Feb. 20, 2024

Living the dream with mindfulness Ninja expert Ruth Fearnow

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Dive into the transformative world of therapeutic mindfulness with Ruth Fearnow, a trauma therapist and EMDR-certified expert who unveils the power of mindfulness beyond mere relaxation. In this riveting episode of 'Living the Dream with Curveball,' Ruth shares her journey from the Shaolin foothills to the therapist's chair, offering listeners a treasure trove of strategies to not just cope, but truly heal emotional pain. Discover how to become a 'mindfulness ninja' and harness the full potential of your mind for profound healing.
www.ruthfearnow.com

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the Dream podcast with curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve, cheat, cheat.

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> Speaker A>Welcome to the living the dream with curveball podcast, a, uh, show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today I am joined by mindfulness expert Ruth fear. Now, Ruth says you can do more with your mindfulness and meditation than just relax and calm down. And today she's going to show us how to be mindfulness ninjas. So, Ruth, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Speaker B>You are very welcome. Thanks for having me.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Speaker B>Okay. I am a trauma therapist.

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> Speaker B>I'm EMDR certified. Um, I started doing that, um, over a decade ago. But a decade before that, I started a serious meditation practice that, um, started when I was. Well, I visited Shaolin, China, and was studying kung fu and qigong.

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> Speaker B>And, um, we were off the grid at the base of the himalayas. No electricity, no running water.

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> Speaker B>I was there for over a month, and, um, I started getting serious. That was time. I was getting serious about my meditation practice. Spent a lot of time, um, reading about it, trying it, learning how to meditate. And then I came home and I kept doing that.

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> Speaker B>Uh, fast forward ten years later, when I'm graduating with my degree as a therapist and I'm an intern, and I start learning that people, all the mindfulness we're being taught to teach our clients ways to, um, calm the emotions, ways to regulate our emotions, using some of these mindfulness tools. And I fell into that naturally because I've been doing, um, meditation guided visualizations, all these different things already that I started using some of those with my clients. And then I started seeing that some people, when they learn a way to calm their emotions and they haven't felt calm or peaceful for months, maybe years, they're so amazed. It's so powerful, and it is. These are wonderful techniques, but there are people that that's the only thing they'll use to respond to negative emotions.

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> Speaker B>And so when you have a bad emotion and you're okay, let me calm down, let me visualize the beach, let me do all these things, and they start pushing them down and never take time out to, um, be with those, then it becomes a new way to avoid and suppress and long term, that becomes harmful.

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> Speaker B>So that's what kind of led me down this path, um, of what I call therapeutic mindfulness. Because the irony is, all these wonderful tools that are so good for our brain and mental health, when we're feeling really bad, we can use mindfulness to heal it, rather than, uh, try to make ourselves feel good at the expense of our painful parts being heard. So you can actually heal that stuff.

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> Speaker B>And a lot of people can do this work without me. So that is how I went from not even being a therapist to writing this book about therapeutic mindfulness.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, before we talk about your book, give us some strategies that people use to cope with pain.

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> Speaker B>Sure. Um, so coping skills can go anywhere from unhealthy strategies, um, drug use, sex, trying to fix everyone else's problems but your own, becoming a workaholic. Um, just spending massive amounts of time on social media. Um, those would be unhealthy coping skills. And then you could have better or even healthy coping skills, like taking care of yourself, nature walks, social time, um, deep breathing exercises, visualizations, doing things you enjoy, which for some people is cooking, cleaning, gardening, sports, working out, um, going to church, reading things that are good for your mind and your heart. Um, there's so many ways that we can cope and deal with feelings. Um, and these are generally things to make us feel better and help us. I don't see a whole lot of skills that people know how to do to actually process or deal with the feelings. But some people that are able to be authentic and have intimate relationships are able to share with a good friend and be validated and be open and authentic and vulnerable about it and with the right person, that can help process and work through some of the feelings that you have. So, as you can see, there is a wide range, anywhere from heavy drug addiction to sharing with a friend and spending time in nature and everything in between that we use to kind of cope with what comes up.

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> Speaker A>Well, I guess you can break it down for the listeners and explain to them what the difference between mindfulness and therapeutic mindfulness is. So give us the definition of both of them.

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> Speaker B>Yeah, I can do that. So, mindfulness has two components. Mindfulness is non judgmental, focused attention. So when you focus attention on something, if you're really super focused on something you're seeing and you hate it, I'm super focused on the snow and I hate the winter. And this sucks. You're not mindful even though you're focused because there's a lot of judgment in there, right. So you need to have non judgment as part of your focused attention.

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> Speaker B>And so, uh, if you learn about mindfulness, there's a lot of ways that we focus the attention without judgment, and that could be watching how you breathe without trying to change it or make any shifts or you could do a change, but not judging what's happening, whether it goes well or not, you're just watching the breath, observing the body. Um, there are other exercises that are really, um, commonly taught, like doing mindfulness while sipping a cup of tea, um, or really doing it while eating a single raisin. And that exercise focuses on so many aspects that you're hyper focused on this raisin, and it teaches that skill. So there are mindfulness teachers that show all kinds of ways to do this, but you can really do just about anything mindfully. You can mow the lawn mindfully as long as you are focused on your task or focused on a specific thing and have complete non judgment as you're observing. When you're in non judgment, you get into this observer mode that you just see what's happening and there's no judgment or commentary about it. And, um, there's a lot that's really good about that. So there's so many ways to do mindfulness because you can do it on anything, but those are where we usually start is the breath, maybe body scan, or on simple tasks. Now, what happens when we start to feel, say you feel anxious and you're like, okay, let me do a visualization to try and not feel anxious, and you just, um, try to force it away because you feel it looming. In my opinion, when that happens, you are no longer truly mindful because you're judging that anxiety as being bad or frightening and too much for you. So therapeutic mindfulness uses mindfulness, which is non judgmental, focused attention. But instead of doing it on a sip of tea or your body, or the way the breeze feels or looking at a candle, instead of doing it on those things, you do it directly on feeling bad. And feelings, when we feel bad, they're in our body. So that's where you go.

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> Speaker B>If you do it on the thoughts that are driving the feeling bad, then it's very easy for a lot of people who are not heavily trained to get caught up in the story and you're no longer mindful. So the way to get into therapeutic mindfulness is going to be different because we're going to go into the anxiety that's sitting like a rock on my chest or into the sadness that's like a squeezing in my throat. And that's where we're going to apply the mindfulness principles.

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> Speaker A>Well, you talked about coping skills, the good ones and the bad ones. Do you feel like coping skills, uh, are the answer to emotional pain?

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> Speaker B>Absolutely not. 100% no. And that may be really controversial.

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> Speaker B>Coping skills have their place. They're so important and they're necessary, and we need good coping skills, but it's not the answer to emotional pain. So coping skills, in my opinion, are, uh, short term solutions. So if I'm in a grocery store and I want to cry, I could do it. It wouldn't ruin my life. But that's really not my preference to cry in front of a bunch of strangers.

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> Speaker B>So I might rather use a coping skill to kind of shove it down and then I'll get home. Or, um, if I get angry at someone in public and I want to punch them in the face, not a good thing to do. So I might use a coping skill, or more importantly, if something big happens, maybe something frightening, and I have a child with me, then I'm going to use a coping skill to control that feeling so I can be a stable source for that child.

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> Speaker B>I can be a source of stability for the child. So coping skills are useful. They're survival skills. They get us through the day.

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> Speaker B>Um, and when it comes to life, having, doing things that feel good and filling up the tank give us emotional and spiritual energy to do things. So those are really important too. I'll refer to those more as self care. So coping skills have value and we need them and we want them, but they are not the ultimate solution. They are short term. So say, let's go back to a scenario where something happens. Maybe I witness a really scary car accident and my child was with me and they're really freaked out and frightened. So I'm going to not worry about my reactions at the moment. I'm going to use a coping skill, focus in on her or him, my child, and make sure that the child feels stable and calm and I may have to soothe them. And when they're finally asleep and everything's okay, then I can go to a place by myself and say, okay, I had some feelings about this.

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> Speaker B>Let me go inside and do what I call a healing skill instead and actually work through and process the emotion so it no longer hurts me.

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> Speaker A>Is that what you call a mindfulness ninja? Give us a definition of a mindfulness ninja.

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> Speaker B>It's funny. I'll give another person, um, the way they put it as well.

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> Speaker B>Pema Shodran is a buddhist monk who refers to people who, people that meditate, the ones that go into the hard stuff, into the dark stuff with openness and curiosity and go into the shadow work, as some psychologists might say. She refers to them as spiritual warriors. Um, I like to use the term mindfulness ninja. If you think about, uh, if a mindfulness ninja is going to infiltrate government facilities like a spy and fight everybody, all while being mindful. Um, as fun as that sounds on a fantasy program, that's not it. But a mindfulness ninja takes mindfulness beyond what we've learned in the west of using it for calming, which, calming is great for our brain. We want to do this, but we're going to use it to go further and use mindfulness to infiltrate your mind and find things that are holding you back and directly go into them mindfully and heal them. That's a mindfulness ninja to me. It's a spiritual warrior.

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> Speaker A>Okay. Will it explain to us factors that can facilitate our healing and factors that can block us from healing?

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> Speaker B>Uh. Um. In my history as a therapist, I really was curious about this.

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> Speaker B>I would have one client that I could see, and they would get better and better, and then I could have another client and, uh, would never get better. And they say that a major healing factor is for the therapist to see our clients positively, kindly with what we call unconditional positive regard. And this is not just how we act. We're not just supposed to act like we see people well. We have to find a way in our own mind to truly see them with this unconditional positive regard. So I did this with this one particular client that I was just wondering. As far as I can tell, uh, after a year and a half of therapy, it seems like she was helped 0%. It seems like I was able to do nothing for her at that time. And so I was really curious about what is different between somebody that is healed in therapy and someone that is not. And as I continued to watch what happened with clients, I believe that I know what the answer is. And people who heal heal to the extent which they are able to internalize or internally accept the unconditional positive regard.

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> Speaker B>So if I am seeing somebody, I can see, in, uh, this case, her strength, her kindness, her goodness, all day long, and I can see her, and I can share that with her.

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> Speaker B>And she doesn't accept it. She judges herself. Then she might say, oh, well, the therapist is just being nice. Or if she believes I'm not being nice, I actually do see her that way.

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> Speaker B>She'll say, oh, well, she's just naive. If she really knew deep down who I was, she would hate me, too. So either we're being nice, or we're naive when we see them that way.

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> Speaker B>And that's a way that the story they can use to reject the unconditional positive guard the kindness and the goodness that we see in them.

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> Speaker B>So, essentially broken down, it's judgment that blocks the ability to heal. Judgment in all kinds of forms, but especially judgment against yourself, can block the healing. Um, and the opposite is true. Self compassion nurtures the healing it creates. It facilitates that healing.

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> Speaker B>So being able to absorb and integrate that self compassion internally, not just what you think, say to yourself, but what you feel and believe, the more and more and more that you do that and practice that, the more you heal. And therapeutic mindfulness is one method that starts to open up people to the ability to accept themselves.

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> Speaker A>Where you talk about how we can apply self compassion. Explain what you mean by that.

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> Speaker B>Well, um, one thing when it comes to applying self compassion, that's really important is that we do it when we're not happy with ourselves in some way. Right. So I think there's a lot out there about self compassion.

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> Speaker B>And here you should talk kindly to yourself, you should say nice things to yourself. And, um, while that's true, when we have a reaction we don't like or do something that we don't like, then it seems like a lot of that stuff goes out the window for people. So, having habits and ways to talk to ourself that take that into account.

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> Speaker B>I can make mistakes and still be worthy of love would be, for example, an affirmation that does this. Um, being able to do it, to apply self compassion and be kind to ourselves in the middle of something like that, of not being happy with how we reacted, that is something we need to develop. Um, the other thing is, it's really important for it just not to be words. We have to emotionally feel that. And so there are a lot of different methods about how to do that.

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> Speaker B>Um, in my book, therapeutic mindfulness, I have a chapter just on self compassion, and I share a mindset that helps to open up the concept of self compassion. But there are people that I see who aren't able to do it. So because we go into the body, into, uh, our feelings, with focused, non judgmental, focused attention, if you can't have compassion, you can start with non judgment. Okay.

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> Speaker B>And non judgment, it's not all the way there necessarily. We want to get a place where that compassion grows, but if we're judging, it's blocked completely.

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> Speaker B>So when we get into a non judgmental space and we're just open and curious with what happens with our feelings, then they start to shift and change and heal. And each time we do this practice and they heal, I have seen in my clients that they stop blaming themselves so much for having a negative feeling or a negative reaction, because when they heal them, they start to realize this is just a part of them that's hurt and it can be healed. And when it's healed, they go back to their loving self. And so that mindset and this practice starts to just being non judgmental with the healing and watching that work, um, gets people to be less judgmental toward themselves in general. And then over time, it becomes easier to actually feel self compassion, and that is powerfully healing.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, tell the listeners about your book, where they can get it from and what they can expect when they read it.

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> Speaker B>I can do that. Uh, my book is on a lot of the platforms, but Amazon, of course, is the easiest, Barnes and Noble, and then it's just published. Um, there'll be different platforms around the world, but I went through, um, draft to digital, a publisher that, um, puts it on a lot of platforms, but the easy one is Amazon.com. It's called therapeutic mindfulness, a healing skill, not a coping skill. And when you read it, it's going to give you a little bit of theories of the mind and how our brain works. So, you know, you're not crazy.

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> Speaker B>This is just what happens. Um, a theory about how the brain deals with emotions by default, and then it's going to introduce, here's another way to deal with emotions, how to actually work through and heal them.

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> Speaker B>Um, then I'll give you the process of therapeutic mindfulness, step by step.

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> Speaker B>And after that, it's going to go through troubleshooting tips, um, chapters to help you understand compassion, and how to apply those chapters on resistance, a chapter on positive psychology, and then the conclusion, really, um, the culmination of all of it, and the healing theory.

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> Speaker A>Well, tell us about any current or upcoming projects that you're working on that people need to know about.

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> Speaker B>The big thing I'm doing right now is just working on, um, speaking, teaching that more. I've done it locally, I've traveled a bit to teach it, and this book is pretty new. So, um, just expanding my opportunities to teach. I've done workshops with this, um, whenever I have the opportunity, which so far has been every time that I taught, I will take someone up to the front and I'll actually demonstrate it. So if somebody is doing a book club for self help books or nonfiction and want to do this, I can demonstrate if they are sending it to all the therapists in their organization and they want it demonstrated. Um, that's the big thing, is just teaching this in person. Or live, um, for everybody that is open to being helped this way and is curious about this book, well, throw.

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> Speaker A>Out your contact information for all the curious people out there.

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> Speaker B>Okay. My contact, um, best way to catch me is@ruthfernow.com my last name, fear now, is spelled like it sounds f, like Francis E-A-R-N-O-W fear now. Uh, ruthfernow.com has a link to the book, has, um, some downloadable documents that are in the appendix of the book. So if you get into that, if you want the basic process, it's there online.

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> Speaker B>And if you're working through the book, those are a handy resource. And then it has a contact page for, um, speaking and workshops.

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> Speaker A>Hey, close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to touch on, that you would like to talk about it. Just any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Speaker B>I appreciate that. Um, the big thing is that we don't know this until we know. We don't grow up learning this, being taught this, being taught how to actually heal our feelings. So we do the best we can. Our brain tries to cope as best as it can to survive.

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> Speaker B>But if you want more, if you want to heal these things and not have them in your way anymore, um, it's not a quick fix for every problem in the world and every problem that you have, but, you know, it is a fix. It does heal a lot of things. Um, I will put out one caveat that people who have super heavy trauma and cannot tolerate emotions will need to start with a therapist.

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> Speaker B>And one way you can know that is if you get, um, spacey, out of touch with your body, feel like you're not in your body, feel like what's happening to you is happening to something else.

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> Speaker B>Um, heavy flashbacks where you don't know where and when you are. If you get those things as really intense trauma reactions, then definitely start with a therapist. If you are able to tolerate some feeling without it overwhelming you or making you space out and leave your body, then you can handle this work. And that means that you can do a lot of healing on your own.

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> Speaker B>Um, if you're working with a therapist on stuff, you can go much faster by doing this in between.

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> Speaker B>I'm just so excited to see what people have been able to do when they actually know how to heal the feelings that are coming up. So, um, that's a big thing, is that there are answers. It takes work, but it does work. So I'm just excited to share and I'm really grateful that you're giving me an opportunity to share.

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> Speaker A>Oh, and we definitely appreciate you for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, ruthfeernow.com. Please be sure to check it out. Check out her book follow rate review share this episode to as many people as possible, especially anybody who you feel that can use this information.

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> Speaker A>If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Cjackson 102 at Cox. Net is the place to send them. As ah, always. Thank you for listening. And Ruth, thank you for coming on and joining us.

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> Speaker B>Thank you for having me.

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> Speaker A>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com.

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> Speaker A>Until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Drink.