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Using Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves
We spend so much of our lives planning for the future or replaying the past that we miss the only moment we ever have, the present moment. It’s never the past or the future, those are just thoughts in our head; it’s only ever right now. The present moment is the only moment we can ever truly experience real joy or connect deeply with others.
We spend so much of our lives planning for the future or replaying the past that we miss the only moment we ever have, the present moment. It’s never the past or the future, those are just thoughts in our head; it’s only ever right now. The present moment is the only moment we can ever truly experience real joy or connect deeply with others.
Some of us tend to spend a lot of time going over events that happened in the past. We may replay difficult conversations or interactions that happened in our personal or professional relationships. Or we may ruminate on our perceived failures, whether they be large or small, at home or at school or work. We can also become preoccupied by how we feel others have failed us or on other hardships we have endured such as divorces, illnesses, and deaths. We begin to feel defined by our pasts and we carry the weight of them with us.
Many of us also worry about problems that never happen and plan for futures that end up very different from how we had originally planned. The difficult things that do happen in our lives we usually don’t anticipate. When we spend so much of our time worrying and planning our futures, we miss out on what is happening right now. We develop strong habits of compulsively inhabiting hypothetical futures and so when that future comes, we automatically start living for the next future and so on and so forth until our lives pass us by.
Practicing mindfulness brings us back to the present moment where our true power lies.
One of my favorite sayings is that our mind is a wonderful servant but a poor master. Our minds produce thoughts like our mouths produce saliva. It’s nothing personal or necessarily wrong with us, it’s just what minds do. Practicing mindfulness strengthens our ability to see our thinking for what it is: a powerful tool that we employ when it is helpful and let go of when it is not. Mindfulness also helps us manage strong emotions as well as physical pain.
The practice of mindfulness is returning, time and time again, to the present moment. We do this in a relaxed, kind, and gentle way, releasing any judgments or analyses of how we are doing or what is happening in the present moment. If there is pain, suffering, shame, anxiety, depression, stress, overwhelm, conflict, or trauma, we simply show up in a kind and loving way.
We can practice mindfulness informally throughout our day or through formal meditation, which is often sitting meditation but can also be walking or other movement meditations. The informal practice of mindfulness consists of building awareness around when our attention has left the present moment (often to the past or the future) and once we become aware, returning back to now.
There are numerous anchors to the present moment that we can always return to. One is the sensation of our breath in our bodies, typically where our breath feels the most pleasant. We are not thinking about breathing, we are feeling our breath in our abdomen as it rises and falls, or in our chest as it expands and contracts, or even as the air moves in and out of our nostrils. Other anchors include our other senses perceptions, which only happen in the present moment. You can feel the surfaces you are sitting, standing or lying upon, listen to the sounds around you or feel the wind on your face.
The formal practice of meditation is often done sitting. Many people like to begin meditating with guided meditations but you don’t need to. Starting a meditation practice can be as simple as setting a timer for five minutes, bringing your attention to the feeling of your breath in your body, noticing when your attention wanders, and returning to your breath. Even though we are sitting, our mind is often in other places and mindful meditation brings our mind back into union with our body. Every time you return to the present moment you strengthen your ability to do so in the future.
Fully inhabiting the present moment takes practice but ultimately allows us to release what doesn’t serve us and show up for ourselves and others in an honest, powerful, and loving way.
Rishab Gupta is a third year resident in psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. He is also enrolled in a PhD in Neural and Behavioral Sciences at Downstate. He graduated from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi in 2008. Being extremely interested in understanding human behavior since his medical school days, he joined Psychiatry residency at AIIMS in 2009. After finishing his training, he continued to work in the Department of Psychiatry at AIIMS as a trained psychiatrist. He is very passionate about academics and loves teaching and pursuing clinical research. He has presented his work at multiple national and international platforms and published numerous papers in different domains of psychiatry. Because of his unquenched thirst for learning he joined SUNY Downstate Medical Center as a Psychiatry resident in 2016. After graduating, he plans to pursue fellowship in Neuropsychiatry because of his active interest in disorders lying at the interface of Neurology and Psychiatry. He aims to be an academician and pursue research into the neurobiology of frontotemporal dementia, and psychotic disorder. When he is not in the clinic or learning psychiatry, he enjoys reading trivia, making jokes, doing social networking, trekking, listening to Punjabi music, and bingeing on various TV shows and movies.
Nwayieze Ndukwe
Dr.Nwayieze C. Ndukwe, MD, MPH, is a psychiatrist based in New York and New Jersey who enjoys exploring the interesection of mental health and popular culture. Dr.Ndukwe serves a associate professor at Mount Sinai Hospital systems in New York City and Mountainside Hospital in Montclair. Dr.Ndukwe was trained at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and is board certified in Psychiatry by the ABPN. Dr.Ndukwe also holds a Master's in Degree in Public Health from Rutgers University.
Candace Good
Dr. Good specializes in college mental health as a staff psychiatrist at Penn State Counseling and Psychological Services. She is also the founder of Sig: Wellness, LLC, an integrative psychiatry practice in State College, PA. Her office includes a mind-body studio to encourage yoga, meditation, and other healing arts for stress management. The space serves as an incubator for other female wellness practitioners to grow their presence in the community. Dr. Good welcomes freelance writing and editing projects relevant to her specialty and blogs at https://howtoshrinkashrink.com.
Dr. Good is board-certified in both general and child & adolescent psychiatry. She maintains a clinical faculty appointment with the Penn State College of Medicine, where she also completed her medical degree and residency training. Over the past 15 years, her clinical work has included care of families in both rural and underserved communities as well as academic settings. Administrative roles have included medical director at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic Center for Children and Families, vice president of Sunpointe Health, and both unit director of behavioral health services and department chair of psychiatry at the Mount Nittany Medical Center. In 2017, she was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Pennsylvania Medical Society (PAMED) and was recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP).
Dr. Good enjoys knitting and spending time with her family, especially her daughter and rescue hounds, Abbott and Flip.
Dr. Chepke attended NYU School of Medicine and completed psychiatry residency at Duke University, where he also completed undergraduate studies. He is Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He currently has a private practice in Huntersville, NC, serves as medical director for a level 3 residential adolescent treatment facility, and is an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Medical School at the Charlotte Campus.
Dr. Chepke has particular interests in treatment-resistant/severe persistent mental illness, as well as patients with both psychiatric and neurological disorders. He is a member of the CURESZ Foundation Clozapine Experts Panel and Tardive Dyskinesia Experts Panel, as well as a member of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. He also emphasizes engaging his patients in psychotherapy and strongly encouraging integrative approaches including physical health and wellness through exercise and dietary modification and supplementation. Dr. Chepke’s research interests are in neuropsychiatry and drug metabolism/interactions and is currently a principal investigator for several clinical trials.
Nishi Bhopal, MD is Board Certified in Psychiatry, Sleep Medicine, and Integrative Holistic Medicine. She grew up in Vancouver and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia. Her interest in medicine and love of travel took her halfway across the globe where she graduated with a degree in medicine from the National University of Ireland, University College Cork School of Medicine. She went on to complete her Psychiatric residency training at Henry Ford Hospital/Wayne State University and then a fellowship in Sleep Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. She now calls the Bay Area home and practices outpatient psychiatry in San Francisco. Dr. Bhopal is passionate about helping her patients find health and wellbeing through a combination of modern medical science and the wisdom of traditional eastern practices.
Dr. Nissa Perez completed her undergraduate work in psychobiology at UCLA and then obtained her medical degree from University of Southern California. She completed residency at UCLA San Fernando Valley Psychiatry Training Program and is a Board Certified Psychiatrist. She worked for one year as an attending in her residency program and has been in private practice for the last four and a half years, now in San Jose, CA. She incorporates psychopharmacology and psychotherapy into her practice and draws from multiple therapeutic modalities, primarily psychodynamic and mindfulness, but also incorporates cognitive behavioral therapy.
Dr. Perez is also an avid meditator and yogi. She meditates daily, regularly practices yoga and has attended multiple silent meditation retreats. She blogs at AMindfulMD.com.
Dr. Leslie Walker obtained her MD and MS (Neuroscience) degrees from the University of Michigan. She finished residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2000 and has been in solo practice since then, first in Baltimore and then in Cleveland. She has particular interests in treating women as well as physicians, and for five years served part-time as the psychiatrist for the Women's Trauma Treatment Program at the Cleveland VA Hospital. She enjoys teaching residents and medical students at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and she speaks nationally to physicians on psychiatric topics, work/family balance, resilience, and self-care. She is married to an academic neurologist and has one child in college and one in graduate school, making her officially an empty nester! Next goals: starting a blog and publishing a book.
Erik Messamore, MD, PhD is an expert in the fields of psychopharmacology, complex mood disorders, psychosis and schizophrenia.
He earned a PhD in neuropharmacology from Southern Illinois University and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. He received his Medical Degree from the University of Illinois and completed a residency in Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
His current research is focused on characterizing the blood flow response to niacin among people with schizophrenia. This research may ultimately improve our ability to detect schizophrenia at its very early stages and to categorize psychiatric illness along physiological lines.
He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) in Rootstown, Ohio. He is also the Medical Director of NEOMED’s Best Practices in Schizophrenia Treatment (BeST) Center.
He is a seasoned clinician and accomplished scientist, with a passion for improving the lives of those affected by mental illness.