The Behavioral Corner
Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano. And this is the Behavioral Corner; you're invited to hang with us, as we've discussed the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and wellbeing. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while.

Steve Martorano
Hi, everybody, welcome again to the Corner. Here we are now as you go our way towards fall, which is terrific. I'm Steve Martorano your host and guide. And if you're not familiar with the program, we talk about behavioral health. It's a very big topic, I like to say it covers everything. That's what this podcast is about. It's about everything that affects us emotionally, intellectually, and physically. The decisions we make, constitute our well-being really at the end of the day. It's all sponsored by our underwriters Retreat Behavioral Health about which we'll learn a little bit later on. September's National Recovery Month, we've used that as a jump-off to sort of expanding the notion of recovery to include mental health issues and physical issues beyond substance abuse. And to that end, we thought we'd take a look at some of the paths less traveled, as it as it were. Over a couple of weeks, you've been hearing from you know, acupuncturists and aromatherapies, we did some crystal stuff, which is very interesting. We're gonna swing it back to a somewhat more mainstream arena, that is meditation and mindfulness today, but first, we want to introduce you to our guests, because we're lucky again, to have a terrific fellow dropped by the Behavioural Corner to spend some time with us. Dr. Donald McCown is Associate Professor of Health, as well as the Director of the Center for Contemplative Studies at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, we thank...Professor or Doctor? What would prefer? Or Don

Don McCown
Call me Don.

Steve Martorano
I get that title, right -- Director of Center for Contemplative Studies?

Don McCown
Yes.

Steve Martorano
Tell me about Contemplative studies.

Don McCown
When I first arrived at West Chester 11 years ago, in fact, I was coming from Thomas Jefferson University, and from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program there. And I wanted to have a platform to be able to do mindfulness courses, and also to expand that idea, and bring in other elements of contemplative traditions. So here's how I explained it to my students. Okay, you're in a university. Where did universities come from? They came from monasteries. What did people do there? They were quiet. And they read and they thought. Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing? Wouldn't it be interesting to connect ourselves to the practices that have been handed down through the millennia -- really, from traditions around the world? We wanted to be able to connect to how is this going to help me as a student? How is, say, mindfulness, going to help me be a better learner? So how can my moving meditations say walking meditation or yoga or Qigong? How can that contribute to my overall education and my capacity to be in the world and to make a difference?

Steve Martorano
Yeah, it's really interesting. When you think about it, you know, you've seen course descriptions that are all kinds of schools. I mean, we can study everything now from Kanye West's body of work, to do anything we want. And then you see some of these as contemplated studies, and you go west, pretty narrow, that it's kind of esoteric and turns out, it's not. It's about...it's about the entire university or learning experience.

Don McCown
Yeah, yeah. So, so it's very broad. And when we are paying attention on purpose in the present moment, non-judgmentally, we're in a way of being that really allows us to encounter huge bodies of knowledge, and to figure out for us what it means. So whether you're in the humanities, or the sciences, or the arts, having an understanding of the contemplative modes of encounter is really valuable to the student. Now, it's also valuable because and especially now as we go I'm back after the COVID situation, you know, we're under a lot of stress. And so that contemplative space that we create for ourselves is also one that contributes to our wellness. If we're not in a constant state of fight or flight, our bodies work better, and our minds work better. So we're helping with student wellness, we're helping with their academics. And the other thing that I wanted to sort of contributing was outreach to the community. And so we also offer programming that touches the community, for example, I know you have had Pat Croce on and so we have a long-standing relationship with Pat, who really helped to get this off the ground with us and have had him come and speak, as well as a whole parade of people who come to talk about the possibilities of contemplative practice, in the sciences, in history and humanities, we sort of tried to bring something for everyone and invite the community in as well. And we also reach out to the community, we actually did a series of mindfulness courses for the borough of West Chester itself, including the mayor,

Steve Martorano
I can't imagine any life that would need to be contemplated other than the government. Yeah, you would hope you know that before we get into the weeds on some of this stuff. This is not exactly the golden age of contemplation is it? I guess there is the...I don't know, when you correct me, I'm babbling here. I guess there is the, you know, the thoughtful or the contemplate of mind. And then there's the reactive mind, which no matter what information, it perceives, it automatically defaults to what it already believes, without examining the information. So this center, and its dedication to these contemplating studies, is really flying in the face of what seems to be the current mood in the world, is a hard reaction, and lack of thoughtfulness?

Don McCown
Well, I think in some sense, that's been the history of humans in the world. It's a hard reaction and a lack of thoughtfulness. So really...

Steve Martorano
Nothing new?

Don McCown
...if you think about the Middle Ages, and you know, the wars, and that kind of thing, even though the Renaissance, there was all that stuff going on. And at the same time, there's this line of people who are contemplative, and you know, in Europe, in the Middle Ages, it's the monasteries, and they develop so far as to become universities. And here we are, again. So the other thing that I would say is that there really is, I think, a greater expression of contemplation and meditation. in the world today, it's more available than it was, say, 40 years ago.

Steve Martorano
We're in the Middle Ages.

Don McCown
Well, yeah. I mean, you had to go to the monastery, you know, to get that. And now it's available in a lot of different venues. Certainly, there are apps and web pages and everything else that will inform you about these things. The question is now, which are the ones that are going to bring you the most value?

Steve Martorano
Right, exactly. Yeah, well, so far, it's resulted in terrific technological breakthroughs for ordering pizzas, or a car to take you to the airport. But not much baggage or other things, I'm assuming. Anyway, it's interesting before we get into meditation and mindfulness, which I have a lot of questions about. Tell me about your students. Do you have people who are majoring in contemplated studies?

Don McCown
So we have a minor in contemplative studies and that's averaged about 50 students a year. So there is quite a bit of interest among the students in this. It's an interdisciplinary program so they can take courses, in music, in art, in social work, in actual kinesiology...you know, sports. So we have yoga courses and Tai Chi courses, that kind of thing, as well as more directly meditative courses.

Steve Martorano
Yeah, I can imagine how helpful a minor in contemplating studies would be to somebody in the humanities, somebody in the music department, somebody, you have to be very close to becoming a deep and thoughtful reader. So in the lit departments, I can, I can see all that.

Don McCown
Yeah.

Steve Martorano
And you mentioned something I wanted...I didn't give me a lot of detail. I don't know whether it's even on point here for us. Did you mention one of your students has created a labyrinth?

Don McCown
Yes, so one of the students in our Honors College, got very interested in walking meditation, and particularly the form of the labyrinth, which might look like a maze to you, I mean, that you can find out we're going back to the Middle Ages again, but in the cathedrals, they would have on the floors in tile, these pathways that you follow, and they take you away from the goal and then back towards the goal. And so it was a way of doing that long walking meditation known as a pilgrimage, but not having to leave town.

Steve Martorano
The actual purpose of the maze was not to confuse and disorient...

Don McCown
Right, but to lead you to the center. So one of the ways of practicing with the labyrinth is to have a question in your mind and walk towards the center. And when you get to the center to be still and see if there's an answer. So a student made a huge canvas labyrinth. For us, it's I think, 25 by 25 feet, and we can lay it out on the floor inside the center, or we can take it outside, which is something that we're going to be doing throughout the fall actually to make it available in the middle of campus. Just come take a contemplative walk, be quiet, follow the pathway, you won't get lost. It's not a maze.

Steve Martorano
You have the perfect voice for this kind of work. Professor Donald McCallum is our guest, he is the Director of the Center for Contemplative Studies at West Chester University. Let's talk about meditation. And then we'll get to mindfulness because I know they're not the same thing. But they are together in a sense, how far back can we trace the practice of meditation?

Don McCown
Well, it is lost in the mists of time, pretty much in every tradition, Paying attention to purpose in the present moment. And non-judgmental is sort of the definition that we use for mindfulness. So you could start to look at analogs for that, such as hunting, I need to be very present, I need to be open to anything that is happening in my environment. And I need to be able to accept what's happening with me and be able to be still in order to do that. So how far back in the history of humankind does that happen?

Steve Martorano
Yeah, you don't mean hunting in the sense of going to Cabela's or buying a flak jacket? You're talking about trying to survive 1000s and 1000s of years ago,

Don McCown
Exactly. You know, so you look at the paintings of the animals and hunters with spears in the caves in Chauvet, say in France. Those people were exactly like us. Their minds, I'm sure did the same things. They went to catastrophes, as Jon Kabat-Zinn of the mindfulness sort of movement would say, you know, "How did they control that?" How did they work with that? And how were they able to be still and wait for the animal. So it goes all the way back there. I mean, you know, as far as the written record is concerned, we would look at, you know, into the literature in greater India and so we can go back 4000 plus years, we look in Greater China, we can do the same thing. We look in our own, you know, in the West, and in America, you know, from sort of the founding of the United States. We see an understanding of these things.

Steve Martorano
You've written a book on that subject, correct?

Don McCown

I did, I wrote a book with a colleague of mine, Dr. Marc Micozzi. It's called New World Mindfulness: From the Founding Fathers, Emerson, and Thoreau to Your Personal Practice. So it really the book grounds you in what is mindfulness? what is meditation, and then gives you ways of practicing that is informal? Because not everyone wants to say, Okay, I'm gonna have this discipline where I sit for 45 minutes or a half an hour a day and meditation. But how do we bring it into our lives? This was really the live question for everyone. In our history.

Steve Martorano
I have a question about why it seems for most people, that these disciplines mindfulness and meditation arrived from the east to the west if it's true, and it seems obvious, as you say, it's an innate biological, evolutionary trait that we had to survive wasn't lost in the West. And we rediscovered it by accident in the east, I don't understand why that would have happened.

Don McCown
So as I was, was suggesting it is innate, but it's been played out differently. And given different emphases. Yeah, in other cultures. And so I think that, in our own encounters with those Eastern cultures, we were shocked by how much of that is there and the depth of impact on the cultures, right. So even if we don't go back very far, if we don't take it back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but we just look at what happened after world war two in Japan, right, the American occupation of Japan, the people who were left in Japan, the Americans, were really the cream of the crop. A lot of them were professionals, there were physicians, there were psychiatrists, which is where I'm going to go with this in a minute who were left, and they wanted to understand what this culture was about -- how it worked. So, you know, the artists and countered Zen Buddhism -- Zen Meditation. And it opened up a new realm for them to think in different ways and to encounter nature in different ways, even in these kinds of stark, contemplative practices.

Steve Martorano
Well, you know, I interrupt you, because it's striking, striking to me, and you tell me if I'm missing the point here, is the western mind seems to at least for this, you know, the near future have been motivated towards action. The only reason you had a mind? The only reason you could actually think was to accomplish something to do something.

Don McCown
Yes.

Steve Martorano
And in the West, they said, well, we...I mean in the east, it was what we want to accomplish things as well. But we think stopping and being quiet is another way to get there.

Don McCown
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And being able to not know something for a while, you know, I mean, that's, that's the key to so many of our great scientists in the West, as they were able to just be with the problem. Do you know?

Steve Martorano
That's a great point of being okay with not knowing something. Can we swing into you know, people go "Okay, I understand that it tastes very good. You're in a room is a candle, it's quiet. You slow everything down. Mindfulness is in the moment." What are the practical applica...I mean, really, nuts and bolts?

Don McCown
Yeah.

Steve Martorano
What are the practical applications for something like mindfulness or meditation?

Don McCown
You plucked just the appropriate moment for that because it is this sense of being able to not know, being able to sit in the middle of our own discomfort. So if we look then at the applications of, say, mindfulness practice, in mental health, one of the huge threads through kind of all of the things that we diagnose people with is that they can't be with their own experience at that moment. And so they find different ways of running away from it. And so if we want to talk about recovery? You know, recovery is learning to be in your life. However, it is, in some sense. To be able to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to quote Hamlet. To be able to do that without running away? How do you do that? So what the mindfulness practices and the meditative practices do for us, is they back off our reactivity. And we can talk about that in the brain and what happens, we're going to talk about how the body feels, which of course, those things are linked. So if you're sitting in a relaxed way, and your body is relaxed, you feel more space around you. You can let things in that you might not let in otherwise, or that you might be reactive to and just lash out. Right. So this is the basic skill that we're teaching when we apply these practices.

Steve Martorano
You mentioned bringing the techniques that you talk about, into the communities, it's not just an ivory tower discussion that goes on on campus. So then it begs the question, are these disciplines -- are these practices available to everyone? Or are they ultimately available to people who have more means who have the time to pause? Can everybody benefit from this?

Don McCown
Yeah, that's a really wonderful question. And the answer is yes! Especially as we look at it in terms of the contemplative tradition rather than specific ways of manifesting that specific techniques and practices. So we could do something as simple as stop. Check into how we are.   Settled down.  And then take a look at where we want to go. And what we want to do. What I'd like to do right now is to do a very short practice with everybody, right. So this is a practice called the soles of the feet. It was developed by a friend of mine, Nerb Singh, for working with people who were very reactive, helping them to make better choices. Okay. So this is how it works. And you can do it along with me. And you could close your eyes if you'd like. Because sometimes that helps you get in touch with what's happening in your body more, or you going to leave your eyes open. And that's fine, too. Because you can do this anywhere at any time. So we're just going to check into how it feels in the body right now. Maybe any sense of tightness in the muscles in places or any sense of softness in the muscles in places. Maybe notice your breathing as fast or slow as deep or shallow. It doesn't matter how it is we're just coming in contact with how it is. Everything is fine. It's just this is how it is right now. You could take a look in your mind in the thought space, you know where the thoughts come and go. And what is the weather like in there? Not, what are you thinking about? But how fast are the thoughts moving? How slowly are they moving? is a traffic jam is it just one car sort of whooshing through? Just noticing what it's like? Again, just to know because there's no better or worse way for our minds to be. And then what's the emotion at this moment for you? Maybe there's a mood state. Maybe there's an emotion that just showed up. And so now that you know what's going on with you, bringing all of your attention to the soles of your feet. Feeling them maybe they're in shoes and they're touching the insoles. Maybe your feet are on the floor and there's the pressure of gravity, the weight of your legs, bearing down. However, it is you can feel your heel. You can feel the insides of your arches. You can feel the balls of your feet, and maybe even inside all those bones that makeup balls of the feet. And then the toes, which you can even wiggle a little bit, just feel the difference between each toe -- get in touch with the individuals. And then feeling the whole of the soles of your feet. These sides of your feet. The tops of your feet, maybe there's pressure on the sides and the top. Maybe there's air. Maybe you're barefoot. And then checking in to how it is in your body. Softness in the muscles. Tightness in the muscles. How your breathing is perhaps looking at the thoughts, the thoughts space, and the weather there. What's it like, in this present moment for you? And then is there an emotion that's here? And just knowing what that is? And so now you've just you've done a check-in. Do you know how you are? And so you could already have your eyes open. You could open them. And so how is it with you? Right, Steve?

Steve Martorano
Well, it's a very, it's a, it's a very calming and soothing experience. I was immediately reminded when we got to our feet of some of them I heard along, you know, a while back. And that is when we think about our consciousness where our thoughts come from, we automatically associated as we should with our head or forehead, and so that's where the center of consciousness is. And I guess this is my hippie background. There was a moment when they were saying to us, you can shift that focus anywhere you want. You can have all of your focus on the soles of your feet. And I thought, well, that's silly. Yeah. But you can! I mean, you could actually do it.

Don McCown
The mind is entirely embodied.

Steve Martorano
Yes. Yeah,

Don McCown
That's one of the keys to these practices.

Steve Martorano
The other thing that I'm struck by is that it is accessible, doesn't cost you anything. And even if you're operating heavy machinery, if you pause for a moment, when you do that, you're only talking about a minute or a minute and a half to kind of as the great philosopher, Kenny Rogers once said, "Find out what condition your condition is in."

Don McCown
Yes. Wonderful. I like that line myself.

Steve Martorano
Dr. Donald McCown of the Center for Contemplated studies at West Chester University. Thanks so much. I mean, that was terrific. It was exactly what we hoped we'd find with you. And we got to thank our buddy Pat Croce for putting us together, great friends and a great resource. People can either enroll at Westchester and check out the center or they can just go to the website and look around, right?

Don McCown
So the shortcut is to just go to wcupa.edu, which is our homepage for the university. If you type a backslash, and the letters CS (/CS), it will take you directly to the Center for Contemplative Studies. We have a number of pages. There are actually recordings of meditations that you can do so absolutely free for the entire community. And you will see our programming for the next year.

Steve Martorano
Terrific. Thanks so much, Don. I really appreciate it. And I hope we can circle back on some of these issues later on.

Don McCown
There's a lot to talk about, that's for sure. Okay, I enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

Steve Martorano
Thanks for your time. Thank you all for hanging on the Behavioral Corner. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff. And every now and then as Professor just said, slow down, take a breath and check things out. We'll be back next time. Bye-bye.

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