Dallin Bruun, Mindfulness Expert and Therapist: Kids Are Already Mindful, Parents Need Mindfulness to Keep Them That Way

Foreign. Welcome to Finding Noble, a podcast where we climb into the world of young people's mental health and where we provide support for the adults who support them. I'm your host, Carly Red. Welcome. Dr. Nim's dinner.

Hey, how are you, Carly?

I'm great. It's good to have you with us today. And today we are really lucky to have the very talented Dallin Brun here with us. Hi, Dallin.

Hey everyone.

Before I tell you a little bit more about our guest Dallin, I'm thrilled to introduce our discussion today. We will be discussing this notion of mindful parenting, exploring how mindfulness nurtures well being and mental health in both parents and children, but also how mindfulness has power to transform the connection and bonds in our relationships and our homes. So a little bit about Dallin. Actually, I could say a lot about Dallin. He has a very extensive resume and really cool training. He is a mindfulness teacher, trained at UMass Medical center for Mindfulness. He's certified to teach Mindfulness based strengths reduction, MBSR. He's completed 17 mindfulness retreats internationally. He introduced and taught mindfulness through the Wellness center at UVU for five years. He's an mft, a Marriage and Family Therapist, intern at Addo Recovery. He is ART certified Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and he has three kids, a poodle and an adventure van. So welcome, Dallin. Is there anything that you would like to add about Dallin, Dr. Skinner?

Yeah, one of my favorite things about Dallin is actually when we do intensives, he is always the person who kind of helps us clean up the intensity. In other words, it is intense. And then in the afternoon we have Dallin come do the mindfulness work and it, it always helps in our intensive. So it's that actual application. I love it when the, the clients are relaxed and calm and usually that comes because Dallin has done his job.

I also learned that Dallin did a kids summer course at the clinic on mindfulness for kids. And I love that, especially in relation to our discussion today. Having that fresh in his mind. Okay, let's get to you, Dallin. First off, what has been and what is your relationship with mindfulness?

Wow. I like to, I like to tell students that this wasn't something I was pursuing actively. Actually, I was pursuing the good old American dream with two companies and a full time school schedule at a challenging university with three kids. And that's all encouraged in our society. And there's probably people out there that can manage it just fine. But I hit clinical burnout and found myself across From a therapist at the university who said, yeah, you've got chronic anxiety, you've got burnout, and you're gonna need some mindfulness. And so, like, well, what's that? And that's how I got introduced to it. And there's quite a bit of a learning curve. I think. We're not highly conditioned to be ready for actively slowing down, paying attention to your body, to your thoughts, those new to me. And I even was skeptical. I'm like, okay, I. I'm stressed, but this feels somewhat stressful, at least initially. And it didn't take too long before I'm like, wait a second, there's something kind of special here. And I'm able to see myself in a new way where there's like, some calm, but there's also some clarity around maybe decisions I was making, around how those decisions were affecting my body, affecting my mind. And I'm slowly able to see the stress differently, to unravel things. And then I'm like, oh, my gosh, I want to major in this. Oh, my gosh, I want to do this professionally. And that really launched the career. Unfortunately, BYU didn't have a major, and I had to enroll on the East Coast. It was the. At the time, UMass Medical was not only the only. It was the very first university or research institution to begin studying mindfulness with Jon Kabat Zinn. And it was his school, his center, that I enrolled in and studied under. And that. That's what launched me across the globe to mindfulness. Retreats were part of the curriculum, and so that's why I racked up so many. It was for school. And anyway, I think the rest is history. When I got back to the US I became a therapist and have been teaching ever since.

I had no idea that's who you studied under. I have so many quotes posted to my mirrors and walls all over my house from him. So how neat is that? Thank you for sharing that with us. I also think it might be interesting to talk about the science behind mindfulness. We have all heard that mindfulness is good for us, and it feels more a part of a wellness world. That's a good idea. But can you tell us more about the hard science behind mindfulness?

Mindfulness, yeah, that's it. That was important for me, too, to. To get that scientific background. And I think whenever we approach something like this, we want to know that the science validates what we're doing. There are two early neuroscientists. This is Daniel Goldman and Richie Davidson, and they're at The Mayo Clinic currently. They were literally at the first conference of neuroscience, the very first one. They're both from Harvard and they're like, hey, we should get some seasoned monks and mindfulness experts and we should pull them in and see if we can prove their bodies and brains are different. That, that there's literal, literal anatomical trait changes to the body. And that would be amazing evidence to the efficacy of mindfulness. And so part of the story is them trying to convince these hermit monks that have spent the majority of their life on retreat in caves in the Himalayas. And they even got the Dalai Lama to write letters like, I want you to do this. And, and so they couldn't lug their equipment overseas, so they had to bring the monks in. They, they stuck all their notes on his head. And it was, you know, quite the process in the early days. And they switched their machine on and they're like, something's wrong, we made a mistake. Well, you know, like, did you do that? Right? You know, they readjust it. But what their machines were showing, no human had ever, it didn't make sense to them. They put those on regular humans and knew the baselines. Long story short, there's different wave frequencies that our minds operate and the higher frequencies are much more rare. The rarest is the gamma frequency. We all have that, but it's very short lived. And it's like those moments of just like, ooh, that clicks for me. That's. And, and subjectively it's very positive when we go into that gamma state. This guy's whole brain was in the gamma state and they didn't even ask him to meditate yet. And it's like talking to different regions in the gamma state. They, they recorded him while he was sleeping and it was in, in the gamma state. But then what, what was really fascinating is when they asked him to meditate on compassion, which was his background in training. His name is Mingir Rinpoche. And it jumped 800%. And that, that was just like so boggling that they had that on record. That, oh, definitely meditation has a profound influence on our bodies, on our mind. And we can only speculate the subjective experience that that monk is experiencing in life. I mean, it goes way beyond words of calm, peace, happiness. We can only imagine. So very cool stuff.

You know what I love about that? It's all research based. So everything that he just shared with us, it's not, it's not guesswork. What's so interesting to me about that is the Dalai Lama was so interested in the outcome that he actually went and talked with him right after the research was done because he was. He wanted to know what's going on. Fascinating. Fascinating. All research based.

I really love that kind of transitioning to the parenting piece of this. You know, I, whenever I learn about mindfulness and, and especially kind of this Eastern tradition, I think I don't have the luxury of doing mindfulness all day, every day. My brain probably can't operate in that state all the time because I have all these kids and all these responsibilities surrounding me. I'd really love to know, Dallin, how you getting more into this world and experiencing kind of more of a stillness inside of you, how that changed the way you experienced your world and also changed the way you parented.

You know, it's great that those Eastern cultures have a tradition of, of monastics where they can go in the caves and not worry about family profession, but that's not how we are, and that's definitely not what we want with mindfulness. We don't want, we don't want this tendency that we need to go to a cave, but it, it ought to be relevant to the things that are important to us. And there's nothing more important than, than good parenting if you have kids. So an example I like to share is we have the fortune to spend time in Paris, but Paris is very expensive. So we had a really tiny apartment, just like one little dining room and then room for the kids and three little kids, a newborn and tight little quarters. And I'm starting to notice aggravation that I'm feeling trapped in here. But especially, you know, I was raised by a really amazing mother who had me do a lot of chores. And so things were always clean, things were always orderly. And I had that brought with me to this apartment where they would do one little thing and all of that, you know, I would just cringe inside and be like, oh, there's a mess being made. But I recognize, you know, this is insane. I can't go on this. We are here for six months. And so my mindfulness training, it helps you recognize that if you turn towards something, if you really just compassionately observe, then maybe insights arrive. Maybe, like tolerance and patience can come online. And so I designed my own mindfulness meditation where I would let the kids come in the room, I would dump out their toys and they would just start playing and start making a mess. And all that previous conditioning of just like, oh, this can't happen. This is bad. This needs to be cleaned. I just sat and let it rise and gently allowed that to wash through me. And it took. This isn't overnight science. I sat with it, I came back to it. And over time I came to a point like, oh, this is adorable. They're making a giant mess and I actually want to play with them now. And I know in my brain it's a mess, but guess what? The time will arrive that I can clean it up. And it's like little things like that that make it so practical, make us less reactive to our kids and more engaged and responsive.

I really loved what you were saying about. It's about the kids. And I think that's part of reactive parenting, is that we are only paying attention to what is existing in the moment, rather than zooming out and seeing the. The child and the whole purpose of what we're doing and why we're doing it in the first place. And reacting usually isn't our best option as a parent. And to. So to create that space before you make the choice of how you want to interact with a child is so important. And I'm assuming this is what mindfulness is, is creating kind of that space where you act from purpose and intention of what I really want, what messages I really want to give to my kids. Dr. Skinner, I can see you're nodding your head like you want to say something.

Yeah. What's interesting to me about that is the intentionality. Right. So you talked about the work that you put in to being more present in that environment. Right. Small space. Intentional parenting is one of the things that we just don't do very much anymore. So we're so used to our fast paced autopilot world that's slowing down to say, what's happening here? What's happening inside of me here? Pausing, reflecting and saying, what's happening to me? And you, you know, you, you. We saw it in your body that, that angst to the point from transitioning from that to oh, look at this, I want to play with them. That's a beautiful transition.

Reactivity is actually a default mode. Like if you're just moving around and not paying attention, well, then your autonomic nervous system, like your brain from the neck down, is designed to react to things. And its reaction mode is often a fight or a flight, which isn't always optimal, but especially with kids. And so without any degree of investigation, that will, that will likely be the default. So that's why if we're clarifying the very basic instructions of mindfulness, step one is always bring attention to the moment. This can also be presence, awareness. Those instructions are always the first ones. And you can see why.

I really love the author, Dr. Shefali Sabari. I think I'm saying that correctly. It's her book, the Conscious Parent. In fact, one of my good friends who worked as a therapist at the clinic clinic where you guys are stationed right now, is the one who gave it to me. And it talks about how children themselves are innately mindful and how it takes a parent who's preoccupied in constant activity to teach them not to be that way. She even says, our children don't operate from this manic state until we teach them to be this way. And then she also says, watch a child, especially an infant or toddler, and you will find the secret to living a conscious life. Children naturally inhabit the present moment. They see a flower and stop to gaze at it or notice a cloud and are able to drop what they are doing to admire its shape, because they have boundless imagination rooted in a lush inner landscape. They can play in the sand for hours, needing no gadget or machine to entertain them, while a parent is called upon to provide their child with emotional guidance, stability, acceptance, and safety. I love this part. The child is invited into the parent's life and to teach something only a child can, how to engage life with presence, authenticity, and joyful spontaneity that adults have lost as a result of their own unconscious upbringing. I love that so much because when we're with our own children, I think a lot of our frustration stems from we want them to come to our level. We want them to be on our timetable, our cleanliness levels, all of kind of what we were talking about. But if we were to reverse that and inhabit some of the world that they are experiencing, I think our peace and our joy would just raise or rise, you know, in a way that we wouldn't. We couldn't get there on our own. And that really is a gift from our own children. But I think a lot of us are resistant to it because kind of what you were referring to down while you were introducing your experience with mindfulness, but that we are conditioned by a culture to not slow down and show up in that kind of way in our parenting and in our relationships because it doesn't feel like it's. We're progressing in some way. There's not a qualitative progression that we can check off unless we wrote on our to do list being mindful with my ch children, being present with my children. You know, I don't think a lot of us are writing that on our to do List.

Yeah, the quote highlights something I emphasize over and over, which is mindfulness isn't some academic, dusty subject that you have to crack open a textbook to get good at. No way. You're already way good at this. You're pre wired for it. And watching for examples of it in your life is a really nice entry point. So kids are great, animals are great. But also personally, even with adults, we can access mindfulness very naturally with our kids, with our animals, with beauty, with nature. When you're passionate, when you're just at ease, that's a great time to just check in and be like, oh, this is mindfulness. And the challenge isn't that we can't do it. The challenge is when we can bring that into moments where we're not used to mindfulness. So this would be like stress. Stress is often when our, you know, our bodies take over and become default. That's when we need to kind of consciously be like, oh, let's see how it feels to be mindful of my stress, my body's stress response, or to be mindful in this critical conversation that I'm having right now. That, to me is the challenge.

We are so used to a fast paced society that the mindfulness that we're talking about today, it's like a foreign language. It's like we're so used to go, go, go, go. And what you're talking about is pause, reflect, be with yourself. And that is so counter to what we are experiencing in our culture that it's like we're pushing on the brakes to say, wait a second, did you see that flower over there? Did you see what your child just did? And when we do that, we find more joy in this life.

As you're talking, I'm curious to know what is this inner dialogue that's happening when you're experienced this inner stress that's resulting from the circumstances that you're in. My go to is to shut off and become high functioning so I feel nothing and I can turn into high functioning mode where I'm cleaning up a mess or you know, dealing with high emotions from a child. But as my kids are aging, I mean, I have a son, you know, who will be leaving home soon. I'm panicking that I'd missed a lot of it, that I can do it all. But maybe I'm not really tapped into what I'm doing and I'm not feeling what I'm doing. So what is that balance of stepping back and feeling what you're experiencing? Because I don't really want to be feeling that anxiety. I'm really good at just turning that off. This balance of feeling it, absorbing it, not reacting to it, and then connecting still and still being engaged and present with your child.

I think the first important response to what you're saying is to not confuse mindfulness for perfectionism. Like we're not here to scrub out all negative emotion because that's futile and part of life is having some of that and you're going to slam your head into a brick wall if you want to never feel negative emotion. Secondly, having a bit of a long term perspective. These skills don't come online overnight, but moving in that direction. I was kind of shocked at byu how they kept directing my attention to my body. This isn't a skill set in our culture. I didn't once learn that from anyone. That it's wise to reinhabit, to feel into the feedback of your body. Because those negative emotions, they're here. And if we're elsewhere, then often we're not feeling them and we're reacting to them. There's a word called interoception, the capacity to feel into your body. And so a lot of mindfulness, initial exercises, they put you at, at breathing because breathing is a, is a common location for emotion, for tension. And so you're, you're putting your attention there. But then also it's having you spread awareness through other parts of your body. And that would be a mindful body scan. Also yoga, moving your body, walking, these all help you bring awareness, this interoception down to your body. And you're not just, you're not just becoming aware. But mindfulness encourages a sort of caring awareness, a sort of like compassion or non judgment. So that when you're down there, you're noticing the emotions and maybe the negative ones, but rather than get upset that they're there, there's this spaciousness, this openness. Oh, oh, I'm upset right now. And, and I can see that that's valid. Yeah, some, someone just crossed my boundaries. That, that actually makes sense. And I'm here feeling that. And, and guess what? Now that I am, oh, here's a, here's an appropriate reaction, here's appropriate response. That's going to honor how I'm feeling right now. So that, that's a, that's a scenario that really plays out regularly and not just with our kids, but with our coworkers, with ourselves when we're bored or when we're, you know, otherwise triggered.

And I want to pick up on something you said There, Dallin, the concept of judgment, going back to what you were initially saying. Carly, I think in our culture we often judge ourselves so in so many ways I shouldn't feel this, I shouldn't think this, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm not a good enough parent. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not good enough. Whatever is driving that thought and when we can understand it from a mindfulness perspective, we do it in a non judgmental way. There isn't judgment to it. It's that awareness that Dallin is talking about. It's I see, I'm frustrated or upset. I understand it without judgment. It's like, oh, I see you that, that emotion. And even Dallin and I, we've talked before. This concept of a bad emotion or a negative emotion, in reality, one of the core conclusions is we have emotions, not necessarily good or bad. We have these emotions and they can teach us if we learn to listen to them. And our body is a really good instrument to help us understand them.

What feels really nice is love. To love, love your kids, to love your family and that having that unit be a source of love. But when you are turning to something difficult within yourself, let's say it's a strong emotion and you're choosing not to judge it, that is a very loving, compassionate thing that you're training yourself. It's not just relevant to that emotion. You're flexing that muscle and it will become transactional. Like you can bring that to the bank of your family. You're becoming more loving and you're starting with yourself, but it starts really quick to become outwardly valuable.

I love this notion of being filled with something that we have somewhere to come from, where our love can emanate from. A real genuine love because we've been giving it to ourselves. As a parent, I would admit and probably confirm that most mothers do not give themselves that kind of self compassion that you're talking about where they go into themselves with that kind of love. I think that is radical for women to hear especially, or maybe all parents to hear and to, to be able to offer that to us as individuals, especially knowing that it will give us a well to draw from when we're loving the people in our lives and fueling the relationships around us, because that is what we want more than anything is to help the people around us. And if there's something more that we can draw from, you know, I'd be like, okay, okay, okay, fine, I'll give myself some self compassion if it really will help other people around me. I know that. Dr. Skinner, you wanted to talk about practicing mindfulness practically in our busy lives and how we might do so and maybe we can kind of link those two things together.

I'd love to hear from you first on this one, D. Because I think one of the things that I really care a lot about is how do we develop a compassion towards ourself self compassion and then a compassion for others. I'd love to hear you talk about that.

The first thing I wanted to respond, Carly, to what you said is that it's not just women. It's a really common ailment, let's call it in our society. It's also the first thing that I noticed on my journey when it was prescribed to me was oh my gosh, there's something inside me that doesn't like me. That's like actively against myself and recognizing that that wasn't healthy overnight. It didn't, you know, it's not a quick fix just like making a new friend isn't a quick fix. But that's a really good analogy. We're taking steps towards compassion and you can break it like on a personal level. What I prescribe to clients is find things that you're already pretty good at and draw from them. So for example, when do you imagine yourself holding a child? When you imagine yourself in your favorite place in nature. When you imagine the moment that you felt the most loved. This can be a nice well to draw on and pull it in and see if you can share that now with something that might be like, well like a, a hard emotion, a pain in the body, something that's upsetting you. And you might start to see this flowing of love from where it's abundant into places where it's absent. That's always a nice, a nice step. But also actually budgeting the time can be really helpful. You don't overwhelm yourself. But if you try maybe five, five to ten minute segments, I, I, I never prescribe more than that to, to people that are new to this but so for like five minutes you sit, calm yourself down, do some breathing and maybe draw in something loving, something that you might even in your own imagination or just turning towards things non judgmentally, non judgment doesn't sound like love, but it really is the first baby step along the pathway of entering like warm compassion, friendliness, open hearted kindness. These things are further along and it starts with non judgment, openness, acceptance. These are more accessible and so we'll start with the more accessible ones and Then enlighten them. Over time, they sort of blossom into the word love.

So kind of this concept of pouring energy into what is right with you, not pouring energy into what is wrong with you and really focusing on it. And then those things grow and we grow in compassion because we can see, oh, there's probably a lot more right with us than wrong with us. One of my very favorite quotes from John Kabat Zinn that really did change my life, he said, as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong. And when I really stopped to think about all the things that were working together for my good, even just within my own body to make sure that I was still breathing, I realized that is true. There's probably a lot more right going on with us than there is wrong. And pouring energy into all the good GR froze the good.

With compassion. We come to realize that we can be with our own suffering, which is really what compassion is. It's being with the passion is suffering with the hardship, with the challenges and the non judgmental loving way. And one of the things that I want to transition here, if we could for a second is to talk about how this applies. How do we teach this to our children? Because you know, in the beginning we said they are, they're naturally there, but we're seeing more adolescents, depression, more anxiety, more suicidal ideation than maybe we've ever seen before. And, and I really believe that one of the best antidotes to that is this self compassion that needs to be implemented more intentionally into our culture so we're less judgmental, more understanding, more accepting, more validating of ourselves.

Oh, I mean, Wednesday morning I was at Pleasant Grove High School teaching mindfulness to high school students in their psychology class. And that was an invitation because of the need. That teacher actually showed me the curriculum they're attempting to integrate to the entire school district because of how important it is what I showed them. And this would be the same thing I'd also show to parents, which is a very just accessible mindfulness exercise, because that's where the rubber hits the road talking about it. It's easy, it makes sense, it's straightforward, but it's really the art of doing it. It's an experiential learning. Okay, so here's what I show the students. You open one palm and then you trace a triangle along your palm. And this gets you in touch with your body, with your sensations. Your palm is very sensitive, so it helps you focus. And then the, the triangle can help you remember a very simple breathing exercise. So we're going to breathe in on each side. I mean, we're going to breathe for three seconds on each side. So three seconds. In, two, three, fold, two, three, out, two, three.

In, two, three. Hold, two, three, out, 2, 3. In, two, three, hold, 2, 3, out, 2.

Just doing that a few times can calm us down. But if, if you do that for five minutes and you have sleep problems, odds are you'll be calm enough to go back to sleep. Odds are if you were heightened with anger, your body will calm down. I have a 13 year old client who couldn't sleep and was here for, you know, issues with friends and things like that. And she is so excited to tell me how well the triangle breathing has helped out her life and now she sleeps effortlessly. And so it seems overly simplistic and kind of silly that we're tracing triangles on our hands. But try it out. I think, I think you'll notice pretty quickly. Wow, this is transformational.

This is helpful. It is so refreshing to look at life from a mindfulness lens. So thank you for taking time to be with us today, Dallin and Carly. It's always good to be with you guys in whatever setting it is. I appreciate your mindful approach to loving life, Carly.

Dr. Skinner, I'm really grateful to be invited on your podcast and talk about something so dear to me. And I really hope it connects with parents and helps them find that connection with their kids and love in their family.

Thank you for being with us today here at Finding Noble. We really hope to help you reattune and tap into the full dimensionality and joy that accompanies parenthood. And we really hope that you leave today feeling inspired to slow down and show up for yourself and for your family. You've been listening to Finding Noble. I'm Carly Redd. Follow Finding Noble on all available podcast directories and find out more on our website, findingnobel.com that's finding noblen o b l e dot com and if you or anyone close to you are looking for further resources on young adult and adolescent mental health, Dr. Skinner and a host of other leading professionals working in the mental health health world share courses and even answer your questions all on parentguidance.org that is parent guidance.org brought to you by the Cook center for Human Connection.