Caitlin Whyte (Host): This is Community Connect presented by TGH. I'm Caitlin Whyte. Joining me is Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin, an integrative arts specialist with the Integrative Medicine and Arts Program at Tampa General Hospital. Danielle, welcome. I am so excited to get into this topic today. Thank you so much for being on the show. To start us off, can you tell us what is MBSR?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: MBSR stands for mindfulness-based stress reduction. It's an eight-week course that basically makes meditation a muscle memory. That's the way I think about it. If you want to learn a new skill, you have to sit down and practice and you give yourself grace. Usually like if you want to learn a new instrument, you would give yourself grace to sit down and practice and not be great. But then, after a while of sitting down and practicing, you start to get into a little bit of a flow, a little bit of where you sit down and say, "Okay, I know exactly what to do." I don't have to think about it so much. That's what we're trying to establish in the mindfulness-based stress reduction course is that, by the end of the eight weeks, you can sit down and meditate and feel like, "I know exactly what to do. I don't have to think about it so much. This has become a bit of a muscle memory, a bit of an internal knowing." And that's what I love about the course, is that it becomes really just natural and part of our lives. 

Host: I love that. That internal knowing is such a good phrase. Well, you spoke on it already, but what are some of the benefits of MBSR?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: Oh my gosh, there are so many benefits. And actually, I encourage people to go ahead and google mindfulness, meditation, and health benefits that you are interested in, like cardiovascular well-being and neurologic well-being and whatever. There are so many studies now. We live in a pretty cool time that this particular practice, mindfulness meditation, has been studied extensively. So, there are actual physiological benefits.

The one that I think is amazing is that there's a study that shows that our brain cells actually regrow when we meditate. So, we are anti-aging our brain when we do these practices, which I think is amazing and really easy. That's a really easy medicine to incorporate into our daily lives. But at the really basic level, you also start to respond to stress a little bit differently. That's not to say that if a car is coming toward you, that you don't jump out of the way. Our automatic stress response is still very healthy.

But let's say somebody cuts you off in traffic, we start to reflect on how our body responds naturally, habitually, to stress. And we start to be able to have a little bit of reflection and distance and say, "Okay. Do I really need my body to go into the actual fight or flight response, because I got a little annoyed by somebody? Or can I manage this?" And then, that ripples out through the day. You know how sometimes you have those mornings that just nothing seems to go right. And that can end up barreling through the day and causing everything to get a little bit more stressful and worse. And then, we create indigestion and muscle tension, and then the body is inflamed. So, this is a way of sort of noticing stress responses and causing a little bit of an awareness, a detachment, a way to reflect and not allow every stressor to affect the body.

Host: You know, we've been talking a lot about meditation and mindfulness already in this episode, but I'd love to know, can you break it down for us? What exactly does mindfulness mean?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: Well, Jon Kabat-Zinn was the man that made this practice a mainstream course, and he defines mindfulness as awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. Now, I think a really basic definition is that we know mindfulness. Mindfulness is watching a sunset. Mindfulness is looking at a sweetheart's face and just like watching them with awe in the present moment. Mindfulness is taking a bite of food that really tastes good and savoring it for a moment or, you know, that first sip of tea or coffee in the morning, where if you can allow yourself to just like enjoy.

I think mindfulness is really innate. It's returning to our senses. And have you ever heard that saying, "That person was out of their senses"? We're not ourselves when we're out of our senses. So, truly, mindfulness is returning to ourselves.

Host: Wonderful. Well, what would you say then are the differences between MBSR and mindfulness?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: MBSR is a mindfulness course. So, there isn't really a difference, except that we do more formal practices to try to train the brain to recognize mindful moments throughout life. So in the MBSR course, we do a mindful eating practice where we actually pay attention and savor a piece of food and explain it and see how the body knows how to just eat naturally and how little attention we typically give to that. We do a lot of sitting meditation where it's guided by me. There's another teacher in the Tampa General program. And we guide through all of the senses and really hyperfocus on each of the senses. We do a body scan that goes through all the parts of the body, noticing really all the parts of the body that function absolutely perfectly every day. It's kind of funny how we don't notice a part of the body a lot of times unless it's in dysfunction, unless it's aching or uncomfortable. We do these body scans. We do some really gentle yoga. I feel like the program is accessible to all capabilities, and we are really mindful of trying to modify the practices to suit any body issue or diagnosis even.

Host: Well, how can we incorporate mindfulness practices in our day to day lives?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: That's a really great question and very important. I honestly feel like everybody would be a happier, calmer person if they practice mindfulness every day. I think it could make the world better, truthfully. It's simple, but it does have to be a practice. It's just like potentially doing a gratitude practice, where the more often you make it a habit, where you force yourself to make it a habit, then it becomes more second nature. Eventually, you start to notice things that you're grateful for.

It's similar to that, where if every day, one thing you do is first thing in the morning, maybe tune into the body before you actually get out of bed. Tune into the breath. Maybe sit up slowly, do a little bit of a stretch before you even put your feet on the ground. That's one thing. You can savor the coffee or the tea first thing in the morning and really just watch the steam. Feel the sensation as you swallow. Enjoy that moment. I really recommend not going to the phones the first thing in the day. But, you know, we have things to do. But if you can at least have a 30-second moment of stillness first thing in the day, that can really set a pattern of habit that will ripple throughout the day. And something that I do, I also do patient care at Tampa General Hospital where I teach stress management practices, and I do provide music therapy at the bedside.

One thing that I do is between each patient, I pause at the door and I just align my body. You know, I stand as if I'm trying to stack my ankles over my feet, my, you know, knees over my ankles, my hips over my knees, I sort of go up the body in a relaxed alignment. I try to relax the shoulders, and then I go into the patient room. That's something anybody could do while you're waiting in line, if you're standing at the stove to cook dinner. You know, just sort of tune into the body. There's so often we stand kind of out of alignment, hips out of alignment. And then, we have a lot of aches and pains in the body. If you just once a day, tune into the body, how it's positioned and try to find the centered alignment for your body, that's a simple practice of tuning in to yourself.

Host: Well, to wrap up our episode today, Danielle, would you mind guiding us through a mindfulness meditation please?

Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin: Yeah, I would love to. Okay. So, finding yourself in a seated position where you can sort of tilt the pelvis forward and create a straight line from the tailbone up to the top of the head, but not with stiffness, allowing some softening in the shoulders and bringing the eyes to a close. And if you can't bring the eyes to a close, you're welcome to just sort of bring a soft gaze.

Tuning into the body just at this moment, any subtle vibrations or sensations, any subtle feelings of tension, just sort of observing how the body is at this moment, and then noticing the breathing, noticing the sense of the cool air going in the sinuses, into the lungs, and then warm air coming back out.

Noticing the muscles that simply needed to breathe. So much of the body is incorporated in this breathing that we've been doing since our very first day.

Not needing to change the breath, just simply observing how the body is breathed throughout the day.

Perhaps scanning the body and noticing a part of the body that feels relatively at ease or neutral, maybe the hands, the fingertips. And seeing if you can bring some really attentive awareness to the fingertips. You might notice a subtle vibration that comes from the fingertips. Maybe a temperature, coolness of the air flow, or maybe you're touching a fabric and you can feel the texture of the fabric.

Expanding out perhaps to sound, noticing the sounds around you in your environment. Perhaps you can even hear the sounds in my environment.

Sound is amazing because it gives us a sense of direction of where a sound is coming from, distance. And we can sort of map out the sounds around us and get a sense of our position within sounds, a sense of safety, seeing how far you can expand your sense of sound, reception out, your sense of hearing perhaps outside of your home, or your environment that you're in, and out into the neighborhood around it.

Observing with curiosity, and whatever comes up, comes up. Not overanalyzing any thoughts that pop in, but simply noticing when a thought pops in and saying, "Okay, not right now, and going back to a focus of what's here and now in this present moment."

Something interesting about sound is that it's a vibration that travels, and you might feel a vibration that is a sound. Maybe a car down the road that rumbles through the floor. Maybe the air conditioning. You can hear the sound and also sort of feel the vibration of the movement.

And again, if the mind wanders, that's natural. That's the way we're designed. We just try to recognize where the mind goes. Perhaps note, "Okay. I'm planning again." And then, come back to a focus of something here in this present moment of your choice. So far, we had the breath, sensations in the body, and sound.

And again, sometimes the mind will be really active, and that is okay. We're trying not to judge the mind, but it might be helpful on those days to simply note where the mind is always going, where the mind returns, to planning, judging, re-enacting, whatever it is, you can simply say, "Oh, that's what I'm doing again." That's okay. Coming back to the breath, to the body, to the sounds and sensations of my surroundings.

And occasionally, we get a brief moment of stillness. And if you get that, hold onto it as if you're savoring it. And returning to the breath, perhaps inviting a bit of wakefulness back to the breath, a bit of a fuller breath, a bit of wakefulness back to the eyes, a bit of movement back to the hands and feet, and returning back to each other.

Host: That has been Danielle DeCosmo Goodwin. For more information, please visit tgh.org/ mbsr. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe, and follow Community Connect presented by TGH on your favorite podcast platform. I'm Caitlin Whyte. And this is Community Connect, presented by TGH. Thanks for listening.