the heart and soul of health and wellness: three … … · the heart and soul of health and...

THE HEART AND SOUL OF HEALTH AND WELLNESS: THREE STEPS TO MINDFUL MEDITATION

Pat Blankenship

The practice of law is stressful. Lawyers get paid to enter into the fray of conflict, to

expect and prepare for the worst case scenario. We are under great pressure to bill more

hours, to work more, relax less. Technology keeps us constantly tuned in. There are myriad

ways to mess it up, break a rule, miss a deadline, or fail to be as persuasive as we must. We

seek and expect perfection of ourselves, and so do our clients. We work in a full-on state of

"defensive" lawyering all day long, every day, dropping down into survival mode and staying

there.

The stress is taking a toll on us. Recent studies show that we are more and more likely to

fall into addictive behaviors, and our profession now has the highest rate of suicide in the

United States. Bar associations are putting assistance programs into place to assist lawyers who

are struggling with emotional, physical and mental difficulties, and the American Bar Journal is

©2016 Pat Blankenship

publishing articles about managing your stress through mindfulness. But what does that mean?

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the intentional act of paying attention to, focusing on, the present. It is

intentionally releasing what may have happened before and what may happen after in order to

focus on what is happening now. Being mindful is being fully present in any one given moment,

being aware of that moment, taking note of your surroundings, your feelings, or your body. It is

choosing to be aware rather than running on auto pilot. You have experienced mindfulness

when you were thoroughly engaged and engrossed in a project and time passed quickly and

your mind was completely occupied by the work at hand. You may also have experienced

mindfulness in the joy of playing with a small child or while standing at the top of a mountain

and looking out at the beauty all around you. On those occasions when the mind is completely

attentive to this moment, when fear or worry or anxiety or anticipation or regret cannot and do

not wander in, that is mindfulness.


So what, then, is mindful meditation? Mindful meditation is the intentional act of

bringing your mind's focus and attention to the breath for a period of time. This mindfulness

allows you to think only of the breath for those moments, to the exclusion of any other

thought, plan, fear, worry or dream. You decide to watch the breath happen. You choose to

appreciate the mechanics and physicality of the breath. You intentionally become mindful of

and grateful for the power of the breath to deliver life, energy and healing to your body.

How do you cultivate mindfulness and meditate on the breath?

Choose a time of the day when you can devote about 10 minutes to the practice. It may

be at the very beginning of your day. It may be on your lunch hour. It may be the last thing you

do each day. But these 10 minutes should belong to you and only you. Turn your attention and

your focus to your meditation practice for this same brief period every day. Show up for

yourself over and over again, and if you miss it one day, just show up the next.


Find a place to be quiet and alone—your favorite chair, your study, your patio, your

office. Sit on a rock in the woods or lie down on a mat in the sun. Meditation can happen in any

place and any position that allows you to become aware of the breath. Most practitioners sit on

the floor, on a cushion, or on a comfortable chair. But others like to lie down on their backs,

eyes closed. Lift the knees if you like, take the feet wide and let the knees fall in on themselves.

Relax. Soften the lights. Play soft, soothing music if you like. Close the door, turn off the phone,

close your eyes. Allow yourself to be off duty for these 10 minutes. And then begin.

• Step One: Find mindfulness. Now, having settled, begin to notice what

is going on around you. Become aware of the information your senses are bringing to

you.

o What do you hear? Traffic noises? Air conditioning? Music? Birds? Focus on

the sounds that surround you in this place and in this moment.


o What do you feel? Temperature? The warmth and pressure of the hands as

they touch each other or rest on your knees? The cushion of the chair or the

mat beneath you? The cool breeze blowing across your skin? Focus on the sense

of touch and notice what you feel.

o What do you taste? This morning's coffee? Your lunch? Your toothpaste? Is

your mouth fresh from a recent mint? What can your sense of taste tell you in

this very moment?

o Then notice, what do you smell? Is there bread baking, or are there fresh

flowers? Do you notice the pungent aroma of sweat? Aromatic incense? An

overflowing trash bin?

o And then, what do you see? Even as the eyes are closed, notice what is there for

you to observe behind the lids—colors? Shapes? Movement? A kaleidoscope of

moving, changing colors and shapes, or the awareness of sunlight pouring into


the room? Focus your attention on these sights, these shapes, these colors, and

watch to see how they change and shift before you.

• Step Two: Bring your attention to your body and find body awareness.

Begin to shift your focus away from this sensory information to focus on what is

happening inside your body.

o Notice, where are you in this space you are occupying? If you are seated, are the

shoulders hovering over the hips? The head hovering over the shoulders? Is the

spine rising straight up out of the hips, or are you leaning forward? Drop the

shoulder blades down and toward the center of your back, creating space

between the tops of the shoulders and the bottom of the ears, and notice the

softening of the muscles in the shoulders.

o Scan the body with your mind, checking in and finding those places where there

might be tension or gripping. Can you soften? Release? Let the bones in your


body do all the work as the muscles melt and dissolve toward the earth. Make

small movements if necessary to entice the muscles to let go and release that

tension.

o Soften the muscles in the face, in the inner thighs, in the shoulders and the neck.

Drop your chin just a bit toward your chest and feel the muscles on the back of

the neck lengthen and stretch gently. Become heavy, letting the body sink

toward the earth. Become fully aware of your body and particularly your

softening and dissolving muscles and soft tissues.

• Step Three: Bring your attention to your breath. Begin to move through

body awareness to breath awareness. With your eyes still closed, pay attention to the

breath, take note of it, see it in your mind's eye. Watch yourself breathe. Really, just

watch your body breathe.


o Inhale. Notice the cool, dry air as it crosses the nostrils, passes down through the

back of the throat and into the bottom of the lungs. Exhale. Watch the warm,

moist air pass back up out of the lungs, through the back of the throat again, and

exit over the nostrils. Note the expansion and contraction of the lungs. Note the

expansion and contraction of the rib cage. Note the rise and the fall of the chest

or the belly.

o Watch and allow yourself to breathe, and then watch and allow it again.

o Breathe in. Breathe out. Turn your entire attention and focus to this process, and

if your mind wanders, notice that too. Take note of where you found your mind

wandering off to and then release that, bring your focus back to your breath.

Watch yourself breathe. No judgment, just acceptance and allowing. The very

effort you make to watch yourself breathe for this few minutes is in fact mindful

meditation.


You will be surprised how difficult this is, to train your mind's eye on your own breath

and keep it there. Ten minutes doesn't seem like a long time to devote to the practice, but you

may begin to notice that the chair gets harder and there's an itch rising to the top of your toe.

Maybe your partner's complaint about your expense account keeps running through your head.

Or your client's difficult situation creeps in around the edges. But don't let that deter you. It

happens to all of us.

Our minds are not trained to focus on one simple thing at a time. So if the chair

becomes uncomfortable, try to sit through it for a moment, and if you can't, shift a bit. If the

itch rising to the top of your toe screams for your attention, sit with it for a minute, see if it

subsides, and if not, touch that toe, stop the itch, and then return to your breath. And if you

hear your partner's voice in your head while you meditate, notice that and then let it go,

release it, and turn back to your breath. This ten minutes is yours. No one else gets to come

with you to your meditation. No one else gets to come into this time and this place.


This is about you. And it's about your breath.

Why do this? Why sit alone with eyes closed and watch yourself breathe for ten

minutes? Because you can create for yourself a moment of peace, a brief respite, a vacation

from everything and everyone else in your world. It allows you to devote just these brief few

minutes to self-care, and it teaches you to be fully present in the moment. Scientists tell us that

in these minutes of self-care, the heart rate can slow, the body's "fight or flight" physiology can

stand down, and the body can approach a space of equilibrium. The mind releases the huge

concepts it must process every other moment of every day and processes instead the simple

physicality of the breath. Mindfulness expands from the ten minute meditation practice into

the other parts of our lives. We begin to grow toward peaceful mindfulness in our law practices,

our business decisions, our relationships, our lives.

Breathe in and breathe out. Expand and contract. Inhale and exhale.

Just this. No more, no less than this, fully present, fully mindful of the breath.


Stress? Managed. At least for this present moment.

You're going to be fine.

RESOURCES

Kabot-Zin, John, Full Catastrophe Living, Bantam Dell (1990)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/therapy-matters/201105/the-depressed-

lawyer

www.tlap.org

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/how lawyers can avoid burnout and d

ebilitating anxiety

http://www.abaiournal.com/search/results/search&keywords=mindfulness/

http://www.tba.org/committee/attorney-well-being-committee


5/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response I Yoga International

How to Change Your Stress Response MAY 9, 2013 + BY CARRIE DEMERS (HTTPS:IIYOGAINTERNATIONALCOM/PROFILE/41)

Remember the tale "The Lady or the Tiger?" As it ends, the hero is standing

before two identical doors: one conceals a beautiful maiden; the other, a

ferocious tiger. The hero must open one of these doors—the choice is his—but

he has no way of knowing which will bring forth the lady and which will release

the tiger.

I'm sometimes reminded of this story when a patient is describing one of the

symptoms of chronic stress: headaches, indigestion, ulcers, tight muscles, high

blood pressure, or some combination of these. When I point out that the

symptom is stress-related, the patient seems resigned—stress is such a

constant in most people's lives that all the doors seem to have tigers lurking

9/25/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response I Yoga International

behind them. Most of the people who find their way to my office know the

fight-or-flight response is hardwired into our nervous system and many have

come to accept a constant feeling of tension as normal, even inevitable.

It isn't. Like the hero in the story, we have a choice. There is another door,

another response to the challenges of everyday living that is also hardwired

into our nervous system. And unlike the hero, whose destiny rests with chance,

we can discover which door is which. A general understanding of the nervous

system and how it responds to stress, coupled with training in three

fundamental yoga techniques, make it possible for us to distinguish one door

from the other. Practicing these techniques gives us the power to choose the

lady while leaving the door that unleashes the tiger firmly closed.

Releasing the Tiger The autonomic nervous system controls all the body's involuntary processes:

respiratory rate, heart rate, blood pressure, gastric juice secretion, peristalsis,

body temperature, and so on. It has two main components or branches—the

sympathetic and the parasympathetic. When we feel stressed, our brain

activates the sympathetic nervous system, which has come to be known as the

fight-or-flight response. This causes the adrenal medulla to secrete adrenaline

(also called epinephrine), a hormone that circulates through the bloodstream,

affecting almost every organ. Adrenaline revs up the body to survive a threat

to life and limb: The heart pumps faster and harder, causing a spike in blood

pressure; respiration increases in rate and moves primarily into the chest;

airways dilate to bring more oxygen into the body; blood sugar rises to provide

a ready supply of fuel; some blood vessels constrict to shunt blood away from

the skin and the core of the body, while others dilate to bring more blood to

the brain and limbs. The result? A body pumped up to fight or run, and a mind

that is hyperalert.


This response is a crucial reaction to a life-threatening event: when we find

ourselves face-to-face with a mountain lion, the stress response dramatically

increases our chances of surviving. And we've all heard stories of fantastic

feats: the mom lifting a car off her trapped child, the firefighter carrying a man

twice his size from a burning building. These are the benefits of the

sympathetic nervous system. Any time we respond quickly and decisively when

a life is at stake, this is the system to thank.

The fight-or-flight response is meant to be triggered sporadically, in those rare

moments when we are actually in peril. Ideally, it remains dormant until the

next close call (weeks, months, or even years later!). But in many of us this

response is triggered daily, even hourly. Some people—soldiers, tightrope

walkers, members of a SWAT team, for example—do find themselves in life-or-

death situations frequently. But for most of us, such situations are rare: a

mugging, a traffic accident, a close-up with a bear in the backcountry. Once

the threatening event is over, hormonal signals switch off the stress response,

and homeostasis is reestablished.

Fear of the unknown, major changes in our

circumstances, uncertainty about the future, our

negative attitudes all these are sources of stress.

The problem is that for many of us the fight-or-flight response rarely switches

off, and stress hormones wash through the body almost continuously.

The source of our stress is psychological rather than physical—a perception

that something crucial to us is threatened.

Fear of the unknown, major changes in our circumstances, uncertainty about

the future, our negative attitudes—all these are sources of stress. Today we

worry more about our jobs, our relationships, or getting stuck in traffic than we


do about fighting off a wild animal, but even though the perceived threat is

psychological, it still triggers the archaic survival response.

The upshot is that our bodies are in a constant state of tension, ready to fight

or flee, and this causes a host of physical problems. You can see what some of

these are if you look again at what happens when adrenaline courses through

the body: elevated blood pressure, rapid shallow breathing, high blood sugar,

and indigestion. What is more, adrenaline makes our platelets stickier, so our

blood will clot quickly if we are wounded. This increases our chances of

surviving a physical injury—but chronically sticky platelets are more apt to clot

and create blockages in our arteries. And this sets the stage for a heart attack

or a stroke.

The damage doesn't end there. When we are constantly in fight-or-flight mode,

the adrenal cortex begins to secrete cortisol, a steroid whose job is to help us

adapt to a prolonged emergency by ensuring that we have enough fuel.

Cortisol acts on the liver and muscle tissues, causing them to synthesize sugars

(glucose) and fats and release them into the bloodstream. From the body's

viewpoint, this is a reasonable response—dumping fat and sugar into the blood

will help us survive a shipwreck, for example. But when this fuel is not

metabolized in response to prolonged physical duress, disease results. Excess

sugar in the bloodstream leads to diabetes, and excess fat to high

cholesterol/high triglycerides. Both conditions boost our chances of

developing heart disease.

The steroids cortisol and cortisone quell inflammation in autoimmune diseases

and asthma, and so are useful when used infrequently and for brief periods, but

their constant presence in the bloodstream suppresses immune function. This

causes the white blood cells—those hardy defenders against bacteria, viruses,

cancer cells, fungi, and other harmful microorganisms—to become sluggish.

And this makes us more prone to disease, especially cancer and chronic

infections like Lyme disease, hepatitis, and the Epstein-Barr virus.


Sounds grim, doesn't it? It is. It's a tiger. A chronically activated sympathetic

nervous system keeps the body under constant pressure. If we ignore early

warning symptoms—tight shoulders, digestive upset, recurring headaches, an

increasing tendency to lose our temper or become easily upset—sooner or

later the tiger will tear us up. But we can make another choice. The autonomic

nervous system has another component, the parasympathetic nervous system.

Rather than living under the tyranny of a ramped-up sympathetic nervous

system, we can learn to trigger the parasympathetic system, the rest-and-

digest response, instead.

Just as the fight-or-flight response automatically kicks

in at the threat of danger, the rest-and-digest response

automatically responds to our sense of equilibrium.

Just as the fight-or-flight response automatically kicks in at the threat of

danger, the rest-and-digest response automatically responds to our sense of

equilibrium. When it is activated, the heart rate drops, blood pressure falls, and

respiration slows and deepens. Blood flow to the core of the body is

reestablished—this promotes good digestion, supports the immune system,

and infuses us with a sense of well-being.

We unconsciously achieve this state on vacation, in the throes of a hearty

laugh, or in deep sleep. It feels good, and it offers a much needed respite from

the hectic pace we set for ourselves. But we have come to accept stress as the

norm and to expect the feeling of relaxed well-being to come about only

sporadically—and so it does. We release the tiger a dozen times a day, even

though the other door is also there in every moment. Once we learn to open it

at will, we can override the harmful habit of triggering our stress response by

activating the rest-and-digest component of our nervous system instead.

9/25/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response 1 Yoga International

Greeting the Lady I use a variety of natural therapies in my medical practice, but the basic

treatments are drawn from yoga—stretching, breathing, relaxation, and

meditation—and these techniques are especially effective when it comes to

managing stress. You already know from personal experience that aerobic

exercise is excellent for dissipating stress-created tension, and that sugar,

caffeine, and spicy food contribute to jangling your nervous system and

shortening your temper. You are probably also familiar with the relaxing effects

of practicing yoga postures—they teach us to move and stretch our tense,

strained bodies and to focus on the breath. But do you know that breathing

slowly and deeply is the easiest way to activate the rest-and-digest system?

That is one reason yoga classes are so popular—they soothe frazzled nerves

and quiet anxious minds. But yoga also works at an even deeper level: it

reestablishes healthy breathing patterns, teaches us to relax consciously and

systematically, and gives us the opportunity to explore the inner workings of

our minds through meditation. These techniques—both separately and in

combination—nourish and strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system so

that the relax-and-digest response becomes our normal mode. The fight-or-

flight response is then reserved for emergencies, as nature intended. So let's

take a look at some ways we can open Door Number Two.

Diaphragmatic Breathing Babies and young children breathe deeply and fully, using the dome-shaped

diaphragm that separates the chest and abdominal cavities to move air in and

out of their lungs. Their bellies are relaxed and move in concert with their

breath. This is the natural, healthy way to breathe. But as we grow up we are

taught to constrict the abdomen (Pull your stomach in and stand up straight!),

and that training, coupled with an unconscious tendency to tighten the belly

when we experience stress, disrupts the natural flow of our breath. With the

abdomen pulled in, the breath is confined to the upper portion of the lungs

9/25/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response Yoga International

(from about the nipple line up). And because this breathing pattern is

perceived by the body to be a stress response, it reinforces the fight-or-flight

reaction.

Diaphragmatic breathing, on the other hand, activates the relax-and-digest

response by stimulating the primary mediator of the parasympathetic nervous

system, the vagus nerve. This nerve travels from the brain to nearly all the

thoracic and abdominal organs ("vagus" comes from the same root as

"vagabond"), and triggers a cascade of calming effects. Most of the time we

wait for it to be activated by something pleasant and hope for a trickle-down

effect, not realizing that the nerve (and hence the entire parasympathetic

nervous system) can be turned on from the bottom up by diaphragmatic

breathing.

Of all the processes regulated by the autonomic nervous system (heart rate,

blood pressure, secretion of gastric juices, peristalsis, body temperature, etc.),

only breathing can be controlled consciously. And in doing so, we stimulate the

branch of the vagus nerve that innervates the diaphragm (which carries a

message to the other vagus branches and the brain) to activate the entire rest-

and-digest response. This is why the first step in reversing our chronic stress

response is to learn to breathe again the way we were born to breathe.

If you haven't been trained in diaphragmatic breathing, find an experienced

teacher and practice every day until it once again becomes a habit. Then, as

you develop the skill of breathing from the diaphragm in the course of your

daily activities, you will begin to experience your breath as a barometer for the

nervous system. As long as you are breathing deeply and from the diaphragm,

you will find that you can access a feeling of calm and balance even when you

are confronted with an unpleasant situation. And you will also notice that if you

allow your breath to become shallow by breathing from your chest, anxiety

creeps in, your muscles tighten, and your mind begins to race and spin. When


this agitated breathing is prolonged, it creates an unsettled and defensive

outlook on life. Once you know this from your own experience, you can make a

different choice.

Systematic Relaxation To activate the parasympathetic nervous system, diaphragmatic breathing

makes an excellent beginning. But we need to do more, particularly when we

have spent years unconsciously flinging open the door to the tiger's cage. Daily

periods of relaxation are a must. When I tell my patients this, many of them say

they relax while they watch TV or read or knit or socialize. The problem is that

while these activities distract the mind from its usual worries (and so provide

some relief), they do little to relieve the stress we hold in the form of muscular

contraction and tension.

To reverse well-established habits of holding tension in our bodies, we need to

work with what the yogis call the energy body (pranamaya kosha). Systematic

relaxation practices offer a precise, orderly technique for releasing tension

from head to toe. There are a number of these techniques, and like all yoga

practices, they are best learned from an experienced teacher, and then honed

through patient practice. They range in complexity from simple

tension/relaxation exercises and point-to-point breathing practices to

techniques that require making fine distinctions among various points in the

energy body. But all involve moving our attention through the body in a

methodical fashion, usually while resting in shavasana (corpse pose). And all

require that we withdraw our attention from the drama of our lives. For the

duration of the practice, we let go of our memories, plans, worries, and

fantasies, and focus on what we are doing here and now as we move our

awareness calmly and quietly from one part of the body to another.

Breathing from the diaphragm, while systematically bringing our full attention

to one point in the body after another, not only releases tension and fatigue in

the places where we rest our attention, it also augments the energy flow


among those points. This promotes both healing and cleansing. Further,

because full engagement with a systematic relaxation practice requires that we

clear our minds and attend fully to the present moment, we are also refining a

skill that opens the door to meditation.

Meditation

Since stress begins with the perception that our lives (or at least our sense of

well-being) are in danger, working with the mind to alter our perceptions is the

most powerful technique for quieting our stress response. Most of what

activates our fight-or-flight response is not a matter of life or death. We may

feel pressured to accomplish a certain task or worried about what will happen

at tomorrow's meeting—but our lives don't depend upon the outcome. With

rare exceptions, the habitual thought patterns that create the experience of

stress for us are overreactions to events in our lives. Instead of responding in a

way that floods the body with adrenaline, however, we can reframe the

experience to make it not only less stressful, but also more accurate in

reflecting what is really happening ("I'm only in a traffic jam, I'm not at death's

door." "I want to please this person, but if I don't, I'm not going to be fired.")

This goes a long way toward quieting the fight-or-flight response, and it is a

skill that comes with experience in meditation.

Meditation helps us understand our mental habits by giving us the opportunity

to observe them from a neutral vantage point. This is why I often prescribe

meditation to my patients as a way to manage stress. I don't mean to minimize

meditation as a means of spiritual transformation, but in its early stages, one of

the most delicious benefits of meditation practice is seeing that it is possible to

avoid getting sucked into the banter and hysteria of our mental chatter.

Meditation allows us to witness that banter—to observe it impartially—without

being smack in the middle of it. It's like watching a rainstorm from a warm, dry

room. The peace we feel when we are watching our minds rather than

identifying with our thoughts is the peace that is at our core.

9/25/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response l Yoga International

When you are first learning to meditate, the mind will wander away from the

object of meditation to dwell on some other thought. This will happen again

and again. Your job is to gently and repeatedly bring your attention back to

your object of meditation, and to do it patiently, without judgment. Sometimes

it may seem as if the distracting thoughts are like movie images projected onto

a personal viewing screen in your mind. And some may be strange and wild.

But you are in the rest-and-digest mode, and as strange as they are, your

projections don't trigger the fight-or-flight response. The ability to simply

observe them is evidence that they aren't you. And the ability to distinguish

between the inner observer in you and the chaotic jumble in your mind means

that you can respond with equanimity, rather than react and flood your body

with stress hormones.

The more we practice meditation, the more we will be able to discriminate

between what is real and what is not—between what is truly life-threatening

and what is just a habitual overreaction. And once we begin to see that almost

everything that triggers our sympathetic nervous system is merely a habitual

overreaction, we can begin to make different choices. Instead of reacting to an

unpleasant event, we can cushion the jarring effect on our nervous system by

observing it in the same way that we observe our mental chatter in meditation

and by consciously breathing from the diaphragm.

This is likely to prove challenging in the beginning. When your spouse or a

coworker snaps at you, you may find yourself halfway into an angry retort

before you notice that you have switched to chest breathing. Then you need to

remind yourself to breathe from the diaphragm and to find a neutral vantage

point. But this skill comes with time, particularly when you are sitting for

meditation regularly, practicing diaphragmatic breathing, and punctuating your

day with a systematic relaxation practice. And as you choose to activate your

rest-and-digest response consciously and continuously, you will find yourself in

fight-or-flight mode only when your car skids on a patch of ice or the cat

knocks over a candle and sets the curtains on fire. Your health will improve, to

say nothing of your outlook on life. You have learned to choose the right door.

9/25/2016 How to Change Your Stress Response Yoga International

#stress relief (https://yogainternational.com/article/tag/stress-relief),#emotional wellbeing

(https://yogainternational.com/article/tag/emotional-weHbeing)

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CARRIE DEMERS

(https://yogainternational.com/profile/41)

(HTTPS:11YOGAINTERNATIONALCOM/PROFILE/41)

Board-certified in internal medicine, Carrie Demers, MD, is a holistic physician who blends

modern medicine with traditional approaches to health. After receiving her medical degree from

the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Demers went on to study massage, homeopathy nutrition,

herbal medicine, yoga, and ayurveda. She has been the Director of the Himalayan Institute Total

Health Center for the last 16 years. Widely recognized for her expertise, Dr. Demers has been

interviewed by numerous... Read more» (https://yogainternational.com/profile/41)

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COVER STORY

Just Breathe By Suzanne Craig Robertson

How Mindfulness 0 Meditation

Can Ease Stress in Your Life

and Law Practice

"The practice of law is stressful," writes Murfreesboro lawyer Pat

Blankenship. "Lawyers get paid to enter into the fray of conflict, to

expect and prepare for the worst case scenario. We are under great

pressure to bill more hours, to work more, relax less. Technology

keeps us constantly tuned in. There are myriad ways to mess it up,

break a rule, miss a deadline, or fail to be as persuasive as we must.

We seek and expect perfection of ourselves, and so do our clients.

We work in a full-on state of 'defensive' lawyering all day long, every

day, dropping down into survival mode and staying there."'

You know this because you are likely living it, but a recent study has

validated that lawyers are responding to this high-stress atmosphere

by hurting themselves in great numbers with the way they cope.

Problem drinking and mental health issues are at higher levels than

indicated by previous studies — and the statistics show that younger

lawyers are particularly at risk.

121 TENNESSEEBARJOURNAL SEPTEMBER2016

Lawyers Have More Issues Than Other Professions In their recently released joint study, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association Commis-sion on Lawyer Assistance Programs' found that 20.6 percent of the lawyers and judges surveyed — one-fifth! — reported problematic alcohol use. The study also found, using a variation of the questionnaire that focuses solely on the frequency of alcohol consumption, that 36.4 percent of the respondents quali-fied as problem drinkers — that's more than a third.

The study results also indicate that • 28 percent of the lawyers

responding experience depression, • 19 percent experience anxiety and • 23 percent experience stress.

All of the rates are higher than reported in earlier studies, and the alcohol use disorders and mental health problems are occurring at higher rates than in other professions and the general population, said Patrick R. Krill, director of the legal professionals program at Hazelden Betty Ford and a co-author of the study But he added there is not one clear answer to the question of why legal professionals appear to be more susceptible to these problems than people in other careers.

"This long-overdue study clearly vali-dates the widely held but empirically under-supported view that our profes-sion faces truly significant challenges related to attorney well-being," he said. "Any way you look at it, this data is very alarming and paints the picture of an unsustainable professional culture that's harming too many people. Attorney impairment poses risks to the struggling individuals themselves and to our communities, government, economy and society"'

The Hazelden-ABA study should be a wake-up call, to be sure. Your profession is stressful, but what can YOU do about it? Take a look at findings by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, which suggest that mindfulness meditation can help ease psychological stresses like

anxiety depression and pain. Dr. Eliza-beth Hoge, a psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disor-ders at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says in the Harvard Health Blog 4 that mindfulness

How to Meditate One way to cultivate mindfulness, according to Mindful.org ,* is to medi-tate. In just five minutes you can learn to reduce stress, anxiety and negative emotions.

• Find a relaxed, comfortable position.

• Notice and relax your body. • Tune into your breath. Feel the

natural flow, in and out. • Be kind to your wandering mind.

If you notice that you are thinking of other things, gently redirect your attention back to your breathing.

• Stay there for five to seven minutes.

• Notice your whole body. Relax more deeply.

• Appreciate yourself for doing this practice today.

* "A 5-Minute Breathing Meditation to Cultivate Mindfulness," Mindful, Feb. 26, 2016, www.mindful.org/a-five-minute-breathing-meditation/ "

meditation makes perfect sense for treating anxiety. "People with anxiety have a problem dealing with distracting thoughts that have too much power," she explains. "They can't distinguish between a problem-solving thought and a nagging worry that has no benefit."

But you don't have time to wedge in a class to help to you relax — what a joke, that would stress you out even more to be there when you should be working. Don't you wish people would stop talking to you about work-life balance? You will get to it one day when you have time.

Calm Down, There Is Help There are many ways to deal with the

demands of law practice, to take steps to continue your life and law practice in a more sustainable manner. Many involve using techniques that can reduce stress and benefit you in the long run. You might not even have to give up the crazy hours or sacrifice the adversarial nature of your work to approach your job in a healthier way

Laura McClendon sees this a lot. She is the executive director of the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program (TLAP), which not only helps lawyers, judges, bar applicants and law students with a variety of addiction issues, but also with stress-related and emotional health issues.

"We often meet with attorneys who want help transitioning into a more healthy lifestyle," McClendon says. "We'll introduce mindfulness ideas, and then direct them toward community support and resources. We then try to set up some sort of accountability piece — for instance, if you come in here with a specific mental or physical health goal, I will call, email, text or meet with you every couple of weeks to see what kind of progress you're making."

TLAP can help you decide what's most important, too. "Lots of times indi-viduals have TOO many goals, and the magnitude can be paralyzing," McClendon says. "We will help you decide your priorities and then break your goal(s) into manageable, bite-size pieces."

What Are Mindfulness and Meditation? To allow mindfulness and meditation to help you with stress-reduction in your daily life, you need to know what they are.

"Mindfulness is a simple concept," writes Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in his land-mark work, Wherever You Go, There You Are.' "[It] means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and nonjudgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity and acceptance of present-moment reality. It wakes us up

continued on page 14

TENNESSEEBARJOURNAL 1 13 SEPTEMBER2016

Mary Griffin

Just Breathe continued from page 13

to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of these moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation." Kabat-Zinn is known as the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).

Meditation, then, is a technique used, along with mindfulness, to rest the mind, to try "experiencing the center of consciousness within," wrote Swami Rama. 6 "In meditation, the mind is clear, relaxed and inwardly focused. When you meditate, you are fully awake and alert, but your mind is not focused on the external world or on the events taking place around you. Medita-tion requires an inner state that is still and one-pointed so that the mind becomes silent."

If you are thinking you don't have time for any of that, you might be surprised to know about some Tennessee lawyers who practice mind-fulness and meditation during the work day. In fact, they say because of the benefits they gain, they don't have time NOT to do it.

Some people come to the point of incorporating meditation and other stress-reduc-tion techniques into their lives after a scare, often a health or personal crisis. Others catch on sooner and start before there is a crisis. That is the hope of these stories.

Learning the Hard Way Ten years out of Vanderbilt Law School, Heather Hubbard was a partner and practice group leader in the Nashville office of Waller, working in intellectual property litigation about 50 to 60 hours a week. She began on the law firm path because that is what she thought she was supposed to do.

"I was always so driven, hard-wired to be a workaholic. I was a litigator. Every-thing was adversarial and that would carry over. It didn't matter if I was on the phone with opposing counsel or at

home. I would get defensive about anything perceived as a threat." Her life was this way until she finally realized something had to change.

"The truth is I had several personal disasters, crises," Hubbard, 36, says. These events made her "take stock" of her life. "I didn't feel like I had any control over my life. From the moment I woke up until I went to bed I was tense and constantly worried about what was going to be the next emergency. It was like being on call 24/7. I was constantly having to cancel plans with family and

But I Don't Have Time to Practice Mindfulness! "One of the many things cancer taught me was to commit to my health, to make that one of my primary concerns," says Mary Griffin. After her breast cancer diagnosis she took an eight-week course on meditating "for people who have been through a health scare, because I didn't have a way to relieve stress" and because she found it difficult to start a practice on her own.

"I have high-energy border collie personality," Griffin laughs. "Meditative mind-fulness is the only thing that holds me in my seat sometimes. Everybody can do it. It's easy." She even meditates walking from her car to her office.

"You can do it anytime, even in middle of the workday." To do this, she may plant her feet on the ground and breathe deeply or take a body scan (she explains this is being mindful of the state each part of your body is in). She tries to get out of her office at lunch every day, walking and meditating, "paying attention to those details that normally would pass me by. This is meandering," she stresses, "not exercise."

Some meditations are as quick as a minute, Griffin says, "and everyone has a minute!" She suggests starting with guided meditation, although that may be the "hardest part for attorneys — listening to someone else tell you what to do."

Pat Blankenship also recommends working in short periods of meditation throughout the day — even just 10 minutes. "It gives you a break, a vaca-tion," she says. "You can drop out of any stressful situation — you can change your physiology and your psychology about what's happening as well. ... It becomes a tool you can use at any given moment as the need arises," she says.

"The busier you are the more you need it and the more you'll benefit from it," Blankenship says. "It's becoming critical. The statistics about how we are suffering bears that out. You've got to slow it down for a moment."

141 TENNESSEERAHJOURNAL SEPTEMBER2016

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friends, always letting the clients' demands come first. It didn't matter how people treated me.

"I literally let my career consume my life, to the detriment of everyone around me." Hubbard says she felt frustrated but couldn't explain why, so she began a journey to find more meaning and happiness. It was in this search that she found mindfulness and meditation, which she began practicing while she was working at Waller.

"It completely changed my life," she says, noting that people had begun asking her what was different about her. "I started noticing over time the things that used to trigger, cause me to over-react or get me really worked up, didn't any more. Didn't even bother me."

As she noticed this change in herself, she says she realized her passion was to teach what she had learned to others. In October 2014 she left Waller to start The Language of Joy, a company for coaching, retreats and other services to

help professionals "figure out how to embrace their ambitions while not losing their sense of self and what's important in life."

One of the ways she does this for herelf is keeping her routine of medi-tating every morning for 15 to 30 minutes, and staying mindful all the time.

"For me, mindfulness is not some-thing you sit down and do," she says. "It's a way of living, a different way of looking at life."

"Law schools teach us to be skeptical, critical and negative, which is not a good combination from a mental health standpoint," she says. "We start making all these excuses as to how we can't change anything. Generally, there is a lot you can change."

She emphasizes that although she left the law firm track (but she does main-tain her law license), that choice is not for everyone. For most people she coaches, she says, it's about "how to be

successful in their current situation, not to make a change. There is a lot of talk about work-life balance, but I actually think it's less about balance and more about priorities. It's not about working less, it's about having boundaries and knowing what's important to you and making that a priority"

Noting the standard long hours of the law firm work week, Hubbard says, "The culture sets you up where you can turn to a lot of addictions. That can be alcohol or drugs or work, which I do think is an addiction, if you don't know how to manage. It can be a very unhealthy profession. But you can manage. You can even thrive."

Cancer Changed How She Looked at Life and Work Mary Griffin is looking at life a lot differ-ently than she did a few years ago, too. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, underwent


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Heather Hubbard. Photo by Photographix.


chemotherapy and a double mastectomy she learned some hard lessons.

"As an attorney, wife and mother, I am used to taking care of people and things. It was hard at first asking for help, but I have come to see it as a gift," she wrote in a 2013 article. 7 "Attorneys are sometimes seen as arrogant or know-it-alls; but I couldn't be more vulnerable now I have reached out to my supervisors, co-workers and the bar in general, and I have gotten help."

She is now "cleared of cancer as best as you can be" but was left with side effects from the medica-tion after the chemo, causing ongoing neuro-pathic pain.

"A lot of attor-neys have trouble dealing with pain management. The medicine and chemo caused this neuropathic pain, and it may never go away," she says. She currently walks with a cane when she goes outside because of damage in one of her knees.

Fortunately, she has found prac-tices that help: pilates for strengthening her quads, changing the way she eats, her faith, proper support — and "counseling when I need it. All these

different things enable me to come to work full-time, support my daughter and spouse, be a daughter to my parents, and enjoy each day," she says. She chose pilates because with the double mastectomy she was able to work with equipment to get back her range of motion in her arms.

"If I didn't have this separate practice

of pilates, of stretching my muscles and. mindfulness, it would be very easy to become depressed," she says. "You have to find your own way, what works for you. For me it's about taking each day and thinking, 'How am I going to have the best day today?' It's not believing you are going to be happy or pain free all the time — there is nothing depressing about that. That's called life."

Griffin, 50, is the state Social Security administrator for the Tennessee Depart-ment of Treasury in Nashville, and is chair of the Tennessee Bar Association's Attorney Well-Being Committee. "All of us want better health for ourselves. We want better health for other attorneys and other people in general. We want that for everybody"

Griffin was still wearing a wig from the chemotherapy's hair loss as she was helping plan a program called "Better Next Year" in 2013. The Attorney Well-Being Committee has hosted the contin-uing legal education event for several years during the TBAs annual convention.

She explains that the committee wanted Better Next Year to have a focus on health care and anxiety issues and ask questions like: How do you function when you have a debilitating thing happen to you? How do attorneys keep going? How do you bounce back from job loss, a diagnosis of cancer, other illnesses or the death of a spouse?

"Resilience," she answers herself. "We are aggressive, but are we resilient?" she asks. "We take care of other people, but do we take care of ourselves? The studies show that, no, we do not."

The CLE has also covered topics such as stress, laughter, yoga, technology game-play, exercise and more. Griffin has seen an increase in participation in the program, especially among lawyers between 40 and 60 years old who want to hear more about work-life balance. "But we have work to do in our profes-sion. Lawyers don't want to be seen as needing any kind of help. Attorneys are crappy at getting help and admitting any vulnerability. I would put myself in that category," she says.

"But cancer will whack you upside

161 TENNESSEEBARJOURNAL SEPTEMBER201 6

Pat Blankenship

Local: (615) 741-3238 Toll Free . (877) 424-8527

the head. Before that I helped people. I didn't need help. I am just a much happier person today, probably because of the illness," she admits. "I got to rethink how I want to live the rest of my life — I got an appreciation for it — and you never know how long that will be."

You Don't Have to Quit to Find Balance: Work It In Now a yoga teacher at Middle Tennessee State University, Pat Blanken-ship practiced law for many years while serving as the managing partner for Blankenship & Blankenship, Attorneys at Law, in Murfreesboro. She says she felt fortunate to have an office practice while raising four children.

"I was practicing exactly the way I wanted to practice, but I can see how law practice freaks people out, and I understand being under a tremendous amount of pressure."

It was not her law practice that drove her to yoga and meditation: instead, in a quest to find ways to thrive in a demanding and stressful world, she read a book that changed her life. It was Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living, and around 2004 she began practicing mindfulness, meditation and yoga. She embraced it, now is certified to teach it, and has since retired her law license.

"Everybody is looking for [more of a stress-free life]," Blankenship, 64, says. "Quality of life is critical to our good health. Stress does in fact hurt us, if not kill us. All of my lawyer friends, regular-world friends, students, when I ask what brings you to yoga, they say, 'I have got to learn to manage my stress. I need to know how to settle down.' I teach theo-ries on how to use yoga to manage depression and anxiety using meditation as a tool. The movement is toward recognizing the kind of world we are living in and how best to manage and navigate that world."

Blankenship is aware that to manage this stress in this faster-spinning world, the answer for some is to reduce work hours, or even as in her case, to change professions away from such a stressful one. But "work-life balance" doesn't

always mean that. "When I hear 'work-life balance,' I

hear 'work fewer hours, spend time with friends, don't take your phone.' Lawyers find that extremely difficult to do," she knows. "There's no easy way to bill all the hours we need to bill all the hours we need to. But mindful meditation is something they can do between phone calls and appointments. It can be inte-grated in a long and busy day to manage your stress."

The Physiology of Stress "Fight or flight" is a concept that has been around since the beginning of time

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— when something stressful happens, the body's instinctual reaction is to either fight or flee.

"When that instinct kicks in, a lot of adrenaline and cortisol flow," Blankenship explains. "Those work to change the digestive system, heart rate, brain, and cause the muscles to tense up and grab the bones. That was great when the stress was the presence of the saber-tooth tiger. But we now live our lives in such a way that we are always under stress and our bodies get stuck in the fight-or-flight mode — and it's detrimental to our health and our well-being." She points out that too much adrenaline and cortisol can cause weight gain and heart disease, anxiety and other physical and emotional maladies.

"Mindful meditation allows you to reduce the levels of cortisol and

adrenaline in the body — it's like taking a brief vacation from the fight-or-flight mechanism," Blankenship says. This is one of the things she teaches to her MTSU students, that "your stress is killing you because you are producing so much more adrenaline and cortisol than your body needs, but you can learn to manage it."

There is more science behind the changes that occur in the body, too. In studies, MRI scans have shown that after an eight-week course of mindfulness practice, the brain's "fight or flight" center, the amygdala, appears to shrink, writes Tom Ireland in an article in Scien-


SEPTEMBER2016 TENNESSEEBARJOURNAL 1 17


tifie American. 8 "As the amygdala shrinks, the pre-frontal cortex — associ-ated with higher order brain functions such as awareness, concentration and decision-making — becomes thicker. The connection between the amygdala and the rest of the brain gets weaker, while the connections between areas associated with attention and concentra-tion get stronger."

"The scale of these changes correlates with the number of hours of meditation practice a person has done," says Adri-enne Taren, a researcher studying mind-fulness at the University of Pittsburgh.

"In other words," Ireland writes, "our more primal responses to stress seem to be superseded by more thoughtful ones. "9

All Stress Is Not Bad Pat Blankenship has seen up close this stress-response and how meditation practices can help — her daughter Katie Blankenship, 35, is a civil litigation attorney focusing on health care issues

with Waller in Nashville. Pat says Katie has used mindfulness and meditation for many years to manage a high-stress life. Currently, Katie works "50ish hours" per week or "60 in a really long week." She's quick to say she enjoys the work and appreciates how the firm lets its lawyers set their hours based on what work needs to get done.

Waller has a billable hour goal for associates of 1,800 hours per year. As if that is not enough, she is also planning an Oct. 9 wedding.

"Waller is great about how you build your schedule," she says, explaining that the morning of this interview she had a meeting at 8:15 so she went in early, but other days she can go in a little later. "I can vary my schedule; that works for me."

The group she is in, litigation, has been a great fit for her, she says. There is "not an expectation that you are at your desk 13 hours a day — it's not

Katie Blankenship

about face time — we are hard-charging litigators. You go to work and get the work done. We are not doing it just for the sake of doing it. It's not this other

Recommended Reading, Links and Apps Books

Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabot-Zinn, Hyperion, 2005 (originally published in 1994).

Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabot-Zinn, Bantam Dell (1990). The Yoga Sutras of Patalijali by Swami Satchidananda The Yoga Sutras of Patafijali: A New Edition, Translation, and

Commentary by Edwin F. Bryant. Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and

Ultimate Freedom by B.K.S. lyengar, John J. Evans and Douglas Abrams (2006).

Articles "The Heart and Soul of Health and Wellness" series by Pat Blanken-ship, 2016, www.tba.org/journal/the-heart-and-soul-of-health-and-wellness

• Three Steps to Mindful Meditation • Seven Choices for Balance in Chaos • Breathing Through Mindful Transition

"Younger lawyers are most at risk for substance abuse and mental health problems, a new study reports," by James Podgers,

ABA Journal, Feb. 7, 2016, www.abajournal.com/news/ article/younger_lawyers_are_most_at_risk_for_substance_ abuse_and_mental_health_prob

"How lawyers can avoid burnout and debilitating anxiety," by Leslie A. Gordon, ABA Journal, July 2015, www.abajournal.com/magazine/ article/how_lawyers_ can_avoid_burnout_and_debilitating_anxiety

Links Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program, www.tlap.org Tennessee Bar Association Attorney Well-Being Committee, www.tba.org/committee/attorney-well-being-committee

Apps

The Mindfulness App: 5-day guided practice and introduction to mindfulness • Calm: Relaxing sounds and scenes

Left vs Right: A brain training game Stop, Breathe & Think: Creating a personal forcefield of calm

and peace Gratitude Journal: Writing down life's best moments

18 TENN ESSEEBARJOURNAL SEPTEM B ER2016

layer of stress of making sure the partner sees you there."

She says the partners are interested and invested in her life because they want her to be healthy. The philosophy is "let's go as hard as we can to do the best job we can and take care of yourself."

She describes her job as stressful, but notes that all stress is not bad stress.

"You're engaged and interested," she says of positive stress. "I enjoy it. Some-times it's a trick of making myself stop working, which can be hard. I will try to take all of Saturday off if I can."

On regular work days, she deals with the stress a lot of different ways. "Every day I build in 30 to 45 minutes to exer-cise: I stretch, do yoga, run, walk and usually try to meditate for five or 10 minutes to start the day with a clear head." In the evening on an average day she will get home around 7 or 8 p.m., have dinner and relax, enjoy a glass of wine on the couch, decompress and try to get away from all the screens as much as she can.

"Everybody has to find what works for them. Some people are not going to like yoga or meditation — it might not be for them. Find what speaks to you to keep a balance," she advises.

She has been doing yoga and medita-tion for at least 10 years, having taken a yoga class at MTSU when she was a

student there — and she never stopped. "It is a crucial part of my day-to-day

living and existence," Katie says. "I make time for it. I get up earlier. Somedays it doesn't happen and you have to give yourself grace for that. [Schedule it] the same way you make time for spending

time with family and friends." "What I notice is that I'm keeping

my stress level down and I'm in a good mood. I'm happier and more engaged. I see myself doing better, feeling better throughout the day Once I'm in my


A Trend Toward a Mental Health Requirement? There is a trend in considering requiring specific education on substance abuse and mental health. The ABA Standing Committee on Continuing Legal Education, through its MCLE Model Rule Review Project, is looking at the current ABA Model Rule for Minimum Continuing Legal Education, says TBA Director of CLE Mindy Thomas Fulks.

"They want to make it a requirement to have a separate hour for mental health and one for substance abuse," she says. Fulks, who is a member of the committee, explains that "when the ABA comes out with model rules, it will trigger the states to look at their own rules to possibly update."

The group is inviting comments through Nov. 1. For more details or questions about the proposals, email [email protected] .

Check Out These Courses • Mindfulness in the Practice of Law. What is mindfulness? What are its benefits? And how are lawyers and law schools across the country using mindfulness to enhance decision-making skills and promote greater overall satisfaction with the practice of law. TBA CLE webcast Sept. 20 at Noon Central, https://cle.tba.org/

• Lifeguard Training for the Legal Profession (Ethics). Why are members of the legal profession particularly susceptible to depression and suicide? How can you help someone you think might be experiencing depression, stress, etc.? In this program, you will learn about practical strategies and available resources that may save a life. Archived webcast https://cle.tba.orglcataloglcourse/3601

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Jerry Farmer

Just Breathe continuecl from page 19

day, I'm barreling through it. [That makes it] even more important to keep me anchored."

Katie was in law school just a little over two years ago, having graduated from Belmont in 2014. She doesn't recall much addressed in school about achieving balance or health.

"Law schools try to 'weed out' those who are not going to make it," she says. "It is purposefully a pressure cooker, and there is a benefit to that. You do need to be thrown into the deep end. We are adults, and you need to be responsible for our schedules. But once you get into your second and third years ... I would applaud a school trying to teach [something like that]."

That "random" yoga class she took at MTSU so many years ago is still paying dividends. Katie liked it so much she took her mother, Pat, with her to try it for the first time and she liked it, too.

"Now mom is teaching that class," Katie laughs.

When the Wrong Path Turns into the Right Path When Jerry Farmer finished at Wash-ington and Lee School of Law in 1985, with a finance undergraduate degree no less, he was primed for the Big Law fast track.

"I thought it's all about money so I need to make as much as I can. That was my philosophy of life," he says. "Then, I thought, when I had enough I could do whatever I wanted to do."

His big banking law firm job in Florida was rough. "I was miserably unhappy — it was not for me." But slow to learn the lesson, he moved to Birmingham and got another large firm job, this time in litigation.

"The pressure of big firm practice and the demands were tough," he says. "Anyone will tell you that." He was so unhappy he quit that job and "kind of took a spacer in life."

Farmer had taken a break from a narrow career path a couple of times before -- both as an undergrad and

before entering law school, including driving a truck and working in a factory — and after taking a stab at fiction writing he again looked to the law, but this time with the focus of helping people instead of trying to make lots of money

"It took me around five years of struggling with the 'standard model' of trying to follow that career path of a big-time lawyer," he says.

He took an IOLTA-funded job at Legal Services in Huntsville, Alabama, working with domestic violence victims on things like divorces and orders of protection. This job was a winner, he thought, because he found more fulfill-ment in seeing the direct results of helping people. But when he fell in love and planned to marry a tenured professor at MTSU in Murfreesboro two hours away, he was ready to pack up and move. So he found himself in the job market again.

His timing was fortuitous — his resumé landed on then-City Attorney Thomas L. Reed Jr.'s desk on the day the staff attorney had resigned. Farmer got that job, working there for eight and a half years until he started his own firm in 2003.

All this time he was working his way

toward the life he wanted, but he didn't realize it. He recalls some advice he heard while in law school that a person has a choice of being a "big firm/tall building lawyer" or a that a small town might be a better fit. "You won't make as much money but you might be successful and have a happy life," they told him. "That is not what I chose coming out of law school, but that's where I wound up — and where I'm most happy and moderately successful." He did not always meditate, but in 2005 he discovered yoga and began paying more attention.

"I've learned for me it's important to live a balanced life," Farmer says. He does this in part by practicing Yoga asanas (poses) every morning and evening, going to a yoga class twice a week: once on Thursday evenings and another for two hours on Saturday. He also reads ancient scriptures, the Yoga Sutras, explaining that "sutras" is a deri-vation of our word for sutures or thread, so the sutras are threads of wisdom. He also recommends and finds wisdom in the poetry of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth — particularly Wordsworth's poem, "The World Is Too Much with Us Late and Soon."

201 TENNESSEEBARJOURNAL SEPTEMBER2016

Now when Farmer finishes a task, he makes a point to "process it" instead of jumping right on to the next task. "Lawyers throughout the day have a lot of short intense interactions — reading a case but the phone rings — and you turn your mind from one thing to another. After each brief period of inten-sity, of focus and concentration, I'll make it a point to let go of that and breathe and process. I breathe before I move on to the next thing. I do that every time I work on solving a client's problem," he says.

At 62, he also practices yoga and other types of physical fitness every morning, then goes to work in his office surrounded by original works of art that he created himself. He took art classes, he says, "in an effort to develop the right hemisphere in my brain."

That was part of finding balance for his life. "If you don't [find balance], you're going to burn yourself out," he

says. "There are people who resort to alcohol and drugs to cope with the stress. They are looking for something to alter their moods. But there are other ways to mood-alter that are healthful, like meditation, like yoga — but they take time and effort to learn."

Before yoga, when Farmer was a new, impressionable lawyer who had not landed on his right path, a partner at the first law firm where he worked told him a story about the Golden Handcuffs. The Golden Handcuffs represented the lure of the big law firms with high starting salaries with their long hours and stressful conditions. "When you put on the Golden Handcuffs, that means you find yourself making more money than you ever imagined and have a lifestyle beyond what you dreamed — and a level of stress that you could not dream of. You find you can't let it go because if you do the money won't be there."

Farmer had them on for a while,

but when he took them off he never looked back.

Calm Your Body, Calm Your Mind Sharon Lusk did not come to yoga late or start because of a high-stress job crisis, although she is both a lawyer and a certified public accountant so she probably had every opportunity She started yoga when she was 12 after her pediatrician suggested it to her mother because her daughter was so highly competitive and self-critical.

"I wanted to excel at everything I did," she says. It was no easy feat to find a yoga class back in 1968, much less for a preteen. "I was the only kid and had to have special permission to go." Her mother went with her, starting a lifelong habit for both of them.

Most people begin yoga as a physical practice, she says, but "if you go back to real roots of yoga, the yoga sutras are all about calming your body so you can


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Sharon Lusk


calm your mind. The yoga philosophy is that your body is a reflection of what's going on in your mind. If you calm your body, you can calm your mind."

Lusk is executive vice president at KLA Healthcare Consultants in Memphis while also maintaining a private media-tion practice. She incorporates medita-tion in her work day all the time, she says, especially in her mediation practice. "Mediation is my real love — and it goes hand in hand with mindful prac-tice." She does some family mediation, but mostly it is for health care partnerships that are breaking up or merging on the front end, she explains. "This often helps them do that in more amicable manner."

She uses "meditation quite a bit with clients to help them reframe looking at a situation if I am dealing with somebody who can only look at what they are facing in the direst of circumstances. Instead of worst case scenarios, I say let's look at the positive, what opportuni-ties would this present? If you go through this practice breakup, what opportunities would this present to you? What would you be able to do instead? They are able to look at other choices and they can get excited."

Lusk stresses that the "breath work" is very important. "Teaching someone to slow their breath also slows their mind and will allow them to become calmer if they are anxious." As you do this, she cautions that the most important thing is "recognizing when your mind is getting away from you. You have that little monkey chatter in your mind all the time," she points out. "[Meditation] helps you remain calm. How you breathe is a large part of how to raise energy levels and to calm you."

To clear up a common misconcep- tion, yoga and meditation are not associ-

ated with a particular religion, she says. "I am Christian and I do meditation and follow Buddhist practices and modify them to my own beliefs."

In addition to her professional jobs, she teaches one yoga class every week for a senior group. Every day Lusk gets up at 4:30 for her meditation practice at home, then usually goes for a walk

outside. At least four days a week she will go to a class of some type of yoga practice. She says she is glad to be back in the swing of yoga and meditation — she says she had stopped meditating for 15 years earlier in her life, but when she found the original problems coming back, she returned to what worked earlier in her life.

To people who say they don't have time for all of that, she says she doesn't have time not to.

"I find I'm much more effective when I can calm my mind and I can focus on what I am doing. I am able to prioritize and get things done in the proper order. Look at how much time we spend worrying about things. If we could get

rid of that and get in the present moment, we would have so much more time to do what we need to do." 'T4'

Suzanne Craig Robertson is editor of the Tennessee Bar Journal.

Notes 1. "The Heart and Soul of Health and Well-

ness: Three Steps to Mindful Meditation," by

Pat Blankenship, September 2016 Tennessee Bar

Journal online, www.tba.org/journal/the-heart-

and-soul-of-health-and-wellness.

2. "Younger lawyers are most at risk for

substance abuse and mental health problems, a

new study reports," by James Podgers, Amer-

ican Bar Association Journal, Feb. 7, 2016,

www.abajournal.com/news/article/younger_

lawyers_are_most_at_risk_for_substance_

abuse_and_mental_health_prob

3. kl.

4. "Mindfulness meditation may ease

anxiety, mental stress," by Julie Corliss,

Harvard Health Blog, Jan. 8, 2014, http://

www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness-

meditation-may-ease-anxiety-mental-stress-

201401086967.

5. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindful-

ness Meditation in Everyday Life, by Dr. Jon

Kabat-Zinn, Hyperion, 2005 (originally

published in 1994).

6. "The Real Meaning of Meditation," by

Swami Rama, Yoga International, June 3, 2013,

https://yogainternational.com/article/view/

the-real-meaning-of-meditation.

7. "Random Acts of Kindness," by Mary

Griffin, May 1, 2013, Tennessee Bar Journal

online, www.tba.org/journal/random-acts-of-

kindness . Also see "Better Next Year," by

Suzanne Craig Robertson, May 2013, Tennessee

Bar Journal, www.tba.org/journal/better-next-

year and "Better Next Year Extras, http://

www.tba.org/journal/better-next-year-extras.

8. "What Does Mindfulness Meditation Do

to Your Brain?" by Tom Ireland, Scientific Amer-

ican, June 12, 2014, http://

blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-

does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain.

9. Id.

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