Episode 212: Mindful Parenting with Josephine Atluri

No need to whine, it's Whiny Palooza! Have some wine and join us on the Whiny Palooza Podcast with Rebecca Greene.

Welcome to the Whiny Palooza Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Greene. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

Hello everyone, thank you so much for joining us. This is Rebecca Greene for the first ever Whiny Palooza Parenting and Marriage Summit. And I am so excited to present our first presenter, Josephine Attlere. Josephine is going to tell us tips from her mindful parenting journal. So Josephine is a certified life and mindfulness coach helping thousands overcome adversity to find joy. A University of Chicago graduate, Josephine's passion for wellness led to a certification in meditation. Her path to parenthood via IVF, adoption, and surrogacy, resulting in 7 kids, inspires her work as an in-demand fertility, pregnancy, and parenting mindfulness coach. Josephine is the author of Mindfulness Journal for Parents and 5 Minute Mindfulness for Pregnancy. She hosts a popular podcast, Responding to Life, talking health, fertility, and parenthood. Her mindfulness expertise has been featured in the Huffington Post, Mind Body Green, Motherly, and Women's Day. I cannot thank you enough for being here today and for being our first presenter.

Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Rebecca. I'm so excited to be here. And just a big shout out to Rebecca and Seth because they have been so on top of their game. It's been such a pleasure working with them leading up to this, and they have put together such an amazing 2 days for all the attendees. It is chock-full of, of content, and it's going to be really, I think, uplifting and empowering for us as married people and parents. And so I am excited to get started with this segment about mindfulness for parents. I, I was all set to do an introduction, but we took care of that already. So, um, you know, as Rebecca mentioned, I am a mom of 7. I've been married for 22 years, so I have infused a lot of experiences from my own life as well as that of my clients into one of the books that Rebecca mentioned, which is what we'll be drawing from today, which is this book The Mindfulness Journal for Parents, which is available on Amazon. But before we get into that, I wanted to get a sense of how many people can really relate to what happened to me and what led me to be a mindfulness journal and writer today. So I, you know, I spent many years trying to build my family through IVF, adoption, surrogacy. You know, we finally had kids number 4 and 5, twin boys. And at the time I had started working again and I was sitting there with them and I thought, okay, this is so great because I'm working from home, I'm able to do both. And I remember looking back at the end of the day and wondering, what exactly did I say to them? What did I do with them? I could not remember. For me, I had spent all this time trying to build this family, blood, sweat, tears, all this time. And I couldn't, remember what was happening because I was too busy thinking about work. I was on my phone at the time— that I remember— and I wasn't present. So I knew that there was something missing and that I really needed to take care of it. At the time, I was working for a fitness company, so like I had dealt with my fitness and nutrition, but the missing component for me was my mental and emotional well-being. And that's what led me on this personal journey to to mindfulness and meditation. So I'm, I'm hoping that, um, the stuff that we'll be talking about today will be really, um, approachable and accessible because that's my style of teaching mindfulness. As a parent who works, as a parent who didn't work before but who has many kids, you know, I tend to gravitate, and as do my clients, to things that I know are realistic and that can be helpful but that I can weave into my day, right? The last thing we need like to add on, is something that is just too hard to start doing and that we can't weave into our daily lives. And then we end up dropping it, and which is such a shame because mindfulness, the way I describe it, as we start getting into it now, is really a foundation. And it's a way for us to build upon things. And if you have this layer of foundation of mindfulness, or awareness, then you're able to enrich many aspects of your life, not just during that maybe 5-minute session of mindfulness that you do on a daily basis. And so, you know, what exactly is mindfulness? I've been throwing it around, but what I wanted to just quickly delve into is just a quick description so that you can understand, and then we can really get a sense of what these exercises and things are that I'll be talking about. Um, so you'll hear mindfulness. A big myth is that mindfulness means meditation. It doesn't solely mean meditation. Meditation is one of the modalities of mindfulness. So if you think of it very simply, mindfulness is just awareness. That's it. It's being aware of how you're feeling in your body, how you are feeling emotionally, mentally, How, you know, being aware of the world around you, of your interactions with other people such as, you know, your spouse and your child, your co-workers. So it's really just being aware and it's being curious about what's happening and why. So for example, maybe you start to get really stressed out or worried. So having that curiosity, taking that moment to just pause and wonder, why am I feeling this way? What was the trigger that made this happen? And then building off of that awareness. So it's really simple, you know, it doesn't, um, it doesn't mean that you have to be calm and peaceful, you know, that becomes associated with it because that in turn is what happens. But really it's just being aware and being curious. And, you know, I'm not asking you to, um, ascribe to a certain dogma, even though it's, you know, its beginnings began with Buddhism. But here it's just, um, it's completely secular, and all you're doing, all you're doing is being aware. And, um, you know, when you start to be aware, you're starting to hone in on your attention. Because let's face it, like, you're aware of everything that's around you. Like, I know that there is this big light in front of me, that there's this computer in front of me. I'm aware of all of things. But what we're talking about now is really driving our attention into a certain— into a certain point of focus. So for example, that can be our breath, that can be our conversation with our child, it can be many little things. And when we're, we're practicing this awareness and this honing in on a point of focus, then we start to weed out all the noise. And I don't know about you, but I have a lot of noise and chaos going through my life. And so it's really important for me to be able to hone in in certain moments throughout my day so that I can be present for myself, but I can also be present for the important people in my life, such as my spouse and my children. And so that in a nutshell is mindfulness. And you know, it sounds really easy. Like I mentioned before, you know, we are aware, we're aware of all the things around us, But it's really practicing that point of focus that is what starts to happen when we, we start practicing mindfulness. So I already touched upon why it's important, but, you know, you can see if you have that layer of attention, of awareness, then it can feed off different parts of your life. So it can feed into how you do your workouts. How you're eating, how you are participating in relationships, how you're doing at work. So just having that as your foundation will really uplift and enrich all these many buckets that we have in our lives. And in doing so, it affords us this moment to, to like really pause, because the more aware we become, the better able we're we are to see, like, how we are doing in situations. So many times when we're not truly aware or focusing in, uh, what will happen is we will react to situations. We will react with emotions, we will react with how we've done so in the past, um, versus responding, which is the why I chose the name for my podcast, Responding to Life. Because when you respond, what's happening is you're taking a moment to really see what is happening. You are giving yourself a moment of clarity so that you can approach the situation that you're in from a calmer state of being, so that you can really empathize with what's happening, whether it's with yourself or with another person, and so that then you can come up with solutions that, um, that are addressing what's really happening versus what we may have brought in from the past, the emotions that are clouding our judgment. And that's what happens when you really start to build off of awareness. Um, and as I mentioned before, it allows us to have that moment of empathy. You know, a big thing for raising our kids is that we give them these moments of empathy, validation, and support. And the problem is when we're not aware, when we're just running on autopilot, when we're not focusing in on certain parts of our lives and our conversations and our relationships we're not able to get into those moments of response where we can be empathetic because we're just all over the place. We're allowing the noise and the chaos around us to come in and cloud what's happening in our mind. Um, so that is sort of a brief description about mindfulness, why it's important, and, you know, how it can enrich the many aspects of our lives, um, most importantly our marriages and our parenting relationships. And so what I wanted to do today was to just give you a brief overview of, as I mentioned with the book, um, what I laid out were 7 different chapters in this book. And what I started off doing, um, was addressing ourselves just as individuals and how we can incorporate mindfulness and self-care into our lives. Because I'm sure you've all heard it before, and maybe some people— you mentioned it about, you know, putting that oxygen mask on ourselves before we can put it on other people. Well, that's the idea about the beginning of my book, Mindfulness Journal for Parents, is learning to— the first chapter is to regain our focus, which is what we were just talking about and why it's so important and how it sort of develops our awareness, um, giving ourselves a break because let's face it, I don't know about you, maybe you can raise your hands, but on a daily basis, the negative inner critic is constantly trying to like squeeze in some words about my parenting, my, my role as a wife, like how I'm doing with my, my job, all of these things constantly. And so I needed to put in— yes, very loud. About giving myself a break. And, you know, mindfulness for me— I don't— I haven't seen it described this way before, but for me, I like to sort of equate it to this constant conversation that I'm having with myself. And not like walking on the street talking out loud, which I do sometimes, but, um, you know, just having this dialogue in my head. Because I have, and we all have, that innate negative inner critic, and that comes from years of programming of having to to be aware of our surroundings, right? We, you know, when we were cavemen, we had to defend our property, our lives. So we had to pick up on all these little things, and that stayed with us, unfortunately. And now it's become sort of more things that were just negative towards ourselves. And so it's a constant dialogue. When you're aware, you can recognize that there's that critic again. You can name that person, that voice in your head. I just say inner critic. I didn't want to give it a name. Um, and so then I can use my awareness to know that this is happening and I need to give myself a break. So one of the things that we'll quickly go over is affirmations. You'll walk away with two different exercises that you can try for yourself that I take from my book and we'll do at the, at the very end so that you have actionable things that you can try today and, and tomorrow and then hopefully see how it can benefit you and how you can weave it into your life. But then the two that I picked out, affirmations and doing a breathing technique, you can also do with your kids. Because just as a side note, before I go back into the different chapters in the book, is that, uh, our kids, no matter how old they are— I have kids ages from— I have, um, 18-month-old twins all the way up to a 16-year-old, and all of them, and in between they're constantly watching me and my husband, whether or not they realize that they're internalizing all of that information that they're getting. They are, um, but they're watching how we sort of interact with the world around us and with the situations that we're, we're in. And so if we're able to show them that when we're in a tough situation, that we're able to lean into our resilience and lean into our self-care toolkit that we have and pull something out that can help us through, uh, they have that as a reference. And hopefully then you can also have a conversation about it and ask them to do it with you, do the same. Like, that's what I've done with my kids, um, not the 18-month-old, but the little boys who are now 7. I started doing this with them about like 3 or so years ago, and definitely with the teenagers, and it's made a huge difference from my little boys using breathing techniques when they can't get that Lego piece off because they can't find that little orange thing that magically separates everything, using a breathing technique without me prompting them was like such a, a moment for me to cheer. And then up to my 16-year-old who is able to know when and be aware of when he's like getting too hot and getting too stressed and asks me to either meditate with him or knows on his own that he can do a breathing technique to help him get through. Like, that has been years in progress, but that has been because we've had open conversations about it. But they've also seen me modeling these techniques. Um, and I know it sounds pretty and it sounds so Instagrammy where it's like, oh yeah, just do this and it's perfect and everything will and that's not how it goes. It requires so much practice, but each day that you try, you're honing in and creating these neural pathways in your head for accessing this focus and this awareness easier for the next time. And, and so it just builds off of each other. So going back then to, to the different chapters in the book, then we have Managing Stress and Anxiety, and the exercise that we'll be doing today is a breathing technique for that. Staying Cool When Emotions Run Hot is another chapter in the book, and that starts to go into your role as a parent. Like, the first few chapters in the book was about just you as an individual, because, you know, we're not just parents. Um, but now it's starting to get into what happens when you're in these situations with your child and you start to get really frustrated. Like, you're at the grocery store and they're screaming about wanting, you know, those puffs and you already have like a ton at home, right? And you're starting to get really hot and sweaty and you can feel yourself like getting stressed out. What can you do in that situation? Well, practice a breathing technique. I love those because you can pull them out whenever you need to and it doesn't require you to sit in like some cushy little room with all the incense and all. No, you pull it out when you need it. And immediately, immediately you'll start to feel the impacts on your, on your body, on your system. And then communicating mindfully, that's another thing that I mentioned with the benefit of mindfulness, is because when you're aware and when you take that moment to pause, you're able to see things more clearly instead of being clouded. And in that moment now you're able to converse with your child, with your spouse, with your coworker from a place of clarity and calm. And I don't know about you, but I've had many moments where I am talking to my teenager or even my 7-year-old, and I already am coming up with the things that I want to say without even listening to them because I'm pulling from past experiences with them or with other kids or from my day, whether, whether it's been bad or good, and that's what's feeding my communication. Versus being in that moment, taking that moment to just calm myself down so that I can really listen, right? When we're communicating, it takes so much listening, but if we're not able to use that focus to hear what they're saying, to read their body, like the signals that's coming from their body language, then it's hard for us to really communicate. It's then it's not really communicating. Um, and then that feeds into another— the second to last chapter of the book, which is Consciously Connecting. When you're able to communicate mindfully with your spouse, with your child, whoever, um, then you're really able to connect because you're giving them, um, you're showing them that you respect them, that you're supporting them, that you're able to empathize and validate with them because you're hearing all these things now versus hearing what's going on in your head. And then the last chapter of the book is Cultivating Gratitude, Joy, and Peace. And I don't know about you, but after a long day or in the middle of the day, I need something to just sort of hit the reset button, um, and allow myself to get through to the next part of the day. And for me, that can be like taking a moment to just go outside because nature is so grounding, or taking a moment to just run through an internal list of gratitudes that I have. So, you know, that's what you can find in my book, but today I wanted to just be able to do two of these with you. I will try to share my screen here. Let's see, here we go. All right, there you go. And, um, affirmations. I don't know if many of you have heard about affirmations, but essentially what it is, they're simple statements of encouragement that you can use to support yourself and say to yourself, uh, you know, when you're feeling like you need something to uplift you and empower you. And what I've heard recently is that, you know, a lot of affirmations you say as like I statements— I am strong, I'm healthy, I'm brave. But what I've heard recently is that what you can also do is speak to yourself, because a lot of times You know, we are able to give out advice and to take advice from others, but taking our own advice and sort of supporting ourselves can be a little bit trickier. So saying, you know what, using your name, like Josephine, you are doing so great. You have got this. You are very courageous. You know, saying things like that. It can— it's a little trick for your brain to sort of hear something differently. So that is what an affirmation is. So what you can do, you know, I don't know if you have a pen or paper or if you just want to take a moment right now to think of something that, that you would love to hear today in this moment, you know, everyone wakes up differently, everyone feels differently every day, and, uh, so what you want to hear or need for today can be very different from tomorrow. So just take this moment right now, you know, for those of you out on the East Coast, your morning has already happened, your kids are off to school. For those of us here on the West Coast, things are kind of happening right now.

Um, hey Josephine, can you go to slideshow mode so people can see the whole slide?

Oh yeah, sure. Um, sorry, let me just move this. But, um, so just take a moment while I'm doing that to think of something that, um, you want to hear today, and then say it just quietly in your mind and just repeat that a couple times. And the thing about affirmations is that, um, you don't necessarily have to believe what you're saying to yourself. It can be something that you're aspiring to. So, you know, if you know that you're feeling really nervous about, say, a presentation that you might be doing today, you can build up to it and just keep saying it to yourself every day. Another hack to that is, you know, you can put little Post-it notes on your bathroom mirror. You can have little calendar reminders that pop up and show it to you on your phone. You can send yourself an email so that when you you wake up in the morning, you see it, and you have that reminder of this affirmation, that this uplifting message that you wanted to send yourself. So there are many ways to incorporate affirmations into your life. And so I encourage you to try that out throughout the next couple of days.

I'm so sorry, the presenter mode is stuck on permanently loading. Do you want to hit the back arrow on Google, on your Google Docs, and then just like zoom in on your screen a little bit?

Oh, um, let's see.

Yes, Tina, I know there's a technical error with the slides.

Well, that's okay. You know what, I don't want to get caught up on that, so, um, one second. I'll just stop the share, um, because the next thing that we're doing anyway is a breathing technique. And then while you're doing that, I'll try and figure that out. Uh, what we're going to do is one that I call an extended breath. And basically what it is, is you're breathing in for a count of 4 seconds, and then when you exhale, you're exhaling for 8 seconds. The beauty of this is that I like to release whatever is just sort of weighing me down, stressing me out, making me feel upset, and imagine that when I'm doing this really long exhale that I'm just letting it go. I'm letting go of whatever is just weighing me down. So we'll practice that. Um, let's do that 3 times, and you can close your eyes. You don't have to if you're driving, certainly don't. Um, it's great actually to use while you're stuck in traffic, which we have a lot of out here in LA. So, um, take a moment, and then on your next breath, what you're going to do is take a deep inhale through your nose for a count of 4, 3, 2, 1, and then slowly exhale like that through your mouth for a count of 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now do that on your own. Take another slow, deep inhale through your nose, keeping count for yourself, and then keeping count for yourself again, slowly exhaling out through your mouth. And imagine as you're breathing out that you are letting all of the stress All of everything that you no longer need in your life right now, in this moment, just out. And let's do that one more time. If you can't breathe in through your nose, breathe in through your mouth. It's really— it's not very strict. So breathe in, nose, mouth, and then slowly breathing out through your mouth so you can make that audible sound. And Hopefully that you were able to visualize or just imagine or even say to yourself during those long extended exhales that you were just letting it go, that I do not need this right now in this moment. And hopefully that lessens the load a little bit, right? But what was happening in that moment, especially if you start to extend it and like continue it on, say for a minute, what is happening is you're sending a signal to your brain, and you may be in a fight-or-flight state when you use this. So you feel like you're being attacked. When you're being— you feel like you're in this moment, what's happening is so many different systems shut down in our body. So our digestive system, our reproductive system, all these things start to shut down because they're not necessary in our lives when we're trying to survive, right? But our body doesn't know the difference between a lion versus an email that has really triggered us. It just does the same thing. And so, um, what we're doing is we're taking control in our own hands with a very simple thing that we always have in our possession, which is our breath. And we're manipulating it in order to slow things down. And that sends that signal to your brain that, you know what, I am not any longer in this moment where my life is being threatened, things are slowing down, I'm okay. You know, that manipulation of your breath is what sends those signals to your brain. And then what you'll notice physically— I don't know about you, but I start to get sweaty, you know, when I am stressed out, like very stressed. My heart starts to race. What will happen, especially if you continue doing that breath for like a minute or two, is that your heart rate will slow down your blood pressures, decreasing your, your body's cooling itself off. So those are all the physical things, but then there are all these other systems that you didn't even realize were turning off, are able to turn back on again. And so that is the beauty of a, um, of a breathing technique. And the other beauty is that, like I mentioned before, it is with you whenever you need. And you can pull it out at the grocery store, while you're driving, while you're in, in the carpool line waiting for your kids, you know, wherever. And it allows you to still be in that moment while calming yourself down. And there are many different manipulations of it, you know, there's like square breathing, ocean breathing, many different things. If you actually go to my YouTube channel, Josephine Lerner Meditation, meditation. There are many video meditations there. A lot of them are breathing techniques that you can try. They're listed in my book. I love them because I'm always on the go with all these kids—basketball, gymnastics, you name it—and I need something to just be able to decompress and to be able to reset myself. I'm constantly hitting that reset button, and for me, my breath and other mindfulness are what are able for me to do that. Ocean breathing is just kind of like a continuous breath. So imagine like the waves don't ever really stop. You're breathing in, but without a pause, you're kind of flowing it back out. So it's just a different manipulation if you wanted to try something different with your breath. And so I think I only have a few minutes left. I did want to leave it open for any questions I know I see them sort of popping up, but if anyone had any questions, I did want to honor that.

Well, first of all, can we all just give the amazing Josephine Attlee a round of virtual round of applause, please? That was absolutely awesome. What a great way to start the day. I feel like calmer already. So that was awesome. Couple requests that we had. Would it be possible for you to email me that slide deck? And then we can get that out to people? Yep, sure. Awesome. And then number— send me a link to the YouTube channel, we'll get that to everybody. And then can you talk before we do open Q&A, um, can you— and awards and prizes— can you tell us, um, again, what is the title of the book and where's the best place to go get it?

Yep. So I have two books. It's the one that I was referencing for this segment was The Mindfulness Journal for Parents. There it is. Um, that's that's available on Amazon. And the latest one that I, um, wrote last year was, uh, 5 Minute Mindfulness for Pregnancy, also available on Amazon. Um, and they are— they have a lot of exercises but also anecdotes from clients that I've had, um, so that you know that you're not alone. Like, that's a big thing with parenting and marriage is feeling like, oh my God, I'm the only one who's going through this. I'm terrible. There goes that inner critic. But reading that hopefully will remind you we're all in it, we've all experienced it, and, you know, there's no shame in it. And so let's just— let's use some tools that we can build up in our toolkit and to help us feel better and to communicate more mindfulness.

Thank you so much. I took pages of notes.

Oh, great. Yeah, no, thank you so much, Rebecca Greene and Seth Kessler. I really I'm so grateful to be a part of this. Such a great resource for parents.

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