MindBodySpace

This month was all about relationships but how about our relationship to ourselves? This mini meditation helps you reconnect to your body helping you connect with kindness so you can nurture and care for yourself. The somatosensory nervous system is what we're tapping into on this meditation in order to elicit our relaxation response, the antidote to our stress response. Click the share button and send to everyone you know who could use an immune and mood booster. 

Whether you're single or not, you'll get some unique insights on how we meet the special people in our lives. Join me on this Valentine's Day with Jon Birger, an award-winning magazine writer and author of two dating books — Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (2015) and Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (2021). A former senior writer at Fortune, Jon has been named to AlwaysOn Network’s list of “Power Players in Technology Business Media.” He's also a familiar face and voice on television, radio, and podcasts, with appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America, BBC World Service, Girls Gotta Eat, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News — discussing topics ranging from dating to investing. A graduate of Brown University, Jon lives with his family in Larchmont, N.Y.

Find his book HERE

Rx Chill Pill — Meditate Your Brain to Resilience Podcast. It's my monthly chat with Fiona Murden, my great friend, awesome mom, award-winning author, and host of Dot to Dot Podcast.  Each month we sit down to discuss the science and real life applications of topics that help us achieve our highest potential. This episode is about how we can find what we value in our romantic relationships, sometimes in strange and miraculous ways.

Fiona and I hit it off immediately! We are both passionate about teaching everyone, especially ourselves, the science behind positively influencing our own brains. We are on a mission to widely share practical cognitive and motivational research tools with curious people who want to fulfill their potential and ultimately, lead happier lives. Fiona is a Chartered Psychologist who coaches top performers and C suite individuals in business, healthcare, sports, and politics to achieve optimal performance.

Sign up to get FREE useful worksheets, cheatsheets, and resources at mindbodyspace.com/podcast

Fiona has a podcast Dot to Dot Behind the Person you can listen HERE

Read about her insightful book Mirror Thinking HERE

This mini-meditation will elicit your Relaxation Response, the antidote to your stress response, while you visualize a situation from your past. Have you ever regretted something that happened? Something you said? If you're a normal run of the mill human, the answer is an emphatic "yes". Perhaps you overreacted or you handled a situation less than optimally. Or maybe there's something you want to do better next time, whether it's public or "zoom" speaking or your next tryout, audition, or interview. Reflecting on our past experiences, in a healthy way, can have a profound effect on our learning and improving for the future. Listen to this visualization to help you "do over" some situation you wish could have turned out better, or a performance that you want to improve for next time.

Meditation is not just about sitting still with a mantra. Meditation is also a form of deep learning. Since New Year's Resolutions are so notoriously difficult to stick to, I wrote a guest blog on School of Thought Blog at the Revolution School to shed some light on how we can have a better chance at learning more efficiently. Here's a little recap and practical tips on how to Reflect to Move Forward.

Read the whole blog post here: School of Thought Blog at the Revolution School

Meditate your brain to resilience with Dr. Juna Bobby, M.D., board certified physician who switched career tracks from clinician to teaching students, parents, and educators the science of mind-body medicine for resilience and peak performance. 

Meditation comes in many forms. The word itself is defined as contemplation, reflection, mental exercises for reaching higher levels of awareness like mantra meditation or mindfulness, it also means to focus on ideas or thoughts, to plan or project in the mind our intentions and purpose. 

Meditation is a form of learning and we know that learning changes our brain. This podcast will cover essential research backed topics and tools of neuroscience and stress physiology to boost you and your family's resilience — your ability to bounce back from set backs — so you can stress less, do more of what's important to you, and be happier.

Episodes include interviews with experts, extraordinarily resilient people, diving deeper into the neurophysiology of stress and resilience, organization, and adaptability. 

Mini Meditation episodes will help you to take a few minutes anytime, anywhere, to elicit your relaxation response, the physiologic opposite of your stress response.

Please share this podcast with any curious friends, family, colleagues, who want to learn science backed tools to manage stress and boost resilience.

Suggest topics and send questions about resilience to: [email protected]

Rx Chill Pill — Meditate Your Brain to Resilience Podcast.  This new episode is called “Our Highest Potential”. It's my monthly chat with Fiona Murden, my great friend, awesome mom, award-winning author, and host of Dot to Dot Podcast. We immediately hit it off because we are both passionate about the science behind positively influencing our own brains. We are on a mission to widely share practical cognitive and motivational research tools with curious people who want to fulfill their potential and ultimately, lead happier lives. Fiona is a Chartered Psychologist who coaches top performers and C suite individuals in business, healthcare, sports, and politics to achieve optimal performance. 

Sign up to get FREE useful worksheets, cheatsheets, and resources at mindbodyspace.com/podcast

I met Dr. Karen Chan Barrett when she gave a fascinating talk as part of a special presentation called Music and the Mind with world renowned soprano, Renee Fleming, at The Juilliard School in NYC. This program is inspired by Ms. Fleming’s collaboration with the National Institutes of Health in association with National Endowment for the Arts, called the Sound Health initiative, and created for general audiences, the program explores the power of music in relation to our health and neuroscience.

This evening’s highlight was “ improvisation and the brain”. Dr. Karen Chan Barrett, Ph.D. representing Dr. Charles Limb's Music and Perception Lab at the University of California San Francisco discussed research on the neuroscience of musical creativity and improvisation. Dr. Barrett is also faculty at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, co-teaching a class on Music and the Brain with Dr. Indre Viskontas.

Dr. Barrett was adjunct faculty at the Peabody Institute of Music and Johns Hopkins University, where she taught seminars on music cognition. Dr. Barrett has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Music Theory and Cognition and is an accomplished pianist.

She tells us about the fascinating research on  the impact that music and musical training has on our brain development, - hint, it’s not just about listening to classical music - she discusses how they gather data on creativity, even improv comedy, and the brain.

Karen also tells us the surprising reason she, a classically trained pianist, pivoted to become a neuroscientist and how her husband, a classically trained cellist, taught himself into a whole new career.

If you have kids taking music classes or kids who are interested in STEaM fields, get them to listen along with you. You may even get them to practice more and start the conversation about how all of these seemingly disparate fields connect!

That was Dr. Karen Chan Barrett, mom, neuroscientist, classical pianist, showing us that STEM is really STEAM and you can definitely excel at more than one thing in life, and yes, lifestyle matters!

Find out more about Dr. Karen Chan Barrett and Dr. Charles Limb's Music and Perception Lab and Renee Fleming’s work in the show notes at MindBodySpace.com podcast Episode #62

Look out for the upcoming monday meditation inspired by Music

You can email me at [email protected] with questions for myself or my guests for the new Tuesday Q&A segment starting in 2021.

Leslie Koenig MD is a mom, a combat veteran, and author of “Stress Relief Survival Guide: Fast, Easy, Totally Natural Techniques and Real Life Tips from a Combat Veteran ER Doctor”.

We talk about why she turned to meditation and stress relief techniques for her own personal life as well as for her patients’ lives.

Leslie walks us through a few of her favorite techniques with us at the end, so stick around. This one is full of practical tips you can use right away to relieve your own stress.

Check out her book:

Dr. Leslie Koenig, M.D.  is a true inspiration. You can find out more about her and purchase her book: Stress Relief Survival Guide: Fast, Easy, Totally Natural Techniques and Real Life Tips from a Combat Veteran ER Doctor  at https://stressreliefsurvivalguide.com/

Email me at [email protected] with questions for myself or my guests for the new Tuesday Q&A segment coming in 2021.

As  always, if someone is having mental health issues, they need to be evaluated by a qualified mental health professional.

Stress Management positive psychology and meditation are absolutely helpful for resilience and for long-term goals, however it is  definitely not the standard treatment of choice in acute situations and it should always be used in conjunction with mental health professionals and clinicians, so the whole person can be properly supported.

The Rx Chill Pill Podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult with a physician or other professional healthcare provider for health-related issues, mental or physical.