The FitMind Podcast: Mental Fitness, Neuroscience & Psychology

Laura Bakosh is the Co-Founder of Inner Explorer, which has brought meditation to over 1 million students in grades PK - 12. Previously, Laura worked in GE's healthcare division for 13 years before co-founding her meditation and mental health organization and has spoken at major venues like TEDx and Wisdom 2.0. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and was trained as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) instructor through the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School.

In this episode, we talk about how mindfulness is being taught to kids, the amazing early results of those programs, as well as some of the scientific research on how mindfulness changes the brain. Laura mentions guided meditations for kids from her program, which you can find on the FitMind website.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Daniel Ingram, MD is a meditation master (and self-described Arahant, meaning one who has fully awakened) with decades of experience training and teaching around the world.

Daniel wrote Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book, widely regarded as one of the most complete meditation books ever written. In this book, Daniel lays out in very rational terms the exact series of steps that can lead to the profound transformations that he has attained. He also criticizes current western meditation as often “hiding the ball” about awakening and being too caught up in psychological material, rather than practical training.

An emergency room physician, Daniel co-founded the Practical Dharma Movement, with the objective of “stripping away dogma and unhelpful taboos, having people share with others in ways that are down-to-earth, helpful, and pragmatic, and the vision that it can be done, rather than a dharma world that is mysterious, artificially hierarchical, dogmatic, and secretive.” When secular meditation is more mainstream and developed in the West, Daniel will someday be appreciated as a true genius when it comes to training and understanding the mind.

In this episode, we discuss what it feels like to be in this awakened or self-actualized mental state, what's feasible for an everyday meditator in terms of meditation progress, more effortless Dzogchen and Mahamudra techniques, the evolution of meditation teaching, how to pragmatically navigate a meditation world that's full of dogma, and neuroscience studies being done at Harvard on Daniel's brain.

If you're thrown off by the Buddhist terms that get thrown around in this episode, you can think of Buddhism as a meditation system for training the mind. In fact, we talk about the different frameworks for pragmatically understanding the mind in this podcast interview.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.

The Ego talks about how we can begin to let go of constructed "self" images that cause us a great deal of suffering.

Topics covered: • How we form an Ego • Why Ego stories are often harmful • The default mode network (DMN)

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She co-authored with Susan Smalley, Ph.D. a book called Fully Present, the Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness.

Diana has practiced mindfulness for over three decades, including spending a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma, and she has taught meditation for over two decades in hospitals, universities, corporations, non-profits, and schools throughout the U.S. and Asia. She's been called by the LA Times "one of the nation's best-known teachers of mindfulness."

Diana is also a founding board member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association and a member of the Teacher's Council at the famous Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California where she was trained to teach by Jack Kornfield. She's been mention in the New York Times, O Magazine, Newsweek, Women's Health, and a variety of other publications.

In this episode, we discuss how Diana became a nun in Burma and then realized her meditation practice needed a big change, the concept of "enlightenment" and how it can be harmful, natural awareness, personalizing your meditation practice, and the infusion of meditation into the modern world. Diana also leads a powerful guided meditation.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.

Mental Programs talks about the three programs that determine all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Understanding this will give you more control over your mind as you recognize the forces that are driving it.

Topics covered: • Evolutionary psychology • Neuroplasticity and self-directed neuroplasticity • Reprogramming your mind with meditation

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Dr. Judson Brewer, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, author, and Founder of MindSciences, Inc.

Dr. Jud, as he's known, has spent over 20 years at Yale, MIT, and Brown University researching how the brain forms negative behavior patterns, bad habits, and addictions, and has developed meditation-based techniques for creating lasting change. His work has received funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Heart Association (AHA). He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT.

Dr. Jud has been featured on CNN's 60 Minutes, Forbes, TIME, NPR and has the 4th most popular TED talk of 2016 with over 10 million views. He also wrote a book called The Craving Mind, which I highly recommend and has trained US Olympic coaches.

In this episode, we talk about thought addiction, using mindfulness to treat anxiety, eating disorders and smoking addiction, the neuroscientific mechanisms of addiction, subjective bias, and the latest cutting-edge research into the neuroscience of mindfulness.

Dr. Jud's mindfulness-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety are apps called (respectively) Craving to Quit, Eat Right Now, and Unwinding Anxiety.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Jiro Taylor is the Founder & CEO of the Flowstate Collective, a company dedicated toward helping leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs achieve self-mastery. He spent two years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and instead of becoming a monk went into the corporate world where he was making millions in London and Hong Kong.

Jiro's path took another radical turn when he reached a breaking point in 2008 and left his very financially-rewarding career. He then wandered the earth for 11 years exploring happiness through meditation, surfing and learning from masters of presence and flow.

In this episode, we discuss Jiro's journey from great financial success and drug abuse into an eventual breakdown that led him to forge a radically new path in life, the shift from a life of doing to a life of being, self-knowledge, meditation, flow states, and breaking out of cultural narratives and conditioning.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.

Inner Chatter talks about that voice in your head that can prove so challenging sometimes, offering a skillful method for understanding and relating to it.

Topics covered: • Mind-Wandering • Where do thoughts come from? • The first obstacle in meditation

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Dr. Willoughby Britton is a neuroscientist at Brown University studying the neurocognitive effects of mindfulness-based interventions for mood and anxiety disorders. She's currently the Director of Brown's Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and has research service awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As a clinician, Dr. Britton has been trained as an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and has taught mindfulness to both clinical and non-clinical populations, as well as in federally-funded clinical trials. She also runs an organization called Cheetah House, a non-profit that supports meditators in distress.

In this episode, we discuss the potential dark sides of meditation practice. In a western world where meditation has been taken out of eastern traditions and spread widely in a secular context, we need to be pragmatic and aware of the risks. Dr. Britton's research has demonstrated that some meditators experience adverse side effects as a result of their practice, and she helps us understand how to avoid such pitfalls. For example, she talks about the specific meditation techniques one should employ and also avoid if they have a history of trauma.

It's important to note that this shouldn't scare you away from meditation, but rather help you to understand that meditation is fundamentally reordering of the mind, a delicate instrument that determines our realities, in ways that we can't take lightly.

Dr. Britton's work is important because it challenges dogma and seeks to help a minority group of meditators who are experiencing some life-threatening adverse phenomena. And while she admits that there's much more research to be done, her early findings are both fascinating and essential knowledge for any meditator.

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.

Modern Survival is all about our newest challenge as a species: the struggle for fulfillment.

Topics covered: • Innate psychological needs • The modern meaning crisis • The evolution of happiness • Meditation as an antidote

FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com