of toxic positivity or in spiritual realms we call this spiritual bypass. I want to be cautious that this isn’t like, “Let’s pretend everything’s good or that everything’s got an amazing lesson that we can take from it,” or some kind of superficial interpretation of, “Always look on the bright side,” or “Every cloud has a silver lining.”
What this is, is how can we actually really do the work where we actually set ourselves on a trajectory where we’re likely to actually grow, become stronger, become wiser through difficult situations? And that is most likely to happen for all of us just on different timelines. And I don’t want this to turn into, there’s something wrong with you if you’re not experiencing this or if you’re not experiencing this now or something like that. I just also want to make sure I get that out there because I do feel like that’s an important critique as we think about positive psychology and spirituality and self-help.
TS: One of the things I got from your book is that we can be experiencing at the same time post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic stress. Because sometimes I think when you think about it, at least when I started thinking about post-traumatic growth, it was like, “Oh, there’s a left turn and a right turn. Am I in the growth path or am I still suffering?” But you say, “No, we can experience both at the same time,” and that seems intuitively right to me.
CW: I think as the Buddhists, or maybe we Buddhists, would say, it’s the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. And how can we fully really recognize and realize all of these in our lives and that both of these are going to always be happening simultaneously. When we see this in the macro of post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth, we can see in the micro of every day’s ups and downs and every day’s challenges and struggles as we go through them. There’s a lot of suffering in life. There’s a lot of stress in life. And it’s important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, to not pretend that things are good when they’re not.
But clear seeing is seeing that there is growth happening, and hope and potential in this world, and seeing there is suffering in this world and there is trauma in this world and there is bigotry and oppression and violence and that both are true. How do we honor and work with all of these things and not just see one or the other? Because that’s actually not clear seeing to just see one or just see the other.
TS: Now in terms of orienting ourselves to post-traumatic growth, if that’s what we’re interested in, what would you say is the orienting attitude that will point us in that direction?
CW: To me, I think an openness, I think, is always important. I think, again, drawing a bit from my own experience– not that my experience is everybody else’s– but that when we can start with hope, then hopefully that hope can turn, then, into a faith that as we continue down this path, more healing will occur, more will start to happen. But it starts, to me, with some of that openness and curiosity.
And the way I structured the book and the way I think about it, is how do we build resilience and growth in our bodies physically, how do we do that kind of mentally and emotionally in our minds, and how do we do that in our relationships? Both our relationship to ourselves and our relationship to others. Where are ways that we can bring in mindfulness, we can bring in contemplative practice, compassion and self-compassion to these different domains and then start to grow from and through all of those aspects and domains of our lives.
TS: In How We Grow Through What We Go Through, I noticed try to say that 10 times fast, it’s not-
CW: It’s a tongue twister.
TS: No, it’s not going to work. But you start with the body and you make a case that it’s important that we start with the body. Can you share more about that?
CW: Yes. I think one thing that’s been wonderful in recent years is this recognition of the role of our nervous system in our emotional regulation and the fact that our minds and our bodies are one, and in fact, so are our spirits and our relationships, if we want to start to get a bit more metaphysical. But that, actually, it is so important that we learn how to regulate our bodies and become comfortable inhabiting our bodies. We know that the nervous system is not just in the brain. We have nerve endings that run up and down throughout our entire bodies. The brain being the biggest, densest part. But when people talk about trauma is stored in the body, that’s really what we’re talking about is that it’s stored in our nervous system.
In some of my research for the book, I was talking to Dave Treleaven and we were talking about maybe we should actually just be saying “nervous system dysregulation” is actually maybe a better way of saying “trauma” because it’s so hard even to define sometimes what that means or what “counts” as trauma in some ways. But we know that when the body is dysregulated in that way, that we can’t focus. We can’t build relationships. We can’t do these other healing things.
And what we want to do is find a way to feel comfortable in our bodies and feel also empowered in our bodies. So much trauma takes place within the body. You think about illness. You think about assault. You think about injury– that we think first of bodily injury or fear of bodily injury or death or something like that. So working with the body to have it feel safe again is really primary. I think it’s also not just, how do we feel comfortable with our bodies? And I talk about it in terms of, I sort of take a spin on the kind of tend to befriend.
With tend to befriend, not to just attend to our bodies but befriend our bodies so that they actually can be not just a source of we’re comfortable here but we’re safe here, we’re healing here. This can be a resource for us, our bodies. Whether it’s how we move our bodies, whether it’s how we breathe, whether it’s how we inhabit our bodies, all of these things. And take care of our bodies with exercise, with how we eat mindfully, things like this too. So to me, our bodies, when we can get comfortable there, then we can really start to work on the rest of it too.
TS: Take this headline, tend and befriend, beautiful headline. Tell me more about that, how to live with that kind of relationship with ourself?
CW: When I do talk some workshops, I often talk about, and you can look at this and the book talks about whether it’s polyvagal or whether it’s window of tolerance or all these different models we’re thinking about dysregulation in the nervous system. But I think about when there’s a threat, we either go into fight-or-flight kind of hyper arousal, or we go into freeze and faint or freeze and forget it or whatever kind of hypo arousal, or we can start to attend to what’s going on and ultimately befriend. To me, that’s also going from survival to thriving as we go from how do we attend to ourselves to the moment, to what’s actually happening, to show up for it, not run away from it, not fight it, not freeze and faint and kind of wilt in front of it when it’s safe to do so. Because there are situations of course where that is the right response, those four Fs.
And then how do we hopefully at some point, the growth, to me, happens when we learn how to befriend ourselves, befriend the challenging experience. What are the lessons I can draw from it? I want to again be clear, maybe not something, but hopefully so. And if I get curious about it, then I open to something and that becomes important. So befriending our experience and befriending ourselves and befriending the world is I think what we all hope that we can do, that we can create a safe enough world where we can befriend it.
TS: Now you mentioned nervous system dysregulation could be the word that we use for being in a traumatic situation state at any given moment, that state. How do you know, Chris, in your own experience, whether you’re in nervous system dysregulation or you’ve shifted to regulation? What’s your own personal litmus test in working with your body mind?
CW: This is one where I’ve made some, but not done, some progress over… I mean, I do think I recognize it more than I used to, right? To me, I mean, in my body it’s like heart pounding, my body temperature heating up. In reality, it’s usually my wife being like, “Chris, what’s going on with you?” Or it’s these other subtle relational things like noticing I have more of a temper, losing my patience. I notice it comes up. I sort of joke sometimes, “I can tell my spiritual state by how I’m dealing with traffic on a given day or what kinds of comments am I posting on social media.” That’s often actually what’s most revealing to me about my level of regulation or dysregulation.
The other thing I find for myself is that my breath is such a key barometer. If my breath is regular and even and regulated, it is most likely that my nervous system, my brain, my body, my ability to relate to other people is also regulated. And so if I’m able to notice that my breath is dysregulated, I can find a way to regulate it. And when I regulate my breath, I’m regulating my body.
As we discussed, that’s where our nervous system is, and the biggest part of our nervous system is in our brain. And then I’m regulating my brain, and then I’m regulating my impulses and my emotions and my attention. And then that becomes really important for, as we say in the mindfulness world, responding rather than reacting. Choosing the way I’m going to respond rather than reacting out of habit or reacting because my nervous system senses a threat when it may or may not be there. So to me, my breath has become really central in how I notice my dysregulation and then how I reregulate myself.
TS: Now in the book you offer dozens and dozens of different practices and approaches and techniques that people can try. When it comes to the breath, you offer quite a few possibilities that people can use to reregulate. Now let me ask you, what’s your go-to move when you notice that your breathing is choppy and it’s not the ideal five to six breaths a minute that you describe as a state of self-regulation? What do you do?
CW: What I really love is, and I don’t know where I got this, but I just call it stretch my breath. I just gently just nudging, stretching that exhale out a little bit on each breath, not even pushing too hard with changing it, but first becoming aware of my breath and then just gently stretching that exhale a little bit longer until it starts to settle. And then starting to deepen at the same time the inhale, and then stretching that exhale, and just this stretching the breath. I think counting can be helpful too and things like that.
But I really just like this. I can just stretch my breath. It just feels to me metaphorically, there’s this opening that can occur rather than this constricting. We’re turning toward things and opening to things rather than constricting and turning ourselves off from things. As we open and stretch our breath, we’re opening and stretching ourselves in many ways to be more accepting and open to the situation at hand and to ourselves and to the challenges of the world. So I like to just stretch my breath practice.
TS: Beautiful. Now you also write about something that you call power postures, that this is an action we can take when we need to feel more resilient in our body. Describe power postures.
CW: I think some folks might be familiar with Amy Cuddy’s work about the power postures and the way that we stand and hold our bodies actually impacts our hormones and impacts our nervous system and impacts the way we perceive ourselves as well as the ways that we’re perceived. Her research took a bit of a hit at some point for not being replicable, but then some other people have done some more research looking at this again. For me, what was really transformative about what I think of as fourth-wave therapies, which is not about how do you think enough so that you can change how you act, but it’s how do you act your way and tune your way of thinking and feeling. And so when our breath is dysregulated, we’re dysregulated. But if we regulate our breath, we can regulate again our bodies and our brains and our emotions.
I noticed when I was doing mindful walking or just bringing mindfulness to walking and movement, when I was leading a workshop once, that my mood impacted definitely how I walked. What I noticed was looking at the ground, once I’m looking up, it was affecting how I felt. And then I noticed actually, well, if my mood affects my walk and my posture, then actually if I reverse that, what if I change my posture? What if I change the way I walk? It actually does in turn actually change how I feel, whether it’s changing our breath, whether it’s changing our walk or even changing our posture. It’s actually this really amazing, in a sense, acting our way into a new way of thinking and feeling. There’s a lot of research on this that as we stand in certain postures, critical feedback tends to roll off of us in different ways.
Cortisol, one of the stress hormones, tends to go down, which makes us less aggressive, makes us less angry. Other kinds of hormones associated with confidence tend to rise, whether it’s standing still or whether we move in certain postures. So all of these things started to really blow my mind, not just when I practiced it myself, but then I dove into the research and was like, “Whoa, this is amazing. When I start to shift how I inhabit my body, people perceive me differently, I perceive myself differently.” And there’s actual real research on what’s changing underneath the surface in terms of my perception of others, my perception of the world, my perception of myself, and that I don’t tend to be as reactive. I don’t tend to see danger lurking around every corner. I tend to be a bit more optimistic and trusting, and people then in turn kind of interact with me in a different way.
It’s kind of amazing both a little bit of self-discovery, a little bit of looking at Amy Cuddy, then a little bit of digging under the surface for what the research says. And so I find some of these just changes and how we hold ourselves really, really change us. One of the things I was struck by when I do a lot of traveling and teaching mindfulness and people in different places saying like, I do dance as that mindfulness, I do drumming as that mindfulness, or I do chant. It’s like yes and no, right?
I think this is always this big debate, and I do believe those are incredible healing practices that actually should probably get as much research funding as mindfulness does. They probably will show that they’re as good as mindfulness even if they’re not exactly mindfulness. But what I do believe is that those are all embodied practices. That when you do Capoeira in Brazil, there’s something about the way you’re holding your body that’s changing what’s happening in terms of the hormones, in terms of what else is happening in your body. That when you do drumming, you get into a rhythm.
I mean, we know that when you say the Hail Mary, that your breath changes into that rate and rhythm that is associated with self-regulation. That when you do the “Om Mani Padme Om” chant, that also changes your breath rate and rhythm. That when you walk or dance in certain ways, that all these embodied practices actually bring us into the state of regulation with ourselves and they coregulate us with the other people that we’re doing them with. Because in most other cultures, we do things more in community than we do here. I just got way off.
TS: No, no, no. It’s interesting. But it does lead to a question, because I have also heard lots of people say, “My gardening is my mindfulness practice,” let alone my dance practice or my drumming practice. You are very clear that the benefits of these activities are huge and let’s make sure we celebrate them, but that they may or may not be “mindfulness meditation.” What’s the not part? How are they not mindfulness meditation that you’re trying to point to here?
CW: I mean, I think there’s always this tension between, that I find especially having done a lot of work on mindfulness with kids about, when are we honoring practices in a pure form, when are we watering them down? And then what’s the middle where we’re adapting them and we’re letting them evolve in other ways, which we need to do in order to have practices kind of perpetuate and reach more people. And so I think there’s always a tension there. But I do think it’s important that, and I do think gardening can be done in a mindful way. I do think running can be done in a mindful way. Dance can be done in a mindful way. But I also think that those practices, they actually contain many other elements that are actually really healing and important that I think as a culture, we’ve decided we’re going to study mindfulness and throw our weight and our research money behind it.
And some of that has to do with what we honor and what we don’t honor, what we see, what we don’t see, especially when it comes from other cultures. Then I think we should actually then really look at gardening, and what does it do separately? And together with mindfulness, we should look at dance and different forms of dance or different forms of chant, especially from other cultures and marginalized cultures and see what healing power they do have because I bet that there’s really a lot there. Both doing those things “mindfully and separately” I think are both equally important to look at, and I think we’d find amazing results. And not everything has to be mindfulness. I sometimes feel, especially when I was starting out, mindfulness should be perfectly pure and mindfulness is also the only way.
And it’s like, actually no, there are so man– what do they say– rafts across the river? There are so many ways to healing. There are so many ways to enlightenment. There are so many ways to feeling better, to recovery, not just one. We need to look at all of them together. We need to look at all of them separately too, to see what’s going to be best for who. I think that that’s really important.
TS: Now, before we leave this topic of embodiment and power postures in particular, can you give me an example of a couple of power postures? As we’re talking, I’ve been visualizing you in some kind of John Travolta move or something, because I just can’t help myself, but I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re referring to.
CW: Right. Well, I mean I think that there’s the Rocky posture, which we don’t always want to do in public and the Superman, Wonder Woman that Amy Cuddy talks about. But I think there’s also, when we do a posture like Upward-Facing Dog or Cobra or something like that in yoga. I actually remember early on in my own journey of recovery, it took me a long time until I started exercising. I was like, “Oh, exercising my body feels really good.” One of the things I found so empowering was doing just lifting weights over my head and just like, “This feels so empowering.” There’s something also that feels like you’re pushing away at something and that feels empowering, but that actually that movement of expansive arms, open chest, that there is also something happening at the cellular level, at the nervous system level, and at the hormonal level. So those are a few examples of those things.
Again, with movement too, when I was doing a lot of workshops around kids, we do sort of theater gamey kind of stuff. Walk like you’re sad. When you walk like you’re sad or you walk like you’re traumatized, you’re often looking down. You’re actually missing many things. You’re missing the smiles on people’s faces. You’re only seeing a small percentage of the world. If you walk even just physically holding your body upright and looking up, you perceive different. You actually literally see different things, but you also perceive the world in a different way too. Again, in a less kind of dangerous way than you do otherwise when you’re looking down. So it’s actually, again, postures, movement, all of this does change our perception and changes actually how we feel about ourselves and about the world too.
TS: All right, Chris, I’m going to ask you a question here that’s important to me. Let’s see how you take it. When it comes to working with our body to try on an openhearted, open chest move to help us be more openhearted, I feel very resonant with that. It makes perfect sense to me. But when I try to put a different thought into my head about something, like I think a certain way, whatever, and then I’m going to try to replace it with a different thought. I notice that doesn’t work so well for me. Something in me rejects it and is like, “Come on, what are you doing? Are you trying to brainwash yourself?” So I’m comfortable with it physically, but I’m not comfortable with it at the thought level. I wonder what your perspective is on that.
CW: I find this really interesting, the ways that we hold our posture. I also find I’m like, “I can’t fool myself. I just can’t.” I can’t bullshit myself, unfortunately. That’s where I find cognitive behavioral therapy kind of falls down for me. It’s like, “I just don’t believe that. I need to really experience it.” But what I found and what I’m looking into actually for yet another book research project kind of thing I’m working on, in terms of communication and perception is the way that we hold our body. It is very hard if you are standing upright and confident to feel sad or angry. It is very hard if you’re holding your body in a certain way to be angry or resentful. It is also very hard to be happy if you are holding your body in a certain way or to feel confident if you are holding your body in a certain way.
So it’s actually started to interest me, and again, this is another topic, but what is the science of communication? How we perceive things depending on what’s happening in our nervous system and in our brain. And so how can we communicate more effectively? But that’s getting a little bit away from it. But I do find that I can’t just fool myself into like, “You should be happy right now,” that doesn’t work for me. But I do find if I’m holding my body in a certain way, it is much harder for me to feel down. It’s much harder for me to feel pessimistic than if I’m holding my body in a different way. And then the research actually finds this to be true and it doesn’t mean smile all the time if you’re miserable.
Although Thich Nhat Hanh does say, “Sometimes your smile is the source of your joy. Sometimes your joy can be the source of your smile.” And there’s some research behind that too. But it does mean that actually we can play with that. When we’re feeling down, we can notice our posture, shift our posture, and take a new perspective. So one thing I do with clients often is they’ll talk about maybe a conflict or a challenge they’re having in their life and I’ll suggest, “Embody that. How does that feel right now?” You see them maybe hunched over. You see them maybe clenching their fists in frustration or anger. And then I’ll say, “Try letting go of your fist. Try putting your hands over your heart or opening your body, and now think about that same problem or that same conflict.”
What arises naturally is often a new perspective. Maybe it’s the right one, maybe it’s the wrong one, but a new perspective starts to arise. And that’s more organic than trying to say to myself, “I should see it this way” or “I should see it that way.” Just changing our posture, just changing our bodies, we start to see things in new ways. We start to come up with new and different kinds of solutions than we may have seen before. And often they’re more compassionate and often they’re more kind of wise in so many ways. So I find it to be really interesting just to play around with, think about this problem in this physical position, think about it in that physical position. Think about it inside, think about it outside. When we have a foundation of mindfulness, that becomes even more useful and more powerful.
TS: Now under this whole category of attend and befriend ourselves and attend and befriend ourselves in a physical way. You know, you write that at one point you discovered food, exercise and sleep are actually medicine. This makes good sense to me. I think that many of us, most of us, I think, listening right now know the kind of exercise we should be getting, the kind of foods we should be eating, and how much sleep we really need. Most of us know it. So it’s not like we need more arguments about it, but we don’t always do it. We sabotage ourselves. I don’t know. We’re “lazy” or I don’t know what. So my question to you as a clinical psychologist who’s worked with yourself and so many people, how do we align with what we know to tend and befriend ourselves in these ways? Sleep, food, and exercise.
CW: Yes, I think this is where I think the through line in the book of self-compassion, which to me when I discovered self-compassion maybe 10 or 12 years ago, felt like an accelerant for my own mindfulness practice. That I could speak to myself in more kind ways. And that the research also finds that sticking with new habits when we have a more compassionate inner voice as opposed to a harsher inner voice, we tend to actually stick with those changes and those healthy changes for longer. So finding ways that we can cultivate that more compassionate inner voice for ourselves. That we do fall down and we all have our thing. Whether it’s we eat too much, or sleep not enough, or don’t go to the gym, whatever it might be, that we’re able to be kind to ourselves and kind of nudge ourselves forward again for the next thing.
We know that when we’re harsh to ourselves, a lot of us have found that has gotten us a lot of success in life. But then we end up stuck and we end up buying a book from Sounds True, or listening to a podcast because something’s not working anymore. It’s often because that more critical voice is failing and it’s making things worse. So when we can start to cultivate a more compassionate voice with ourselves around motivating ourselves, then I think we can start to make that difference.
Actually, it’s funny, Tami, that we’re talking about this right now. I’m just off the phone actually with Zoom, a call with a client who is feeling that sense of failure. “Why don’t I exercise? Why don’t I get sleep? Why do I talk to myself in such a nasty way in the mirror?” And really starting to shift to how do we actually really zoom in and see where progress really is?
We were joking about, I was actually self-disclosing a bit that some of my self-compassion journey has been over these 20 years from saying to myself in the mirror, “You’re such an asshole,” to saying like, “You’re kind of an idiot.” Sometimes that’s all the progress. It’s like, but that’s still progress, right? I’m mostly actually nicer to myself than that. But when we actually find a more compassionate voice, we actually know that it’s easier and we break things into smaller steps too.
Do you have to eat every raisin for 45 minutes to bring more mindful awareness to eating? Like no, but it’s good to do that when you have the time to do that. But we live in the real world. But can you take the first few bites of a meal? Can you think and talk maybe about where the food came from? Do we all have time to run a marathon? No. Or to do it mindfully? Certainly not, right?
But can we get out there and get some exercise, get into nature. Just simply notice what’s beautiful in our surroundings. Does it have to be perfectly mindful? No. But can we be a little bit more mindful as we bring awareness to how does each day look a little bit different? I notice this a lot during the pandemic. I was taking a lot of walks. It’s like, “Oh, it smells different today. Oh, these trees are in bloom today, they weren’t the last time I walked down this street.” We can tune in in these smaller subtle ways, and it doesn’t have to be these big, “I’m always mindfully walking,” or “I’m always running a marathon”. We can find these little bits of progress that maybe we measure with calipers rather than with yardsticks. But that’s still really important that we do that, because it builds that momentum and that sense of accomplishment and forward movement toward growth. And yet we so often are so self-critical, but that’s where working with that critical voice can be so important.
TS: Now, you mentioned self-compassion as a kind of accelerant for yourself, accelerator on your own journey, and I found that true for myself and many people. I’m curious to know a little bit more how you adopted it. How did you shift? How did you become more self-compassionate? To what do you credit that? What sort of insights or changes in behavior?
CW: Yes, I feel really fortunate that one of my mentors and friends has been Chris Germer for a long time, actually since before he even wrote that book. I remember his first book. I remember he was talking about writing it. I was like, “That’s a great idea. No one will ever buy that book.” And boy, was I wrong, right? But it was such a wonderful book. And then a lot of the work that he and Kristin have then done in terms of developing and honing these practices of just the acknowledgement that we’re suffering. We know that even just the kind of naming it to tame it, we know what that does to our nervous system. Just to notice, “OK, I’m suffering right now.” And the common humanity of knowing that we’re not the only one. And then that shift toward, “Let me just try to talk to myself a little bit more how I might talk to a friend or talk to a child or my own kid sometimes with just a little bit more gentleness.” That has been so powerful.
The practice of the gentle touch. That, along with breathing, actually, is one that I use a lot. Just placing a hand over my heart. That’s one that I’ve been inspired from the two of them around that work. Knowing that just I feel my nervous system settling, just putting a hand on my heart around my chest. I feel my breath slowing down. It really does. And then we know the science of how that works too. I just find that that is so helpful and helps me zoom out and see my larger connection in a way that’s helpful to really identify my suffering with others rather than comparing it with others and comparing myself as different or less than somehow has been incredibly powerful.
TS: Can you share with people, Chris, the science behind putting our hand on our heart? I mean, this is from someone who teaches at Harvard Medical School. I think a lot of people might think putting your hand on your heart, it’s a little corny or something, but there’s science behind this.
CW: It is. And it was so hard for me because I’m like so not a corny guy and I’m so mind/body. Like until I read the science and I’m like, “OK.” But it is. As I understand it, what really happens is, actually I learned this in my wife’s birthing class or our birthing class, I should say eight years ago. Cortisol and oxytocin actually operate on the same receptors in the brain, so that when you have cortisol, it jams up the receptors that allow oxytocin to flow.
Cortisol is the stress hormone, makes us aggressive when combined with testosterone. Oxytocin actually makes us feel safe. It’s the love hormone, the attachment hormone, things like that. The reason this has to do with birthing, sorry to take the long way around with this, is that you need to feel oxytocin. Oxytocin needs to flow to be able to feel comfortable enough to give birth.
Pitocin is artificial oxytocin. So to induce labor, they give women artificial oxytocin and then their body relaxes and they’re able to give birth and feel the sense of connection. So when you’re stressed out, that can’t happen because it blocks the same receptors. So finding a way to relax through breath work if you’re giving birth or through other things like that.
When we touch our hearts like this, which is also a very natural thing that we do. When I think about the responses to stress, we have fight or flight, we have tend and befriend. I talk about this as the befriend response. I think often about when any of us hear a horrible story or a tragedy, the first thing we do, we touch our heart. We grasp ourselves like this with, “Oh my goodness,” right? “Oh my gosh,” right? We literally touch ourselves when we are touched and moved.
What that’s doing is it’s a self-soothing activity that then actually quiets down the cortisol. So the cortisol then breaks loose, which allows the oxytocin, which lets us to feel safe, to feel attached, to feel connected, to feel loving and safe. All of those things start to flow. So it actually signals ourselves that we are safe when we do this. So as I understand it, that’s how the science of that is actually working. When we give ourselves a hug, when we place a hand over our heart, that also gives us something to focus on besides the stress. But it’s a natural response, just the way fight is a response, flight is a response. Holding our heart is a natural response to stress or tragedy, especially when we hear it for somebody else. And can we do this to ourselves when we hear a sad story about ourselves, when we hear a sad story from a friend?
TS: Now, Chris, you wrote How We Grow Through What We Go Through during the pandemic and also while you were sitting next to your mother’s bedside while she was entering and going through the dying process. And here you are, you’re writing a book about how to grow through challenging situations and you’re going through one and growing through one while you’re writing the book. Tell me what that was like for you.
CW: It was not easy. To me, writing has always, since I was a little kid– I’m not writing the great American novel–but writing has been not an escape from, but an escape into in some ways the pain of the world and an escape through it. Going through deepening, exploring suffering and exploring healing and the backdrop of the pandemic is actually what started to inspire the book. As I started to give talks on this, and this kind of comes out of the structure of some of those talks I was doing. And then just really these moments of my mom dying and offering myself that compassion, these moments of family conflict that come up around someone dying and just other, all this pain on so many different levels and putting this stuff to the test and really writing it.
I think all my writing is for myself, and I think all writers in some ways that’s true and all of our teaching, too, is what we’re trying to learn. But putting it to the test and thinking about it and reflecting on it and exploring what I needed, and that doesn’t mean that’s what everybody needs, but knowing what I found really helpful for me. I also found another Sounds True book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. I’m blanking on who wrote that, but to me an unbelievably helpful book.
TS: Megan Devine.
CW: Oh my gosh, that book’s unbelievable. I read it twice in a row when my mom was dying. But yes, I needed to find the truth in this and not just write like, “Here’s some ideas for you if you’re having a hard time,” but also really try to walk it and live it. And that it helped me be with the pain and not run away from the pain, which is so tempting when you see so much suffering in front of us. We want to fight it or flee from it or freeze in front of it. But to walk into it, to walk into it with my family, to walk into it with my mom’s friends, to walk into it with my mom herself in those last moments. And just so much gratitude for all of these practices that I’ve been privileged enough to learn over these last 20 years that they say all this practice is practice for living and practice for dying. And how we live is how we die, but also how we live and how we practice is how we can be with dying and with the suffering.
It brought more peace at the end, still sadness, I still miss her, but brought more peace to it. So it felt like a gift from you, Tami and Jennifer, that you let me write this book during that time too. So I appreciate that I got to explore this personally and at the kind of writing level too. So thank you.
TS: Well, there may have been some wise part of yourself writing the book for the you that was in the experience, but the book itself, I think, will be helpful to many tens of thousands of people going through hard stuff, which means all of us.
Which brings me to my next question, Chris, which is I think sometimes when we’ve been on a path of practice for a long time, been on a spiritual path for a long time, when something difficult happens in our life, I’ll speak for myself. I think I have some expectation that I’m going to be like some Olympic athlete or something in terms of my capacity to handle it. And in fact, I’m just on the floor on my knees for a period of time.
And then there is a rising and a, to use the words you use in your work, resilience to handle it. But there’s often a kind of flattening at first. And I’m shocked, I’ve done all this spiritual practice, how many, in my case, mantra repetitions and frustrations and et cetera. And yet it seems like that is part of just being human. I’m wondering what your thoughts are, especially for us proud spiritual practitioners.
CW: It brings us all to our knees, right? I think the suffering so up close in myself, in my mom, in all of us close to her and in all of us in the world of this pandemic too. To me, the pain is always as sharp as it ever was. But the perspective is also there with it, that there’s a bit of an opening to the relief of knowing the common humanity.
I think with compassion and self-compassion, it’s helpful to know that I am not alone in this even if I feel alone in my suffering. I’m not alone in suffering in general. That the ability to know that it will all rise and fall each day over the course of each day that I’m sitting with her before, during, and after she stopped breathing. That perspective from my time on the cushion, my time during frustrations and all of that, that that perspective I think does help that this is part of a larger thing and being present both for…
There was something about being with my mom when she took her last breath and we were all there together, my dad and sister and another very close family friend. There’s something that reminded me a lot of birth, too, and seeing this sort of continuity of someone entering and someone leaving or someone passing between doors or passing between gates that I think had I not had the practice, it would’ve felt much more horrifying. And it was also simultaneously horrifying and simultaneously beautiful that both could be true and I could hold both to be true. Felt like a privilege. Yes, it was beautiful, too, that we had the shared practice. Everyone in our family from that family retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh going back 20 years.
TS: Now, one final thing I want to talk to you about, Chris. You mentioned we could call trauma a dysregulated nervous system, and we talked quite a bit about self-regulation and different things we can do. I want to talk for a moment here about co-regulation and if we are somebody who wants to help other people in our life when they’re in a dysregulated state, we can notice it. Maybe we notice it because of their emotional jangled quality or something that’s going on with them. What do you suggest? What can we do to be a co-regulating force for others?
CW: Yes, I think this has come up a lot in my work as a therapist that what we’re doing is, to me, we’re offering a space of the potential for regulation and co-regulation of someone who is dysregulated. This is what I think about a lot in my work with parents and families and kids, that there’s no way a child is going to be regulated unless the parent is going to be regulated, unless the parents are able to find some regulation. And then I think also as a society, whether it’s kind of like, “Peace starts with you. If you want peace in the world, see peace in yourself.” To me, it always felt like hack clichés with some wisdom behind them and realizing suddenly, “Oh my gosh, that really is true.” I had to really live it to see that it was true. I can’t create peace in somebody else until I create some sense of peace in myself, that that’s not just a spiritual maxim.
That’s nice that Thay or Gandhi says that, but that that’s also physiologically true in terms of the ways that our nervous systems interact through this sort of interpersonal neurobiology, which to get kind of fancy about it, but the way that we co-regulate our emotions. That can go in very beautiful ways toward, I think a lot about movements for social justice and people chanting in unison, beautiful things in coming together and
co-regulating and co-empowering each other. People lending their privilege to others to empower and amplify voices, to create change in the world. It can also go really dark when we see kind of historical atrocities and things like that.
But that what human potential has around this co-regulation thing is when we do find peace in ourselves, then we know that that can be shared. We know that other people can connect to us, can tune in, nervous system to nervous system, and that they feel safe around us and that then they can learn to find that in themselves. And then that can spread to the next person. You really can see this. You really can measure this in these powerful ways in terms of the neuroscience, in terms of the social science, what’s called emotional contagion and social contagion in terms of behaviors. Even behaviors like kindness and compassion actually really spread person to person to person in these incredible ways so that as we act, so the world becomes.
In terms of how we present ourselves with the world, that does have an impact on other people. Again, seeing this as a therapist, but also trying to think about this more broadly as a citizen of the world. I feel like this is so important and it’s how we heal. We don’t heal that much individually. We really do most of our healing with others in groups, in relationships, in forming new and healthy attachments that do regulate us, especially if we never had those when we were young or they were disrupted by some kind of trauma in our lives. To find those safe people again to reconnect and re-regulate ourselves with becomes so important.
TS: Chris, when you say we can measure this positive social contagion factor, what did you mean by that? The measuring part.
CW: This blows my mind. I gave this talk a while ago that I did some writing about, some of it went into the book about karma and is there such thing as karma? Can you measure it? I’m always interested in the science. And it really is like what goes around comes around. These researchers at Emory and Yale, Nic Christakis and James Fowler.
They were looking at prosocial behaviors and behavioral contagion. Even if you just witness an act of kindness, actually you’re more likely to do something kind, which then three degrees of separation. I then see someone do something kind, and then I let someone go in traffic. And they then buy flowers for their husband or wife on the way home, and then they then are nicer to the kids, and the kid doesn’t kick the dog on the way up the stairs.
It’s kind of amazing. They’ve actually measured this happening. And then it actually does in a way come back to us, too, as we create a nicer world. The technical term is downstream or upstream reciprocity. But it’s amazing how actually it changes a person’s mood. We’ve all experienced this. Someone walks into a room and they’re in a great mood and everyone’s mood lifts up. Someone walks into a room in a sour mood… or in our own homes. When I come home grumpy, that’s not great for the kids or anybody else. If I come home happy, everyone’s mood goes up.
When my son comes home grumpy. All of this, we know that we’re not the only one. That our emotional state actually really does resonate on some measurable frequency with other people’s and changes actually how they feel. So it’s amazing what we can do when we care for ourselves, we actually do end up caring for other people.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Christopher Willard, so bright-eyed and dare I say also humble and a real servant of the Dharma. It’s so great to talk with you, Chris. Really, really enjoyed it. He’s the author with Sounds True of a new book, How We Grow Through What We Go Through. And he’s also the author of several mindful parenting books with Sounds True, including Raising Resilience and Growing Up Mindful, and a popular series of children’s books on Alphabreaths. Chris, what a creative and generous soul you are. Great to talk to you.
CW: Thank you for having me, Tami. Just hearing your voice is like Pavlovian, I just relax like it’s the beginning of an old audio tape that I used to listen to years ago. Thank you.
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