How learning to be gentle with your mind helps you to grow wiser . . .

You may want to still your mind to experience

calmness and peace in your life and believe that meditation is your answer.  You may also believe that mindfulness meditation is about learning to train your mind to be empty of thoughts.  While some of these are aspects of any mindfulness practice, you will not experience long lasting peace or comfort in your life if you do not also practice and cultivate a loving heart.

Mindfulness meditation and self-compassion are intimately connected.  You may believe and struggle with the idea of learning to be kind and loving yourself because you feel that it is selfish.  As you deepen your practice of mindfulness meditation and have more conscious awareness of the thoughts and feelings in your mind, it is crucial that you simultaneously make the attitudinal shift to be kind and deepen your own self-compassion. 

One practice that can help you is to use R.A.I.N.  R.A.I.N. is a traditional acronym used by many mindfulness meditation teachers such as psychologist, author and teacher Jack Kornfield.  Like rain that indiscriminately and gently touches all things it falls upon, mindfulness is about learning to be curious and cultivating your capacity to hold all of your experiences non-judgmentally with curiosity, openness, kindness and love. You are learning to befriend and not struggle with you mind.

• Recognize:  As your mindfulness practice grows, the first step is to simply recognize and be aware of the stream of thoughts and feelings that surface in your mind.  Simply notice without elaborating.
• Accept.  Without judging your experiences, learn to simply allow the stories in your mind to unfold and embrace your own vulnerability.  Like countless other people who have lived, the pain or discomfort that you experience is part of your humanity and the human experience.  Self-judgment or criticism will only add to your pain and lead to  your suffering.
• Investigate: As you notice your mind’s many experiences and simply hold them in your awareness, investigate and learn to see beyond your fleeting thoughts and feelings to examine how the stories or feelings manifest in your body.  Is the experience part of some story that you are clinging to tightly as part of your  identity? Does it extend to your relationships with the people who you love?  Where else have you experienced the thoughts or feelings?
• Non-identification:  Perhaps the most challenging and important step is to learn to not take what your mind tells your personally.   As you learn to consciously hold your mind’s constant chit chatter, you may believe and feel like many people that your private experiences define you.  However, as your mindfulness practice grows and you learn to cultivate self-compassion, you will also deepen your awareness and become the observer behind all of your experiences.  Simply noticing your experiences and cultivating self-compassion will allow you to act with a wise heart so that you do not take your experiences personally. 

As with any skill, R.A.I.N. is a tool that without consistent practice will not take you very far.

To your health,
Dr. Sandoval

To learn more about how working with a psychologist and holistic health coach can help you to enhance your health and well-being, call or email Dr. Sandoval to schedule a free consultation. 

The information, published and/or made available through the www.fullofradiance.com website, is not intended to replace the services of a physician, nor does it constitute a physician-patient relationship. This blog is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. You should not use the information in this post for diagnosing or treating a medical or health condition. You should consult a physician in all matters relating to your health, particularly in respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.  Any action on the reader’s part in response to the information provided in this blog is at the reader’s discretion.

How to tend to your mind's unsightly weeds . . .

If you experience painful and unpleasant emotions or thoughts like anxiety, depression, guilt or shame, there is a strong likelihood that you also engage in many unworkable behavior patterns like substance abuse, compulsive shopping, or binge eating.  You probably also are overwhelmed by your mind’s unending barrage of critical and punitive thoughts that you are “not good enough,” “inadequate” and “unlovable” as you are right now.  Like unsightly weeds that grow in your garden, you may want to eliminate these painful experiences.  

The reality, however;  is that more you engage in a battle with your mind’s nasty thoughts and struggle to undo your painful emotions, the more your life narrows and constricts as you focus on what is wrong with you instead of acting and doing what truly matters to you in life.  Research has demonstrated that experiential avoidance (i.e., engaging in any behavior designed to alter the form, frequency or duration of an unpleasant experience) frequently is at the root of most mental health disorders.¹  

Rather than “pulling out” your mind’s weeds, you’ll free yourself from your mind’s “tight grip” that leads to your suffering by learning to love and radically accept all of who you are in this moment (e.g., your fear, sadness, shame, frustration).  When you experience emotions like fear, worry, sadness or guilt, be gentle and forgive yourself.   

Having self-compassion will ease your pain, allow you to notice the many opportunities around you to “wake up” and get “out of your mind” and allow you to experience pleasant states like contentment, mirth, achievement, connection, and gratitude.  Learning and practicing Loving Kindness Meditation (LKM) everyday is an effective tool to aid you experience this state of inner harmony.  

As you pay attention and connect with your surroundings and the people in your life, simply notice and be willing to experience your discomfort.  If your sole focus is on the “holes in your socks,” you’ll get “stuck” in wiggling your toes and adjusting your shoes all day instead of creating a life that is rich and meaningful to you by aligning what you can control (i.e., the actions of your hands and feet) with your life values.   

To your health,

Dr. Sandoval

To learn more about how working with a psychologist and holistic health coach can help you to enhance your health and well-being, call or email Dr. Sandoval to schedule a free consultation.

1. Hayes, S.C., Wilson, K.G., Gifford, E.V., Follette, V., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6): 1152-1168.

How R.A.I.N. helps your mind be gentler & your heart wiser . . .

You may want to still your mind to experience calmness and peace in your life and believe that meditation is the answer.  You may also think that meditation and mindfulness is about learning to train your mind and be empty of thoughts.  While some of these aspects of any mindfulness practice, you will not experience long lasting peace or comfort in your life if you do not also practice and cultivate a loving heart.

Mindfulness meditation and self-compassion are intimately connected.  You may believe and struggle with the idea of learning to be kind and loving yourself because you feel that it is selfish.  As you deepen your practice of mindfulness meditation and have more conscious awareness of the thoughts and feelings in your mind, it is crucial that you simultaneously make the attitudinal shift to be kind and deepen your own self-compassion. 

One practice that can help you is to use R.A.I.N.  R.A.I.N. is a traditional acronym used by many mindfulness meditation teachers such as psychologist, author and teacher Jack Kornfield.  Like rain that indiscriminately and gently touches all things it falls upon, mindfulness is about learning to be curious and cultivating your capacity to hold all of your experiences non-judgmentally with kindness and love. 

• Recognize:  As your mindfulness practice grows, the first step is to simply recognize and be aware of the stream of thoughts and feelings that surface in your mind.  Simply notice without elaborating.
• Accept.  Without judging your experiences, learn to simply allow the stories in your mind to unfold and embrace your vulnerability.  Like countless other people who have lived, the pain or discomfort that you experience is part of your humanity and the human experience.  Self-judgment or criticism will only add to your pain and lead to  suffering.
• Investigate: As you notice your mind’s many experiences and simply hold them in your awareness, investigate and learn to see beyond your fleeting thoughts and feelings to examine how the stories or feelings manifest in your body.  Is the experience part of some story that you are clinging to tightly as your part of your  identity? Does it extend to your relationships with the people who you love?  Where else have you experienced the thoughts or feelings?
• Non-identification:  Perhaps the most challenging and important step is to learn to not take what your mind tells your personally.   As you learn to consciously hold your mind’s constant chatter, you may believe and feel like many people that your private experiences define you.  However, as your mindfulness practice grows and you learn to cultivate self-compassion, you will also deepen your awareness and become the observer behind all of your experiences.  Simply noticing your experiences and cultivating self-compassion will allow you to act with a wise heart so that you do not take your experiences personally. 

As with any skill, R.A.I.N. is a tool that without consistent practice will not take you very far.

To your health,
Dr. Sandoval

To learn more about how working with a psychologist and holistic health coach can help you to enhance your health and well-being, call or email Dr. Sandoval to schedule a free consultation. 

The information, published and/or made available through the www.fullofradiance.com website, is not intended to replace the services of a physician, nor does it constitute a physician-patient relationship. This blog is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. You should not use the information in this post for diagnosing or treating a medical or health condition. You should consult a physician in all matters relating to your health, particularly in respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.  Any action on the reader’s part in response to the information provided in this blog is at the reader’s discretion.

Why mindfulness meditation can help you to transform your life . . .

If you struggle with feelings of anxiety and depression, you very likely also are your own worst critic, judge yourself harshly and negatively compare yourself to other people.  You may engage in this behavior believing that this is an effective way to motivate yourself to do better, as a habit that you picked somewhere in your past or simply because we live in a culture that reinforces the message that demanding more of yourself is the way to move ahead in world.  If this sounds like you, you probably also do everything that you can do run away and avoid these difficult and painful feelings (i.e. watch TV, listen to music, smoke, drink alcohol to “numb out,” or  binge on food), experience guilt or shame when you do not do as well as you wanted to and have a difficult time expressing your emotions to people.

While short term many of these coping behaviors do provide relief and pleasure, in the long run they are not very sustainable and have a negative effect on your health.   By ignoring your emotions and avoiding your difficult thoughts and emotions, your “fight or flight” (i.e., amygdala and adrenals) and PIN systems (psychoimmunoneurology, the study of how your thoughts and emotions interface with your immune and neurological systems) get ramped up, which damage your body by releasing more stress hormones like cortisol and inflammatory cytokines.

On the other hand, when you express your experiences and “talk it out” with your friends and family or practice affect labeling (i.e., simply labeling and mentally acknowledging your experiences), you activate a region in your brain (i.e., right ventrolateral frontal cortex) that helps you to process your thoughts and emotions and mitigates the damaging effects of running away from your experiences.^1,2  By talking to other people, you’re likely to also receive caring and loving words of support and affection that increase the amount of the “bonding hormone” (i.e., oxytocin) and feel good and pain relief chemicals (i.e., endogenous opioids) that your body produces.

Learning and practicing mindfulness meditation will lead to and produce many of these same beneficial effects.  Research suggests that cultivating self-compassion and mentally noting your experiences (i.e., skills that are integral to mindfulness meditation), help to significantly down regulate your “fight or flight” and PIN systems.^3,4,5   These practices will also help you to produce more of feel good and pain relief chemicals.  You can practice mentally noting your experiences and cultivate self-compassion by simply labeling your thoughts and emotions (e.g., each time you experience any unpleasant or painful thoughts or feelings of anxiety, gently repeat “fear” or “tension” and affirm “It’s okay.”).  

To your health,

Dr. Sandoval

To learn more about how working with a psychologist and holistic health coach can help you to enhance your health and well-being, call or email Dr. Sandoval to schedule a free consultation.

1. Nakazawa, DJ. (2013). The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, and My Life. 
2. Lieberman, MD, Eisenberger, NI, Crockett,MJ,  Tom, SM,  Pfeifer, JH and Way, BM. “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli .” Psychological Science. (2007). 18(5), 421-428.  doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916. 
3.  Leary, MR, Tate, EB, Adams, CE, Batts, AA, Ashley; and Hancock, J. “Self-compassion and reactions to unpleasant self-relevant events: The implications of treating oneself kindly.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (2007). 92(5), 887-904. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.887 
4. Neff, KD and McGehee, P. “Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults.” Self and Identity. (2010). 9 (3), 225-240. doi:10.1080/15298860902979307. 
5. Creswell, JD, Way, BM, Eisenberger, NI, Lieberman, MD. “Neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness during affect labeling.” Psychosomatic Medicine. (2007). 69(6), 560-565.

The information, published and/or made available through the www.fullofradiance.com website, is not intended to replace the services of a physician, nor does it constitute a physician-patient relationship. This blog is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. You should not use the information in this post for diagnosing or treating a medical or health condition. You should consult a physician in all matters relating to your health, particularly in respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.  Any action on the reader’s part in response to the information provided in this blog is at the reader’s discretion.