Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

So mindfulness, as you know, is a word that's used universally. And I don't think people necessarily mean it the same way you might. I think a lot of people use it to mean paying attention and noticing the good stuff in life. So I'm interested in hearing from you how you define mindfulness.

Carl Jerome (00:15)

I think you're right. And I think mindfulness has become so broad in the common vocabulary that it's like natural foods. Mindfulness is actually this process of noticing that our mind has distracted us from what we're doing, taking us away into an old story about something that doesn't matter. We get in the shower and we're thinking about the to-do list and we don't even notice that we've been standing there for eight minutes without doing our washing. So mindfulness is just being present and doing what you're doing. And when you start applying that to your everyday life, it's monumentally important.

Brandon Gimbel (00:47)

We've talked about this at length before, and we've talked about Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has his brand of mindfulness training And one of the definitions of mindfulness that I like most and that I'm interested in your thoughts on is his, which is paying attention to what we're doing with intention.

Carl Jerome (01:04)

Yes. And that's great. And being mindful just means that we drive the car when we drive the car. We don't get distracted by the fact that we had an accident in this neighborhood three years ago, and now our stomach is churning. We come back to driving the car and we bring ourselves back to the present activity.

Brandon Gimbel (01:23)

Paying attention to what we're doing.

Carl Jerome (01:24)

Yeah, deliberately and intentionally.

Brandon Gimbel (01:26)

I have over time melded the view of mindfulness that I learned largely from you with a more clinical lens. And so I will think about the thoughts that we're regularly being inundated with by these brains up here as not necessarily being helpful, and using the focal point of our breath to bring our attention back to what we're doing.

Carl Jerome (01:51)

Yeah, well, that's the whole key. We just keep coming back. People think they should empty their minds and that's not possible. We keep bringing ourselves back and eventually we train our mind to stay where we tell it. And then the stress and the anxiety goes away.