Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: Brant Rogers Interview

As we head into American Heart Month, we recognize the importance that managing stress plays in maintaining heart health. So we turned to Brant Rogers, certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor and owner of Yoga Hillsboro and The Stress Reduction Clinic, to help us understand how we can better identify and manage stress.

LifeBalance: How can we evaluate our stress levels?

Brant: I think that what immediately comes to mind is to just tune in to what’s happening in your life. You know, notice the number of times you react in ways you might feel badly about. Or the times when you’re eating food that’s not good for you, there’s something about that way of paying attention, kindly, to what we are doing. Or maybe you are worrying…that sort of thing. Just being aware of a qualitative sense of the discomfort, the difficulties that are showing up. You could use a scale of one to ten. How well do you feel your relationships with those you love are going? On a scale of one to ten, how much are you enjoying the food you eat? That’s sort of the ABCs of life. Really tuning into life a little bit more and seeing what’s there.

Especially if you are having lots of aches and pains and you go see the doctor and they can’t do anything for you, or they give you some medications that aren’t helping. There’s something about the interior experience in life that we need to tune in to so we can care for ourselves more effectively.  So we can help our doctor support us more effectively.

There are stress tests. There’s something called the Perceived Stress Scale, PSS, and you can look it up online. That might be helpful, but really I think it’s more of an internal experience that is more accurate. Notice how life is going and if it’s going south. It’s not always something external, like bankruptcy or something. Sometimes something internal may be a little shaky, or off.

To put it in a few words, just pay attention to your life a bit more and notice what’s there, what’s going on, and take it in.

 

LifeBalance: To piggyback on that question, it seems like sometimes stress sneaks up on us, and we don’t realize we’re stressed until we’re way overwhelmed and it’s kind of gotten out of hand. I’m wondering if you can speak to the physical and mental signs we can look for to better recognize when stress is affecting us.

Brant: Yeah, I mentioned a couple but I think a real difficult one is reactivity. When we react to those around us, whether workmates or family, and we react in a way where our trigger is a bit more touchy than usual and it goes on that way for a while. That’s really a practical measure of the dark side of stress in life. Stress is a normal part of life, essential really.  How we meet it is what can be enhanced through practice.

Look at the enjoyment of life; the enjoyment of foods, hobbies, friends. If that wanes and it seems to be illusive, if you’re wanting to comfort yourself with more and more ice cream or cookies or unhealthy activities whatever they might be then maybe there’s something going on inside causing you to long for comfort. But those are temporary measures that aren’t doing it for you, and are even distancing you from being able to take care of yourself.

I think it’s very clear that our body talks to us, tells us the state of things. Many of the aches and pains in the body are telling us there’s something going on here that we need to take care of. Maybe it’s a muscle ache, or something that’s not an overwhelming pain or injury, and you feel it’s not worth seeing the doctor. Like a tensing in the shoulders or a clenching in the gut, or those sorts of small things that are uncomfortable. It’s almost like the body is tapping us on the shoulder, saying, “Hey, wake up! I need to be taken care of.” Minor physical aches and pains, appetite changes, etc. — those can be indicators.

Students come in with all kinds of things; maybe just an intuitive sense of anxiety about the world. It might be the heightened anxiety about politics, or family affairs, and it may appear from your perspective that something is going on out there, but maybe it really is going on inside of you.

If the world seems to be overwhelming for long periods of time, even though you’re still functioning, and other folks don’t see it as so overwhelming, maybe it’s more on the inside and you’re filtering what occurs in a certain way, a stress-filled way that may not have an external source.

 

LifeBalance: Let’s say we’re at work or home and a super frustrating, stressful situation arises. What do you think are the best in-the-moment stress management tactics?

Brant: I think a lot of folks ask that. As a culture we long to have the quick fix. I sort of have that as well. We all want to have something that takes care of things in the moment. But effectively working with stress is a long-term investment. It’s kind of like the flu shot for heart, mind, and body. It’s not so much a quick fix.

But I would say, if there’s some ability to step back just for a moment, that can help. Let’s say there’s a tense situation, an argument that’s starting, and you find some ability to step back just briefly and notice that argument beginning. Maybe it’s familiar; maybe this is a pattern, like, say arguing with a spouse. If you can step back, instead of doing the same old thing, try something else. Instead of saying, “You shouldn’t do that”, maybe instead, ask a question like, “I’d like to know why you do that?” That’s one thing. A behavioral shift may be helpful.

If you’re in a confrontation, just pause and try to find some way to offer a kindness, like a comment of gratitude. Try to offer something genuine, kind, and generous, without an expectation that the person you’re in a confrontation with will do anything better or worse. That simple act can sometimes shift things altogether. How you see the situation may be altered for the better.

In high stress occupations, say ambulance drivers or police officers or even in the military, there’s something called “tactical breathing”. It’s not something that can be done only once in a while. It requires practice this so that long-term, they develop an ability to use it.

Say you’re about to go into a tough situation, just notice your breathing. Let your exhales be a little bit longer than your inhales. If you count, one thousand one, one thousand two…count the inhales and exhales, and let your exhales be a count longer.

This tactical breathing influences the physiology of the body. It can temporarily moderate stress physiology and the heart rate. It’s something that has to be practiced like everything else. If you’re going to go out and lift 50 pounds, it’s probably good for you to practice picking up 50lb weights.

 

 

LifeBalance: We know your clinic focuses on yoga and mindfulness as regular stress management tactics. Can you give us your quick definition of mindfulness and mindfulness-based stress reduction?

Brant: So, the term mindfulness is basically just the quality of attentive awareness of life. To the aspects of tension or ease, strengths or weakness, sadness or joy, just a quality of attentive awareness, or presence, to the experience of life right now.

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is actually a training that was developed about 30 years ago at Massachusetts General Hospital, and then subsequently at UMass Medical School, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It’s an 8-week training that helps people remember their inherent capacity for awareness in everyday life.

How we eat, how we walk, how we speak and listen and sit, how we attend to life: The goal is to bring that quality of awareness to life as a practice. It’s a curriculum that’s very well studied. It’s one of the most studied forms of mindfulness training on the planet at this point in time. It’s been researched with very good outcomes in programs around the world in many ways; medically, psycho-therapeutically, athletically, and on and on.

 

LifeBalance: What do you think is so effective about yoga when it comes to stress management?

Brant: My sense is that a quality of bringing attentive awareness to the experience of movement and the experience of ease is at the heart of the effectiveness of yoga, mindfulness practice, Qigong (pronounced “chee-gung”), and many other such practices.

For mindfulness training, we may practice how we eat or listen, but in my mindful yoga class, it’s movement with awareness, paying attention to sensations of movement, the aches and pains and pleasures, the strain and the ease. We try to sculpt the ability to be present in the body. It’s being “embodied” on purpose, with a degree of awareness. We offer ourselves to the experience of being alive in movement.

 

 

LifeBalance: And why is mindfulness so effective?

Brant: I think we get a little bit caught up in labels for mindfulness and yoga.

Really, there’s a wonderful poet, my favorite these days, David Whyte. He was having some challenges in life, and was really stressed and burnt out, like many people in my trainings.

He didn’t know what to do and he went to a Benedictine monk named Brother David. He said, “I’m burnt out. Life doesn’t seem to hold the meaning for me. I want to do my work but I’m just fried. What do I do?”

And Brother David said, “Look, we think that when we get like this, that relaxation or vacation is the remedy. Forget all that. The remedy for difficulties in life is to live a full-hearted life, to offer yourself to life in an open way.”

I think that what the MBSR program does, is it invites us to meet life with an openness and to lean into life in a really full way. The research in my clinic and around the world shows that levels of depression, anxiety, and chronic pain diminish with MBSR.

I’ll quote one of my dear students, who had tremendous loss; she lost a child. She was hesitant to slow down and sit quietly because the memory of it all was so traumatic. But she said, “I’m so glad I did this, learned to sit in the stillness, because I found myself and I hadn’t found myself for years. I came home, and I found myself.”

I think that’s the heart of this. It’s not a relaxation program. It’s not something fancy. It’s coming home to an experience of life right now and working with what you encounter. It’s very helpful.

We have so much scientific evidence that it’s effective and true. This mode of waking up what’s gone to sleep inside of us is so very effective for many of the aches, pains, and suffering that we encounter in life.

 

 

LifeBalance: Here in our office, we try to practice mindfulness. But when I first heard about meditation as stress relief, it seemed a little far out there for me. I thought of meditation as something monks who are seeking enlightenment do, and not something for our every day. What would you say to those for whom meditation sounds a little daunting or unapproachable, or like it doesn’t have a fit in everyday life.

Brant: Well you know really, a quality of presence or mindfulness is part of who we are. We have ears and elbows, and we breathe, and we can see with our eyes. Some portion of us is capable of attentive awareness, and we do it all the time — we wouldn’t be able to function without some quality of awareness.

But we tend to cover it up with thought. We think, “I shouldn’t do this or I’m worried about that.”  We cover it up, even though that awareness is always there. So these practices where you sit quietly, or you practice yoga, these are all just ways of peeling back those layers of fussiness, or layers of adulthood and worry.

Children are the best teachers in the world – they are fully present, and they are just letting it all in. We can’t all be childish like that, but we can be childlike. If we can remember that quality of letting the world in, along with our adult ability to pay the bills and go to work, we can be mindful every day.

If we cultivate that and practice it, at least a few minutes a day…it may be meditating, it may be yoga, or it may be just being aware as you walk down the hall to the drinking fountain. You can be fully present in that moment, paying attention to the shifting pressure on the soles of your feet, or the taste and coolness of the water from the drinking fountain.

These are just moments of presence that we practice on purpose. They’re not fancy, and you don’t have to shave your head and be a monk. It’s just daily life with a bit more presence.

MBSR training, specifically, is very practical. It’s very applicable to North American daily life. It’s about how we bring, in a formal way, this quality to our lives.

I trained the Bend [Oregon] Fire Department this summer, about 70 people. For just two hours each, all we did was practice very simple things they could take with them; mindful pause, mindful movement, body awareness, attention to the breath. There’s an app – Headspace — that they wanted us to introduce so that on a daily basis, for five or ten minutes for a few weeks, they could try it out and see if it makes a difference in their life. By and large, folks wanted to do that and wanted to keep doing it: just a few minutes of practicing being present on purpose to peel back those layers of thought and find out what’s there.

We find that there’s some transformation that occurs after about 3-4 weeks of practice on a daily basis. Folks realize “Oh, that’s a region in me I can work with. I want to do this, because I feel better when I do.”

I call it flossing and brushing for heart, mind, and body. Everybody flosses and brushes, and I think in the future, we’ll be practicing mindfulness in some way, because it’s just a practical way of living a healthier, better life. The way we have healthier teeth and gums by flossing and brushing, we can be healthier and more capable of living life in a less disturbed way if we sit quietly periodically or pay attention as we move. We start to notice when we get reactive. It’s a practice.

 

 

LifeBalance: I’ve talked to some people who tried meditating once or twice and weren’t feeling it or seeing the benefits. What would you say to folks who’ve tried meditation or mindfulness practices, but couldn’t really get into it? I’m wondering if it’s a question of the right approach, or trying different tactics or programs. It seems hard initially to see the impact right away.

Brant: One thing is, they’re not alone. Here’s the bottom line: When we sit quietly, we notice the mind is busy, so we feel like we failed. But really all we’re doing is noticing that our mind is busy. And that’s the homework right there, to notice it and be patient in the face of a busy mind or wanting to get up and move. But you’re practicing patience. That busyness – that’s your life. Can you have some compassion for it, and sit quietly as you meet that part of your life?

But let me also say that there are many modes of practice. It could be a sitting practice, or a movement-based one like yoga and qigong. It could be prayer; prayer is a cousin to meditative practice.

Often, we have a sport we really love and we really feel at home doing, like skiing down a ski slope. Part of the reason we love it is because we bring a quality of attentive presence to it. The good thing about practicing mindfulness each day is you don’t have to have a ski slope or a swimming pool or anything special like that, but you can experience some of the same benefits.

And you should still do those things you love! But the encouragement is there are many modes of attentive presence, of mindfulness. If you feel like you aren’t doing it right, my job in my trainings is to say “just notice that thought, don’t take it too seriously, and come back and practice a bit more”. See what happens over 10 days as you sit there with that thought, and I can almost categorically say that if you do that for a week or two, something will change with your relationship to that thought. It won’t feel as strong.

In the same vein, this is very analogous to going to the gym. If we get in the gym and we have a 30lb barbell and we just do curls for 10 minutes a day for 2 months, what’s going to happen to our biceps? They’ll get bigger and stronger.

We have excellent evidence now, through MRI studies of the brain, that when we sit quietly and notice our fussy thoughts, and we have some compassion for them, and notice our breath; when we do this over and over, it’s almost like doing reps on a barbell. What happens is after a few months of practice, MRI studies show that the areas of the brain that have to do with mental focus and attentive presence literally grow, just like a bicep muscle.

We also find that that little part of the brain called the amygdala, which is like the smoke detector in our brains for getting stressed out, literally shrinks.

Like going to the gym, it can sometimes be kinda boring or difficult. That’s the nature of this practice. At times, it can be that way. But after a while, it can become something we enjoy or that at least feels helpful, like flossing and brushing. So we do it because it’s helpful for us. We know it’s helpful for us to get exercise, and we know it’s helpful for us to soften the busyness of an active mind, and we see the results in MRI studies of all things. Our brain literally changes.

 

 

LifeBalance: Outside of meditation, what are some other ways we can use mindfulness in our every day to reduce feelings of stress or anxiety?

Brant: In the spirit of having this not necessarily be a quick fix, but a practice that will, over days and weeks, be very fruitful, let’s say everybody drinks a cup of coffee or tea. When you do that, stop multitasking and just for 5 minutes, pay attention to that beverage. Notice the surface of the cup, the foam, the color, the texture, the shape, and the aroma as you bring it near your nose. Is the cup warm or cool in your hands? Just bring awareness for a couple of minutes to the experience of having your coffee or tea without doing eight other things at once. Just give that coffee your full attention without doing anything else.

Most of us go to work. Maybe, when you park your car, without rushing to get into the building (assuming you’re not late), as you come to stand, can you, just for a moment, just feel the sensations of the weight of your body and the soles of your feet. As you rest your hand on your car, is it cold, warm, or moist, or dry? As you walk in, can it be a quality of noticing the images in front of you, like the sidewalk, or the flowers nearby? For even 30 seconds or a minute, try walking with a quality of presence.

Little things like that throughout the day help us be present.

We all usually get a work break (hopefully). Is there some place you go that is quiet or where you won’t be disturbed? Just sit quietly and notice the sensations of the breath. Maybe it’s boring to sit quietly, or maybe it’s actually quite pleasant. Can it be a practice? Because over time, that builds. It builds those muscles, like going to the gym. Again, it’s like flossing for the heart, mind, and body to be a bit healthier.

 

LifeBalance: Tell us more about Yoga Hillsboro and the Stress Reduction Clinic. We figured we’d give you a chance to give your business a shout-out and what they might find when they come there.

Brant: In terms of the Stress Reduction Clinic and Yoga Hillsboro, there are two dimensions. Same location, two classrooms. I teach, oh I guess 90% of the classes, and have been here for 15 years, but really it’s a place where folks can come and find themselves a bit more directly. And define the heart and feeling of being alive and appreciating that, through meditation practice and yoga practice. There are other teachers here, teaching their yogas practices and there’s actually even a belly dancing teacher!

It’s really very community-oriented and family-oriented, but we draw students from Portland, Vancouver, the coast, Eugene; I even had a few students from Canada come take classes! But mostly it’s just folks in the area. Some of them have been students for 15 years, some for half that, and some are brand new. It’s sort of a community center in many ways. It’s a place where there’s an intention to be whole and healthy and take care of yourself and those around you.

 

To learn more about Yoga Hillsboro and the Stress Reduction Clinic, check out their website or visit their location in Hillsboro, Oregon. LifeBalance members save on classes, workshops, and series using this offer. 

Want to try guided meditations on your own? LifeBalance members save 25% on annual Calm memberships, and you can try the app for free for a week before you sign up.