This is the transcript of a podcast episode. You can listen to the episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Katharine: Laurie Cameron, it is so wonderful to have you here.
Laurie: It’s so good to be with you. I’m delighted.
Katharine: I have just a few introductory questions for you to help people get to know you a little bit better. Where did you grow up?
Laurie: I grew up just down the street from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. My dad was a rocket scientist. I did a hero’s journey living in Europe and South America. Now I’m back in the DC area.
Katharine: What was your first ever job?
Laurie: Other than babysitting, my first job was lifeguard. And I loved it. And in fact, that job got me to then become a pool manager at a hotel pool that had a contract with what was then the Capitol Center. So all the rock stars and bands went and stayed in the hotel and I was a 16, 17-year-old life guarding the Police, Rick James, the Commodores. That was one of my favorite jobs.
Katharine: So much more glamorous job than my first job! Oh, that is fantastic. I’ve got to know who was your favorite celebrity that you got to interact with then?
Laurie: Probably the Commodores.
Katharine: We just talked about your bio, but I would love to hear you describe your current job using three verbs.
Laurie: Write. Teach. And guide.
Katharine: And then finally, just something that’s making you happy lately. What’s a a thing that you’re either doing or seeing, that’s bringing you joy right now.
Laurie: My wood burning fireplace and my 16-year-old, and that we sit in front of the fire every night together.
Katharine: Wonderful. You are an expert on mindfulness and you’re helping so many people. Can you first start off, just tell us what is mindfulness? What does that mean?
Laurie: Yeah, it’s a word that’s ubiquitous and has a lot of different connotations. Mindfulness is very simply present moment awareness. It’s just about paying attention to what’s happening in your direct experience right now, right here. And we’re paying attention in a particular way. We’re paying attention with an attitude of curiosity and receptivity and an attitude of empathy and compassion. Cultivating mindfulness really builds on a set of skills. We all know what it’s like to be mindful and present and pay attention. We all have that experience without any training. We might’ve held a newborn baby and looked at their smile or watched kids performing on stage back in the day, or stepped outside in the morning of a new fallen snow and saw the sparkling diamond light crystals in the snow.
All of those moments are paying attention in a particular way, in the present moment. So that’s what mindfulness is. The beauty of what we’ve discovered now is that we can train it because it’s really critical that we offset our biology and learn to pay attention with kindness and compassion.
Katharine: What are the benefits of being present?
Laurie: What’s interesting is that Harvard researchers found that 50% of the day we are not present. When I talk to my clients, Deloitte, KPMG, the Aspen Institute, Google, they’re very fascinated by that number. I work with businesses, so they’re very numbers driven. And so I tee up your question as, what’s the ROI of learning how to be more mindful.
What’s interesting is that when we’re present with an open awareness, that is the birth place, that’s the foundation of collaboration, innovation, creativity, relationships of trust. So when I’m working with professional services–I work with lawyers and financial advisors and strategic consultants–their job is to work in the unfolding uncertainty of the economy right now, for their companies or their clients. And in order to navigate uncertainty and to be able to find our way through with intelligence and connection, we need to be present. That’s the benefit of mindfulness is that we can be more present for the life that’s right here.
There’s been a meta-analysis of the benefits of mindfulness at work, for example, and the three benefits are performance, relationships, and wellbeing. And that kind of sums up, you know, they’re all interrelated, they’re not isolated, but when we talk about cultivating conditions in the workplace or at home or in community for people to thrive and flourish, to have a life of purpose and meaning, it begins with being aware and present. So there’s a myriad of other benefits. There’s physical benefits of the immune system getting stronger, which is really important right now in the pandemic. There’s benefits of slowing down the aging process, increasing length of telomeres.
Katharine: Wonderful. Thank you. One of the things that is really hard right now is that we are in this era of constant upheaval and turmoil in the world. Things like the insurrection at the Capitol, we’re seeing horrifying videos and instances of institutional racism, the numbers around the coronavirus are skyrocketing and upsetting.
And a lot of people are very, very scared right now, and very anxious. I think often when we feel scared and anxious, we just want to kind of close down. We don’t want to necessarily open ourselves up to the present moment because the present moment feels really scary and hard. Do you have any advice on that impulse and how to navigate this time with openness and also take care of ourselves?
Laurie: You’re absolutely right. That when in times of uncertainty and fear, like we have been for quite some time, and even though we’ve had some changes this month in our culture, there’s still a lot of fear and anxiety of the unknown, a tremendous amount actually. And our evolutionary biology is designed not to keep us, you know, blissed out under a Bodhi tree somewhere, but it’s designed to keep us alive. So that tendency to withdraw and tighten and avoid and isolate is deeply wired in our DNA. It’s part of our ancestral mapping. We carry that in our genes.
I share this with so many audiences. I do a lot of speaking at conferences and so on, I open with that because I want to normalize that that is absolutely normal and it’s happening, and why it happens. It’s not that something’s wrong with you, or you’re a hermit. It’s that you’re in a protective mode as a human being.
Secondly, I introduce the skill of mindfulness, of being aware of paying attention so that we can recognize when we are in that mode. So many people start isolating and withdrawing and avoiding, and don’t come out of their house and haven’t showered in four days and are eating chips out of the bag for lunch. That’s not a true confession, but yeah, we don’t even realize it. So advice number one is to practice mindfulness meditation to help you build the skill and capacity to wake up out of those modes that tend to not serve us. We need to see that we’re withdrawing, avoiding, and isolating, and that we’re in pain, that we’re suffering.
Number two is, the science shows us that we are designed to avoid discomfort and to move towards comfort or pleasure. We don’t want to step into the messiness, the uncertainty, the fear. We don’t want to look at what’s difficult. Yesterday, I spent some time contemplating very difficult images of the Holocaust. Yesterday was the anniversary of remembering the Holocaust, and I looked at some difficult imagery. Number one is to remember. Number two to practice, I’m always in the practice of staying with what’s difficult. We have a human tendency to suppress, deny, or avoid what’s difficult. I might have fear about, will I get sick with COVID, will a loved one get sick, will my business suffer financially because of the pandemic? You know, there’s a lot of fear coming up. When I noticed that fear, it’s natural to want to binge into Netflix or a bottle of Chardonnay or make another batch of brownies. That’s a way to escape or take refuge out of our direct experience.
Mindfulness teaches us to open to it. When I can open to what’s here, when I recognize and allow and investigate my current experience with mindfulness and compassion, then I’m able to meet my current experience with a loving kind awareness and I’m able to navigate it skillfully.
When we suppress, deny, or avoid our current experience, then we just push it down and it might come out now in a sharp comment to a team member or inner critic, but we can allow things to flow through and we do that by staying, facing, naming it. We name it to tame it.
Okay, fear is here. Anxiety’s here. Then we can meet it with compassion and take skillful action. And sometimes skillful action is, you know, it might be brownies. It doesn’t mean denial. It means being conscious to what’s happening. And finally, the third thing to navigate these times and difficult emotions is recognizing it by turning attention inward to the body, scanning for physiological sensations, naming them, and then treating yourself as you would a friend.
And that means that we’re letting go of the inner critic and instead inviting in words of kindness and compassion. Just naming, this is really hard. I’m feeling afraid. The second step to that is common humanity, and this is really powerful and there is nothing almost nothing that anyone is experiencing right now that is unique. Feeling afraid, feeling angry, feeling alone, all of these are shared by millions of human beings right now on the planet. The research from Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer show that when we tap in to this idea that I’m not alone in my suffering, it actually reduces the distress that we’re in. So there’s a number of things we can do, but it begins with naming that this moment is hard.
Katharine: Naming and accepting and recognizing that you’re not alone. That’s just fantastic advice. Thank you. What other advice do you have for people to hold on through these times and try to remember mindfulness? Do you have any advice on developing a practice of mindfulness?
Laurie: I do. And you know, I love that you brought up the word “remembering,” Kate, because one of the definitions of mindfulness comes from the word to remember. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the pioneers in mindfulness in the West, teaches that remembering as part of mindfulness and he even breaks it down to think about the word, the part of the word membering as our member, as our body. We’re re-membering, we’re coming back into the body because mindfulness it’s, you know, it’s kind of going to a name that throws us off. It seems a lot of people think it’s about my thoughts in my head or it’s about attention. It’s even more about the body. It’s a somatic embodied practice. To practice mindfulness, step one is always, always coming into the body.
It’s not, what am I thinking about? Oh, let me have a different thought. We might get to that in a few steps, but the first is to come into the body. The simplest way to come into your body is through the senses, through any of the five senses, smelling, tasting, listening, hearing. It’s a very simple way and very accessible to people.
I just made a nice cup of Earl Grey infused with vanilla. If I take a sip of this tea, I can smell it on its way up, that beautiful vanilla. And then when I taste the tea, that moment. Smelling and tasting is a moment of mindfulness. That’s a mini meditation.
Not only does it get me out of my overwhelming thoughts, anxiety, catastrophizing, ideas of the future, all the things we tend to do right now, and maybe always, but they’re on high right now. The moment of sipping that tea brings me right into the present moment. I can’t sit the tea and be thinking about the past or projecting into the future. I am right with the tea.
My book, The Mindful Day, takes my readers through an entire day in very practical ways from waking up to sipping morning tea, to stepping outside and listening to the birds sing, which is one of my favorite things to do. Or I do that at twilight. When the sun starts to go down, the birds get really loud.
I have little indicators. So to answer your question, how do we remember? I need help. I’ve been practicing mindfulness for 27 years with the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastics, nuns and monks there. And Thich Nhat Hanh actually teaches how to integrate mindfulness in the day, so I’ve learned a lot from the years of study. But what I do in these modern times, living in the United States here, is I use my phone. I have an alert that comes on at 12 noon that says, You are loving spacious awareness. I set it up as a little meeting and it comes in and then I pause and I come home to my body every day at noon. I just breathe. So we can set up reminders. I think it’s really, really essential that we create external structure and systems to help us pause and be present, so it’s not just willpower. It’s not like, am I going to remember? Because I think we don’t. I have a morning routine, a practice every morning, and I don’t have to think about it because over time habits become default, and then we don’t have to remember. It’s wonderful. Eventually they become a default way of living, but until they do, we create structures and systems, like for example, I’ll be starting a live free weekly meditation. I’m going to do two. That’s a structure that I’m going to offer to people because it’s hard to remember and when we can come together and then it’s built into the routine. I encourage people to give themselves a break, know that habits are hard to form and we can set up our environment and have accountability buddies and partners that support us.
I’ll add one more thing, for people that are in your community that are listening that work in companies or schools or hospitals or organizations, I really encourage them to set up similar structures in their workplace. At Deloitte, my company Purpose Blue, I think we’ve trained maybe 6,000 people in mindfulness and compassion practices. One of the practices is called A Minute to Arrive. It’s becoming a norm to start a meeting with a minute of stillness. It’s normal. It’s not weird. It’s not new age. It’s healthy. Instead of plunging right into a packed agenda, we either play a short meditation, which they’ve got my meditations, or we just take a minute and people can breathe or close their eyes, they can just do whatever they like to do, but it’s a reset.
Katharine: I love that. That is fantastic. I will tell you, I’m as guilty as anybody at overfilling my schedule, I get to the point where I think I don’t have a minute to think, or I don’t have a minute to notice the wind or whatever, but I have always found when I take that minute, I am so much more thoughtful and productive in the time after that, it more than makes up for that minute that I took.
Laurie: It’s incredible. And that experience you had, that direct experience of realizing that–I tell my students and clients that they’re scientists and subjects. I don’t want them to believe anything. I say, don’t take my word for it, but try it. And then see for yourself and see what happens. So I love hearing your example because, it’s the same for me and I get really busy now, I’ve done it enough that I know, like if I’ve got to write something under deadline. I can sit down and if I don’t take a minute or two, I have an actual little set of rituals, but if I don’t create the space and calm my mind and body and open up my heart and connect to a bigger purpose, if I don’t do those steps, then I enter into that deadline with a sense of clenched anxiousness. Oh my God, I got to crank this out, you know, will it be good? Will it be good enough? Will I be good enough? And then I’m in the ego, I’m not into heart, I’m into my ego. I’m under pressure and it’s usually not as good. This idea of mindfulness, all the skills in mindfulness really are about pausing and creating space to shift into what’s important.
We both are really focused on helping people shift to an attitude of empathy and compassion. That’s a big part of the work that I do in companies is helping people understand that that is a deliberate move we can make. We can shift to a more compassionate way of being. People kind of at first resist taking a mindful minute, when they hear the word compassion, they often think, Isn’t that just being nice? Or is that weak? Or, that’s really cool, but I’m a senior leader and I’ve got to make tough decisions and I can’t let people in because they’re going to think I agree with them and maybe I do, but I don’t want them to see that. There’s a lot of walls we build up, we’ve built up and the research shows that the more senior we go in a company, the bigger the walls are.
I teach a course on psychological safety, empathy, and effective teaming. And I ask people, What do you think blocks empathy? They say all kinds of things: I’m in a hurry. I’m rushed. I don’t have time, which is true–that blocks being present. You need to be aware and present in order to be empathetic.
But what we see in the research, it goes beyond that. Status differentials, a perceived status differential, block empathy, and these are sometimes unconscious. So we have to pause and really check in and say, How well am I seeing this person next to me? Am I seeing them as like me or different than me? We tend to other, to make somebody other than us and instead of judging ourselves or beating ourselves up for that, we can recognize that that is also part of our biology.
We can train ourselves to orient the mind when we come upon another human being or a group, we see them as just like us. I actually have a meditation called Just Like Me on Insight Timer which trains the mind and heart to have a we mindset.
That’s how we increase empathy and compassion at work. But it takes practice and repetition in order to rewire our default way of being to become truly more compassionate, empathetic, human.
Katharine: Thank you. I will definitely check that out. I love Insight Timer. I’ve gotten into a habit where when I first wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put a headphone on and start up a little meditation. Literally like while I’m in bed, still waking up, the first thing is this guided meditation and I do different ones for different days, but lately I’ve been starting with a joyfulness meditation, which is a really lovely way to start the day.
Laurie: That you’re doing that I can just feel in my own body a little lift, I enjoy you waking up the sun may be coming up over the horizon and you starting your day with joy.
Katharine: I enjoy meditation and have done it for many years. Not every day, but it is a practice of mine, and I know that a lot of people in the listening audience have no experience with meditation or might have some impressions about it based on failed attempts at meditation. So do you have any advice on starting a meditation practice?
Laurie: I do absolutely. First I’ll talk about how to start and the answer there is going to be start small and be consistent. I’ll go into a little bit more on that, but I wanted to just talk about what is meditation and what is mindfulness because people confuse those. Mindfulness is a state. It’s a way of being. We talked about being present, aware, open, kind, compassionate. Mindfulness is really awareness of what’s happening right now. It’s a quality of mind. Meditation is a mental exercise. The mental exercise of a meditation is building skills and capacity that allow me to be more mindful.
Just like exercise and sports and running and lifting weights allow me to be more fit, exercise is to fitness as meditation is to mindfulness. I’m so glad you asked that because I think it’s kind of cool. And in the workplace I use the metaphor of the mental gym. People can think about that as they’re starting and they’re like, oh, I meditated once at the end of a yoga class or one time there was a guest speaker at my office but I just want them to simply think about, we are helping our mind body become more fit, not so that we can be good meditators. so that we can have a better life. We can take ourselves to the mental gym.
There’s hundreds of meditations, but the ones that I teach in relate to emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, to deepen increased self-awareness, self-regulation, emotional regulation, empathy, compassion, and purpose. These are a set of specific mental training exercises.
That’s cool to think about it that way. I’ll say like, you go to the gym and you can do quads, or you can do biceps or triceps. Same with meditation. You can say today, I’m going to do biceps. You can start anywhere, but there’s meditations that train the foundation of mindfulness, which is attention and awareness, and that’s often using the breath. Just bringing attention to the breath, resting attention on the breath. The mind’s going to wander because you’re a human being. Not because you’re doing it wrong. That’s a key thing. We bring attention to the breath and that’s called an anchor of attention. I’s that simple when we’re mindful of something, but we have something to focus attention on and it can be the breath. For some people that have experienced trauma, the breath might not be the right place to put the attention. For those students of mine, I have them bring attention to the feet, making contact with the floor or your hands resting on your lap.
We have an anchor of attention and we just breathe, relax, rest attention on the anchor. And then your mind will wander and you bring it back. Every time you bring attention back, you’re training meta attention, meta awareness.
This is a superpower because meta awareness allows us to witness the habits of our mind. This is really cool. We’re training really powerful skills, attention and awareness. And when we are able to train that witnessing observer part of our mind, that seed of consciousness, then that starts to impact our capacity for self-awareness, for empathy, for compassion. Then we start seeing that the narratives and tapes and things we’re writing in our head. That has huge payoffs down the road.
Bottom line is the mindfulness meditation of mindful breathing, also called focused attention. Or you could do a body scan, bringing attention part by part through the body, which is a different piece of equipment in the gym. It’s training focused attention. It’s also exercising the insula, which is a part of the brain, as you well know, associated with self-awareness and empathy.
When I’m training and tracking my own experience with a body span, when I go out in the world that day I’m much more tuned into other people. That’s just to clarify meditation and mindfulness, to talk about a couple examples of meditations that are well-known: Mindful breathing, the body scan. My favorite to open the heart is loving kindness meditation, where we repeat loving or kind phrases of wishes to other people. So that’s using, instead of breath as an anchor, it’s using phrases.
I encourage people who have a new habit like meditation to be very small, to do like one minute of meditation every day, or two minutes. That’s it. And number two, find a consistent place I’m going to everyday. I’m going to sit in that chair in my living room or stand on my back porch or while my coffee’s brewing, I’m going to do my one minute of meditation in the kitchen.
So start small, have a consistent place, and track it. Use the Seinfeld method of don’t break the chain. Take your calendar, put an X through every day you do your one minute and don’t let that streak break. Then slowly increment up.
Then the other key thing we find in the research to start meditation, there’s two more things. One is to hook it to something you already do. If you brushed your teeth, say after I brush my teeth, I’m going to meditate. Or if you walk your dog every morning, say I’m going to come back in, put the leash down, and meditate for one minute. Then the other one, which is really, really cool, it’s maybe my favorite tip, is tap into your innate biological reward system. We are built with this incredible neurochemical nervous system that is designed to flood us with reward. It’s like a bio hack. So after you do your minute or two of meditation, just like you shared, Kate–Man, I think I don’t have a minute, but when I do a minute, I notice that I feel better and I feel clear.
In that noticing moment, that is when you state the benefit to yourself. You say, Oh, I just did that minute or two of mindfulness, and I feel so much calmer. I feel clear. I feel like I’m going to do one thing at a time now for the next half an hour. So name your benefit. What happens is the brain creates that reward. That’s a reward for doing that practice and then it links it to the behavior of the meditation.
Katharine: That is amazing.
Laurie: I’ve been training with Thich Nhat Hanh. He’s a peace activist, Zen master from Vietnam, and what I’ve always loved about training Thich Na Hanh and the monastics is he has always taken an approach of enjoying the breath. He always uses words like smile to yourself. In some of my guided meditation, I’ll invite listeners to, as they’re breathing, I’ll say, experiment with a slight smile. This smiling, this enjoying the breath, enjoying your minute or two, I really encourage that because it’s a beautiful nourishing, lovely practice that feels good. Once we bring in our old conditioning of, I have to do this, you know, I got to exercise, I got to floss, and I got to meditate. Once we have that mindset, it’s not fun, at least for me. So forget that mindset, this is more of a nourishing, healthy, loving, kind thing to do for yourself, and just as important to do for the people around you. When I meditate, I am a much better mother. I’m patient. I’m more spacious because I’m more compassionate to myself. Compassion we know in the research rises even out of mindful breathing, even without a compassion phrase. When I’m compassionate to myself, I’m kinder to my daughter, or my team, or my clients. It’s like a ripple effect. That’s another reward. Right? You can think of that as a reward. It’s extraordinary. It’s amazing to me that we now know that we can engage in specific and deliberate practices that increase our ability to be present for this life. We need those practices in our lives, that mental training, more than ever. So I encourage everyone to start.
They can join me in my Insight Timer community. It’s free. They just search for Laurie J. Cameron as a teacher and meditate with me at any time. I will be doing them live every Sunday, but they can just access these meditations anytime.
Katharine: That’s fantastic. One of the things I so admire about you, Laurie, is that you’re able to speak both on a very high level about what’s happening with our brains and the impact physiologically, but also just in very, very practical terms and you make it very accessible. That’s one of the things I love about your book, The Mindful Day. Tt’s such an easy, accessible entry into these concepts. You just make it very, very simple to adopt different little practices that you can fold into your day and really begin to see the benefits very quickly. Thank you for that book. I want everybody to know that that book is out there. You can get it anywhere you buy books.
You also do training for organizations, right? Can you talk for just a second about the kind of training that you do?
Laurie: Yes, I will. And thank you. And I’ll mention, I’d love your readers to buy the book because I see a teeny tiny fraction of that come back to me, but I do want to tell them that right now, the book is free on Audible.
The training that we do at Purpose Blue is for professionals, we do schools, and I teach at the University of Maryland and I’m just starting now at UC Davis in California.
The trainings are right now all virtual, but they’re online classes that are teaching at the intersection of mindfulness neuroscience, positive psychology, and emotional intelligence. For example, one course we do a lot is Mindfulness and Emotional Mastery. It’s learning what you and I talked about, to recognize, to be present and aware, train attention, train awareness, be awake and actually involved in more of your life, more engagement with your own life. That’s mindfulness, but the emotional mastery is recognizing emotions very early on. Emotions have a curve and we can recognize them very early on and then create a pause and work with them skillfully instead of like exploding or blurting something out or blasting off an email that you later regret.
Emotional mastery is big and right now we’re dealing with additional difficult emotions of grief and loss and apathy–people are kind of getting disengaged because of the sustained chronic stress of the pandemic, so working with emotions is a big part of it.
Another class that we have that I really love is called Cultivating a Positive Mind. In that class, I actually dive deep in the first half into working with acceptance, which you mentioned, and acceptance is a really powerful mental strategy. Working with acceptance and self compassion, meeting ourselves as we are a friend, we do that in the first half. We’re using advanced techniques, some Jedi moves on navigating the difficult. And then we start engaging in specific practices to generate a positive mind on demand, which if you think about that, we have that capacity as humans, it’s to me, another mind blowing thing, because I’ll have a day where it’s the afternoon and I’m feeling apathetic and not motivated. And I know now that when I recognize that I can do something about it. Then we learn these practices and we do them individually and in small groups and dyads and stuff, even on Zoom.
Then our third class that I mentioned is Psychological Safety, Empathy, and Teaming. It’s really cool, knowing that we can engage in training to create more collaboration and trust in the workplace and make it safe, create safe spaces, and then the fourth class that we’re just piloting right now in a launch in March is Purpose, Alignment, and Meaning. This is really about using the skill of attention and awareness and adding that to the skill of self-inquiry and reflection to really connect to what we care about, what really matters, and here’s where we bring in values.
When we bring in strengths and then we connect that to what the world needs. I really love this course. My company’s called Purpose Blue and I know purpose is a pillar of wellbeing and we really need it these days as we’re navigating so much extended long-term sadness and uncertainty and grief and anxiety that when we pause and connect. Connect to something outside of ourselves and then we start to have a lot more joy and meaning in our lives. I think we need that now more than ever.
Katharine: Thank you, Laurie Cameron. I’m going to include in the show notes links to your website as well as to your beautiful Instagram and Facebook pages, and also links for people to go find your book on Audible or in the paperback version. Thank you so much for sharing yourself with me and with our audience today. And thank you so much for all of the good you are putting out into the world.
Laurie: Thank you. I appreciate you sharing all that. I want to mention one thing. I’m launching a really exciting initiative this year with a long-term teaching partner, a master facilitator, Laurie Schwanbeck. We’re really creating a community and it’s called The Art and Science of Being Fully Alive. It’s bringing in mindfulness and psychology and practices of joy and connection. We do a series of retreats. Our first retreat will be on March 13th and it’s virtual. So they can look at my website, purposeblue.com and find out about that or on Instagram. And I’d love to have whoever would like to be there with us.
We’re going to mix virtual connection practices with things that we’ll do on our own and then come back together. I wanted to share that. Yours is the first audience that I’m sharing it with. I just look forward to meeting whoever might be there around our virtual fire.
Katharine: That sounds fantastic. That’s wonderful. Thank you for mentioning that.
Laurie: So welcome. Thank you for having me.