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Orlaith O'Sullivan - Mindfulness
193 Plays2 years ago
In this week's episode of The Trauma and Healing Podcast, we go back to a conversation from 2022 with mindfulness expert Orlaith O'Sullivan. This engaging discussion predates the podcast itself, harking back to a time when I was initiating thought-provoking dialogues on Instagram Live.
Orlaith's insights remain as profound and relevant today, shedding light on the transformative power of mindfulness and its role in personal healing. Listen in as Orlaith explores the nature of trauma, the importance of presence, and the role of inner companionship during challenging times.
This episode offers a thoughtful exploration of mindfulness and healing, a conversation as enlightening today as it was in 2022. Enjoy!
Remember to like and follow The Trauma and Healing Podcast, helping us to share these essential discussions. Enjoy the episode.
You can learn more about Orlaith and her work through her social media platforms and website:
Orlaith's own book "We Are All Flowers." You can explore and purchase her insightful work here.
TRAINING - For any teachers interested in incorporating mindfulness into their professional and personal lives, Orlaith is offering a Summer Course for teachers or those working with children for the month of July 23. You can learn more and sign up for it here.
During our conversation, we mentioned books by Thich Nhat Hanh that delve into mindfulness and healing. You might find them insightful:
- The Miracle of Mindfulness -
- Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child
Orlaith's meditations, which complement her teachings wonderfully, are available on YouTube and the Insight Timer app.
As always, if you enjoyed the episode, please remember to like and follow to help promote these important discussions.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome, everyone, to this week's episode of the Trauma Healing Podcast. I'm your host, Chloe McGraw, and I am thrilled to share with you another insightful episode. This week's episode is a special throwback to 2022 to a time before this podcast was even born. Back then, I was having rich conversations over on Instagram Live and I was through these conversations that sparked the idea for the podcast.
Discussion with Orla Sylvain
00:00:23
Speaker
Among those early conversations, I had the good fortune to record a compelling discussion with the deeply insightful Orla Sylvain over Zoom. And today I get to share that with you. In this conversation, we revisit pearls of wisdom, top provoking insights that remain as relevant today and as stirring as when we first spoke in 2022. As you listen, I hope Orla's words strike a chord with you. If they do, please do take a moment to like and follow the Trauma and Healing podcast.
00:00:50
Speaker
Your support enables us to spread these critical conversations further and help others that may need it. Enjoy the episode and do take care. Thank you very much for coming in to talk to me today.
Mindfulness and Happiness
00:01:02
Speaker
So we're going to be talking about all things mindfulness, all things happiness, and how that helps the work that you do and how that comes into trauma. So welcome. Thank you so much, Kilda. Thank you so much for having me. It's always such a joy to explore this together.
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself? How did you become an ordained member of Thich Nhat Hanh's Order of Interbeing? What led you to be an ordained? Did you train with him? You know, how did that come about? Yeah. So I have, I think I've always been interested since I was a child, I was interested in kind of living a life that was awake. And I started, I remember my mum had a yoga book
00:01:46
Speaker
And at the back of the book, there was some breathing exercises. And as a child, I tried them and I was like, that works. I noticed the difference in my body after I did them. So I used to, you know, started doing meditation. My dad was sick when I was a teenager and died. So, you know, we had several years of illness in the house.
00:02:04
Speaker
and I found meditation practice really helpful and I remember the Dalai Lama had brought out a book called The Art of Happiness and so there were kind of different you know we read Khalil Gebran in our family's treasured so there were lots of kind of different flavors of wisdom and then when I was in my 20s I picked up a book by Thich Nhat Hanh and read the first line and thought
00:02:26
Speaker
we've come home, that makes perfect sense to me. And then I practiced, so I practiced mindfulness and it's called the Plum Village tradition, quite diligently from Ben.
Practicing Mindfulness in Communities
00:02:37
Speaker
And first, as most of us do, we kind of come to it for ourselves, for our own individual needs and wants. And then it grew into much more of a community-based approach that actually practicing mindfulness in circle with other humans was where I noticed the like,
00:02:52
Speaker
very powerful healing and transformation could take place. So the order of interbeing is something that is a space to support people who want to build circles, like to build sangha, to help groups of people to practice together on the path. So a lot of people when they when they first encounter the practice might receive the five mindfulness trainings. And they're kind of like, it's like a little constellation of stars on
00:03:18
Speaker
to explore living a happy, ethical life. And then the Fourteen is kind of living a life where you can really be of service to others. So there was lots of opportunity to practice with Thich Nhat Hanh's community and he offered us so many teachings when he was alive and beyond.
Personal Mindfulness Experiences
00:03:38
Speaker
I mean, it sounds so full. It sounds so enriching, you know, like even just the curiosity you have as a kid that afforded you going, actually that worked. What's that about? You know, and that piece you say, you know, everybody comes to it for themselves. I remember I did my first kind of introduction to it was a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy eight week. I remember doing the body scan and being
00:04:07
Speaker
utterly amazed by how much pain my body was in. I was just not connected to it. And that was my introduction to going, okay, hold on, what's going on here? How do I not know this? And it started a wonderful journey with mindfulness and my relationship with myself then.
00:04:24
Speaker
But one of the things I absolutely love on the door now is those group circles. It's not quite meditation, but it is. It was meditative, of course, but I did a cacao healing ceremony. And just the presence of other people in those circles was just, I find the energy just amazing. So going from healing yourself and then getting into connection with others, just fantastic. And it sounds like that's where your
00:04:52
Speaker
really focusing on that on education in the community. Yeah. And that is kind of an immediately kind of practical approach.
Insights from Orla's Mindfulness Journey
00:05:00
Speaker
You know, it's not an intellectual approach where you're trying to learn some things all for intellectually understand them. As you say, you kind of come home to your body and you realize something. You go, look, there is pain. There is pain that I have not been present for. So that's my next step. Yeah. How do I meet myself? Yeah.
00:05:19
Speaker
And okay. So what then has your, what has been your biggest or what has been your best lesson that you've learned in your personal practice that you might not have otherwise learned had you not gone on this mindfulness journey? Not a small question. But I think, I think probably the most freeing one for me was that I don't need to waste to be happy.
00:05:43
Speaker
I know that I think as humans often we make ourselves waste. We're kind of a little bit conditional. When this happens, then I'll be happy or when this is no longer present, then I'll be happy. And, you know, in this practice, there's a lot about just coming back to this moment to sense the goodness that's here, which tends to be more than good enough, like completely imperfect always, but more than good enough. So for me, that's, that's taken away the weighting attitude.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah and I suppose that brings me nicely onto the next question and that is how do we make happiness a habit? How do we make happiness a habit? Because it is possible. So I think I think it's about practice. I think you know there are we know
00:06:34
Speaker
scientists used to research like everyone who murders and you know they used to research like really dysfunctional things and about 20 years ago they were like why don't more people murder because like very few people murder and but life is really annoying and disappointing and upsetting so they started to question like what is this that stops us from you know completely losing it in society what are the things that
00:06:58
Speaker
help us to live happily so i love this research that's been done about these different you know the things that people who have a high happiness set point have in common and the ability that they have so for me like i love that
00:07:13
Speaker
You know, I can meet a human being and they might go, I'm just not a grateful person. Like I'm just, I just, that's not who I am. And actually with our approach, we see things as much more organic so that your little seed of gratitude might have been malnourished for, I don't know, 80 or 200 years.
00:07:33
Speaker
like it just might be very deep in the soil and really malnourished so what like our job is just to nourish these wholesome seeds that are in us and they kind of manifest in their own time so with with practice for example like we could do you know we could take a breath and feel maybe like a tiny bit of peace in our body
00:07:54
Speaker
And we know that the way neurologically works is that at first it becomes an experience. And then if we do it a few more times, it becomes a familiar experience. And then it becomes a habit. And finally, it becomes a trait. Like the ability to come home and feel peace is really natural to us because we've done it over and over and over. So one is about practicing to develop the good wholesome things. And then we also need to take care of everything that gets in the way of our happiness.
00:08:22
Speaker
I have to be aware of it. What is this? That is an obstacle to my happiness right now in this moment. So sometimes there's a physical thing you might go, it's too hot, it's too cold, there's a noise that I dislike, but more often it is the quality of our thoughts that we're thinking. Thinking about it, yeah, I've just put a thought on that, I've just put a judgment on that rather than actually it just is.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Neuroscience of Mindfulness
00:08:47
Speaker
So we figure out our obstacles and help to dissolve them a little bit. And then we grow the good stuff. And the result is happiness on an average, in an average moment is much more possible. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I totally get that. Then when I, when I started, you know, the bell would be wrong at the start of a session. Yes. And I'd be like, yay. The, like coming to the end of it and bring again up.
00:09:15
Speaker
God, that's over. And now when I hear the band, all I do is I go straight into relaxation. I'm like Pavlov's dog. I'm like, yep, I can relax now. And so it's great. I have those on my phone on apps or anything like that. And just to remind myself, I have them at home as well, the bowls that I couldn't do, but it's quite amazing. You know, I would often talk with clients about, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together.
00:09:41
Speaker
Absolutely. And what we're talking about is creating new habits or undoing old habits. And we have to build those systems within our brain. The neuroscience says that you will build those neurons. It will get stronger and stronger. I talk about building cities. You have a good city built in your brain with, you know, the roads are well-paged and just high-rise buildings and
00:10:03
Speaker
at the moment you're building a dirt road but soon it will be paved and soon you'll start putting lights at lights but you get to build the city not just a city that was you know through experience that not really through awareness or a week and that you have built so I love that yeah the
00:10:21
Speaker
And also the well-built road is just easier to travel along for a while. And you'll go down? Yeah, that I imagine is like being in a country field going and just choosing to walk across this field going. Eventually it'll become a bike path and then there'll be more vehicles. But it's always going to be like the motorways might go to reaction for a while. So like we need this kindness built in. Yeah, meet yourself and then I'm going, I'm on the highway. It's all right, turn around.
00:10:51
Speaker
That's all it is. Just turn around and go back the way you wanted to go. There's no problem going into the city. Sometimes you're gonna need to go into the city because it has to go that way. That's absolutely fine. But again, that compassion and kindness to go, that's what I needed in that moment, that's okay. Beautiful. Okay, so then, not everyone will get ordained. So what are the simple ways people can bring mindfulness into their lives?
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, so mindfulness is simply an energy. You know, mindfulness is an energy of kind of this kind of awakeness and being present. So it's always mindfulness of something. So where I what I normally recommend is to start where you're naturally present. You know, and for some of us that might be actually I love my cup of tea in the morning and I watch the birds at the bird feeder for two minutes or I go out for a walk at lunchtime or you know, we have moments where we're naturally in our bodies.
00:11:49
Speaker
And we're really, we do show up for that moment of our life. So to find where that moment is, you know, and sometimes it's at the beginning of eating, most of us can taste the first bite of our food, and then we lose interest in it. We just suddenly... Yeah. It's done. Yeah. But like, even that first bite, you know, commit to really tasting the first sip of your coffee.
00:12:12
Speaker
So it's wherever we're naturally present. The easiest way is to pour ourselves in there and then to kind of let it kind of come into high definition to give ourselves more time because your brain will scan instantly and go, yeah, I've woken up. I know this moment. And we'll then like lose interest. But if you kind of go, let's just stay for a minute. Let's sense like the warmth of the duvet, my cheek against the pillow, the air of the room against my other cheek, like sensing down, how does it feel this morning to have woken up?
00:12:43
Speaker
How am I doing? Exactly. Yeah. So that we listen more to our body than our intellectual mind. Yeah. Body never lies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, so then that just tends to grow where then we're kind of really present for like maybe two or three moments in our life. And then those dots tend to join up then during the day. So we kind of aerate our day with little pockets of mindfulness and goodness.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah. I remember learning about, you know, the breath being the anchor and, um, I was like, yeah, but I breathe all the time. Again, my brain was like getting in my way the whole time. It was so funny and still does. But, uh, like that, I, you know, you just run on autopilot, just doing everything you need to get done. And you're at the end of the day and you're like, what did I do? Say I have, I actually wasn't present for most, but I don't know. But when I learned that the breath is the anchor, uh, every day and then I'd just click in going, Oh, I'm breathing. Okay.
00:13:43
Speaker
attention to just this breath and I'd come back and that became the habit of going oh if I notice a couple of times a day that I'm breathing and it just it added pockets of calm and you know I talk about the speedometer of your life you know we have a stress point that we are just naturally running at because life is happening we have bills we have this we have that and you know somebody's shedding you know the deadline for this stuff that's happened in her life has raised a set point
00:14:13
Speaker
but we can press the brake. How many times a day do we press the brake? How many times a day are we taking the time to make our coffee? How many times a day am I just breathing for 15 seconds, if that's all it takes, if that's all I can take? Checking in for that, and it's about pressing the brake in our nervous system and allowing that calm to be there rather than just going, well, I can't do it. If you can't take 15 seconds for yourself, we need to have
Mindfulness in Family Settings
00:14:39
Speaker
a longer chat.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. It does, it's like we kind of get entangled between like the past, thoughts about the future, you know, we run through the day as though we're being chased. And so, as you say, like this breath can be
00:14:56
Speaker
It's such a powerful bridge, one between our body and our mind because it involves both and it unclips all the other timelines. So we stop time traveling. And so we can really come into this present moment, like just for a moment of like one breath of kindness or soothing or friendship, you know, so that you can, you can let yourself be a human being, like not a human doing a human, just being like just for one breath. That's not nothing.
00:15:24
Speaker
No, no, it's not a really isn't. And yeah, powerful. Okay, so you work with individuals. So when working with families as a whole, do you see a difference from working individually? And so what I'm talking about here is that intergenerational trauma.
00:15:44
Speaker
How can we have an unconscious inheritance trauma being played out in our families? So what's the work that you do? How does that, do you see that? How does that play out? Yeah, so I think I love this question because it happens anyway in circles, like even circles of grownups, but especially with a family who are related to each other and who live together.
00:16:06
Speaker
and they are known and know each other well, you know, it plays out in so many ways. So the power of having a family kind of learning to awaken, to sense what they're feeling.
00:16:17
Speaker
and to share that with the kindness that's possible in that moment. It's so powerful. So children don't do what you say. They do what you do. And that's the fundamental reason to practice with your parents. They don't do what you say. So if you can show up and learn to explore your frustration, your perfectionism, your anger, your worry,
00:16:43
Speaker
and just do that kind of publicly with them. Even if they're colouring in the corner, they take everything in. So one is you model an extraordinary way of living for life for these kids. And also, as a family then, together we're developing these abilities, right? We're learning how to sense our body, maybe for the first time, how to notice moments when we're safe. Because most of us, we only think about safety when we think, I'm not safe.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah when actually so deliberately learning to notice like this is such a safe moment we're sheltered stormy outside and I'm so protected there are no emotional threats right now this is a very supportive environment and to let my body feel
00:17:28
Speaker
how it feels to be safe. So as a family, you know, we learn these things together and we learn how to listen to each other, how to notice our own autopilot reactions and then take care of them. And so the magic that happens as a family, because you're well known, is that then everyone can suddenly see the matrix code. Everyone gets to see the patterns that's going on.
00:17:51
Speaker
and like so often you know I'll work with the family and maybe there'll be one child who has a problem with anxiety and often the family choose to do a course. They're the symptom of the family. Exactly and you know I feel that anxiety because they feel well actually what we need to do is fix you know John's anxiety. Over there. John's not the problem and his anxiety is not the problem. The ecosystem
00:18:14
Speaker
has allowed that anxiety to grow. So by taking care of the ecosystem under which all these seeds are growing, then we can care for each other. And what tends to happen is that there's a, so yes, John,
00:18:26
Speaker
is much easier taking care of his anxiety, but actually the things that touch his anxiety as a family, the things he worries about, you know, these kind of silent festering thoughts that we have, actually transform the family dynamic. I can remember with one family, both parents were like really hard working, really diligent, but they pushed themselves a lot. They did not prioritise self-care. So of course the kids, you know, felt that they should always be doing something.
00:18:56
Speaker
And I remember the mother saying she came in and she was like, oh, I'll get the dinner on. And the problem child was like, mom, why don't you just go upstairs and do deep relaxation for 10 minutes or 20 minutes? She was like, wow. You know, so we call each other on us when we see that we're still a pilot behavior. But the kid knew where the mom was. And they wanted to mind her.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So like, the kids are our best, like, they have made a career by age five, we've made a career out of being able to sense what kind of mood our parents are in, or any mood they've grown up in our life. So like, they're extraordinary barometers of being able to sense what we're feeling. So, so as a family, then, when everyone is doing this kind of work according to their ability, so if I'm four, I might talk about, I feel rainy, I feel sunny, I feel stormy.
00:19:47
Speaker
You know, that's what makes sense to me. Or if I'm 15, maybe, you know, maybe there's a family book that we get to write in so that we don't even have to like have someone looking at us when we're speaking. Maybe I can just write down. This is the kind of day I'm having back off. I need five minutes there. Yeah. So that we create this loving community where one, we get to be who we are and we feel that there's nothing inherently wrong with us. And, you know, that we just learn how to support each other.
00:20:16
Speaker
So yeah, magic happens with families. Yeah, no, I first met you again through Inside Matters, as I seem to meet all of my work. We're not a cult, it's work.
Strengths-Based Approaches and Resilience
00:20:30
Speaker
But you were teaching strengths-based practices, and I actually had a question on that. I don't think I asked that. Well, it's the next question.
00:20:42
Speaker
You were talking about, you know, the work that you were doing and you were talking about the transformation that could happen within the family. And I think, you know, as individuals, I actually was on Instagram, actually, I think it was last night or today, but it was like a lot of people go to therapy because the people in their lives won't go to therapy.
00:21:01
Speaker
So this collective family approach where everybody gets to heal, everybody gets to show up and be exactly as they need to be and be met in a moment because that's where transformation happens. That's where if I feel like I'm okay in this moment, I can go further, I can grow, I can expand, or I can contract if I need to in order to go forward again.
00:21:26
Speaker
fantastic work. So on that, what are mindfulness-based strengths? Mindfulness-based strengths practices. It's a bit of a mouthful. I can't talk this morning either. In Ireland, when I teach the course, I just call it strengths to thrive, which sounds easy to me, but it is. So basically it blends mindfulness
00:21:48
Speaker
with recognizing and growing where we're naturally at our best. So when I talked about like about 20 years ago, like researchers got interested in like, why don't people kill? Why is anyone happy? And they started to map out, you know, what is it the humans value in humans? And they did a lot of work. So the VIA Institute of Character was developed to further the research of
00:22:13
Speaker
what was identified as 24 character strengths that all cultures and all histories had in common. So there were some strengths that not everyone shared so they weren't included. So these are 24 strengths that you know an average human in an average culture would value and some of them you know we might know is like
00:22:32
Speaker
love or gratitude or teamwork, and it's essentially part of a community. And then some are like humor, appreciation, beauty and excellence, the importance of hope. So anyway, there are 24, we all have them, and there are energies that come up in us. And some of, for each of us, we'll have a few of these energies that are just supernatural to us, that they come up effortlessly, that they're like, just bright as a button, always ready to go. And there are signature strengths. So noticing
00:23:03
Speaker
what these strengths are and then how to kind of work with our signature strengths, how to kind of boost our middle strengths and how to awaken the strengths that are sleeping. So, you know, a phasic strength might be, for me it might be something like bravery. You know, I don't need to be courageous every day and I need to know how to awaken my strength of courage when I need it, when I go.
00:23:25
Speaker
This is the moment where I need you to face up to this moment and don't run away. And the wonderful thing about this practice is that most interventions start with a problem. So we go to therapy, as you said, like the cognitive therapy version, because we feel that something is languishing, that there's a lack, that there's something that's getting in the way of our happiness.
00:23:48
Speaker
And this strengths practice just starts with us at our best. So actually the wider context, it might be really difficult. But we're starting with the very best parts of us where we just shine. And that's where we begin. And so it has this, the research on it has, it's kind of twofold. One is that we are able to meet challenges in our life more effectively. So it does make difficult moments a little bit less difficult because we feel more immersed.
00:24:16
Speaker
But the other part is that it makes a good moment even better because we are more able to enjoy the moment of goodness in our life. So it kind of raises our whole life experiences. It just kind of comes up a little bit. So I love strength practice.
00:24:34
Speaker
not a small thing at all there is that at all it kind of raises our vibration all over and starts with the best yeah i love that that's really good and you then look with other people through like strengths goggles so like oh i've seen you yeah just to notice the very best parts of them like that's amazing and you know so it was with the way it plays out with like you know a teacher and a student or a parent and a child is that you know when when the grown-up has decided they want to do something and the child is all
00:25:03
Speaker
pretending to be a t-rex, you know, I wish it would be more obedient, you can go, like you can take a moment to go, what extraordinary creativity, like how amazing to go and be a dinosaur that hasn't lived for, I don't know, seven million some time, you know, and you get a moment to appreciate them just as they are. And then you kind of come out of reactivity into genuine appreciation. And then you choose your next step.
00:25:29
Speaker
God, you meet that moment so differently there, don't you? So different. Everyone comes transformed to see people at their best. It's amazing. Yeah, really transformed. I love it. I absolutely love that. That's fantastic. Thanks for sharing that.
Addressing Trauma with Mindfulness
00:25:45
Speaker
OK, so then does trauma show up in the work? I imagine through what you do, there's a lot of people bringing a lot of stuff with them. Everybody does. So if it does show up, how would you work
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, and it does, of course. You know, most human beings have a sense of something that might have been stuck, energy that might have been stuck at some point. And for me also sometimes we meet it on a community basis. I remember some years back we had a retreat for the Vietnamese community in Ireland, and most of whom
00:26:18
Speaker
came to Ireland like through just appalling circumstances. So, you know, practicing together, we kind of only began this work on day three. So we had two days of enjoying food together and eating and singing. And then on day three, we like sat in a circle to share. And the grief and trauma and energy that was released that day is extraordinary. So yeah, so we, so I do, I work, you know, I work
00:26:47
Speaker
with many people who have like their moments of stuckness or like sudden looming is how you know a lot of us senses that there's just something that's too big to be dealt with and I guess in with his mindfulness practice like we're walking a path for our whole life so one is really important to not treat ourselves as a self-help project
00:27:09
Speaker
so it's never about to hack something there's no shortcuts like it's about meeting ourselves just where we are and what we want to do is to cultivate like a mind of love a heart of love and clarity so that we can live ethical happy lives and
00:27:27
Speaker
and so it's okay for us to be grievously wounded like it's okay for us to be stuck or lost because this practice meets us just where we are you know and I'm thinking at the moment of there was one retreat on the west coast of America years ago and I was listening to a stream of it and so Thich Nhat Hanh was you know speaking to a group of people and they they're keeping helicopter sounds
00:27:51
Speaker
that were moving across the building because there were wildfires going on as it turned out. But there would be this like deathly silence as the helicopter was moving. And I was like, usually he's not so interested in sound recording quality, like, you know, but it was actually because the sound of a helicopter meant something very different to a Vietnamese person. Sure, of course.
00:28:15
Speaker
And so this sound was moving and there were so many bodies in the room who were being triggered by the sound. And so he began to talk about the sound of the helicopter and what might be our felt associations with it. You know, there was this sharing from a grown man when he was a boy, remembered like a wet, his grandmother putting a wet face cloth over his mouth to try and get out of their home, which is being bombed. And the sound is there.
00:28:43
Speaker
So what Thich Nhat Hanh did was, you know, led people in this very gentle helicopter meditation, like literally, where you imagine forests on fire, humans in danger, mammals in danger, trees that were like, I don't know, 900 years old, and that this helicopter
00:29:03
Speaker
was bringing something that could soothe and relieve the flames and help protect life and it just meant something entirely different. Yeah changes the relationship. So it's not possible for everyone but like you know what we do is we meet ourselves where we are so that's not possible you keep your eyes open you wiggle your toes you look for a beautiful color to explore you know that you stay in the room check the safety with the safety yeah yeah
00:29:29
Speaker
My God, the work, I don't know whether I'd be able to meet that moment if I was so triggered in that. But the work obviously that he was able to do in his lifetime. And I mean, he was a great teacher. He was fantastic. Anybody that's listening, check his work out. He's a global spiritual leader.
00:29:50
Speaker
And I remember actually, I was in like physical rehab for a pain. I had five-year-old, it just got to a really bad pitch. I needed help. I remember reading the miracle of mindfulness, I think when I was in there. And my God, it was like, you know, nectar at that time is exactly what I needed. And it's so simple language. You know, there's no, you don't have to, you don't have to have a PhD to do this stuff.
00:30:13
Speaker
Absolutely not. So yeah, so worth checking it out. But that's talk about leaving it in the moment. I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. But my interest, I think, does have so much for trauma work. And I know a lot of people give it a lot of grief. And I mean, you have to be careful as well, because it can be quite triggering to go into the body.
00:30:36
Speaker
if you're traumatized. So, I mean, there's another piece of meeting yourself where you're at. Maybe that's not where you start. Maybe it is just having the morning coffee and that's all I can do. That is okay. That's where you need to be. That's how you can meet yourself and be kind to yourself going, okay, it's really hard right now. This is how hard it is. And beating myself up because I can't, you know, do my first five minutes or even a minute. That's okay. Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
OK, so the next question was, can mindfulness practice offer preventative and protective factors against trauma? So I mean, that's what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you gave the caveat of like to have care about like it is not a one size fits all thing.
00:31:23
Speaker
It's effective. With some humans, they will always need a form of talk therapy or medication or some other interventions as well. But we know that we could have both the same experience and have two entirely different reactions.
00:31:36
Speaker
I might get stuck in me and you might think, whoa, that was a close call. I'll put on the kettle. You know, and as humans, we just, we are so uniquely individual. And so mindfulness practice, I think helps us in a few ways. So it can reconnect us at a safe pace with our body. So we can begin to reawaken bits that we've cuddled from in our body. And I, you know,
00:32:02
Speaker
I really emphasize the at a safe pace. And sometimes even like I work a lot with people who have asthma. So, you know, you know, I don't go, why don't you come back to your breath and stare at your breath? Because they're going like, am I getting in? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Yeah, you know, it's telling me I'm not okay. That's what I'm noticing. Yeah.
00:32:22
Speaker
So, you know, so when when resting on the breath isn't comfortable, we can rest on sound and we literally like bathe and sound from the very closest sounds to just wibing and wibing and wibing. So they're always it doesn't really matter what we're doing. What matters is is that we're cultivating our ability to rest our attention without being pulled or hooked by our thinking.
00:32:45
Speaker
and by these other timelines in the past and the future. And mindfulness helps us deliberately grow the good stuff. We know that where we rest our attention over and over becomes habitual. So we train ourselves, as you said, with Thich Nhat Hanh and the helicopter, like he had
00:33:01
Speaker
developed his ability to hold space for suffering so he cultivated his heart so that it was a little bit bigger than the amount of suffering he was feeling and in that little bit biggerness like magic is possible in terms of being able to hold space for our suffering or for someone else's suffering and and the thing about practicing in a circle is that you just need to get yourself into the circle you need no abilities like
00:33:27
Speaker
You need to drive your weary heart in there and go, this is me. I have nothing to offer today. And that's fine because that's such an offering in itself. Absolutely. Yeah. And that the healing comes from being together, walking a path together.
Community Support in Trauma Healing
00:33:43
Speaker
You know, it's not about comparing ourselves that someone is better or worse than us. It's that, you know, the healing comes from a much more in mindfulness, we call it store consciousness. So it's like, you know,
00:33:54
Speaker
all our potentials and capacities all of these different seeds are being nourished by simply being present for that moment of our life and so we kind of ramp up our capacity to be just who we are and so yeah so it has I think a buffering effect it gives us more spaciousness when we face
00:34:16
Speaker
moments that could become traumatizing moments, that we actually have this built in caring energy that doesn't leave us on our own. And that's one of the reasons why trauma gets stuck, right, is that we're on our own, we've no agency, there's no control. And so having a friend during those really dark moments, having a voice inside that's like, I am here with you, I really care about the suffering. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's so important. I think, you know, one of the biggest shifts for me was, you know, there's, you know, thoughts come up all the time and memories come up all the time. And you may feel, you know, you can give out to yourself, why am I thinking that? I shouldn't be thinking this, you know, I'm awful for doing, I'm awful for thinking, I'm awful for feeling. And I remember another meditation and I was like, can you meet that with love?
00:35:11
Speaker
because that's what it needs. It doesn't need more hate. It doesn't need more scorn. It doesn't need more, yeah. It needs you to love that moment, to love that going, I'm so sorry. I love you. It's okay. And that for me is going, I need more love. And that's for everybody. That's not a, that's not only a few of us get that. Everybody in this planet and every being needs more love. And that's how we can grow and expand.
00:35:41
Speaker
And that for me, again, was transformational for my own relationship with myself and also meeting others, maybe really best at what somebody is doing. And that moment of going, can I love them in this moment, regardless of what they're doing? And that transforms my presence with them. And I just love what that's done for me. And again, that was through mindfulness. I don't think I've learned that anywhere else and met that in such a field.
00:36:11
Speaker
It's so beautiful. And it does, it's like your presence transforms everything else then around you. So yeah, that kind of love without think of it as like, like, medicine, son fontier, love, son fontier, not without good boundaries, but with the condition of loving, not because it's deserved or anything, but loving just to love, caring just to care. Because it's really hard to be a human being, right? Why would we not care? Yeah.
00:36:38
Speaker
So I think I know the answer to this question, is that do you believe it's possible to heal trauma? Yes, I do. I think we have an extraordinary capacity to heal. And we see other mammals do it, like other mammals either don't catch trauma because they let it move, or they can heal from it. And I do, I think there's a few things about the human mind that
00:37:02
Speaker
you know catches up we have an unusual ability as a model to to replay the past i quite addicted and we can also imagine things that haven't happened. So we can imagine disastrous features which you know my body believes every single thing that i think.
00:37:20
Speaker
My body is always listening and it believes everything. So I do think we need to be, we need to have a lot of care of the thoughts that we're thinking regularly because that becomes kind of the emotional tone of the world that we live in. Yeah, the energy that's within our body. Do we know what it's like? Yeah. And I don't think, I think that's, people don't realize it's like our imagination when we are imagining those futures.
00:37:47
Speaker
Our brain and our body knows no difference, whether that's happening right in front of us or it's happening in our mind, mind site. And people don't realize that because they do, they play out different things and they go, why am I doing that? And it's kind of like this odd thing that they do. Like actually your body is sending the same hormones as if it were happening. So if you're imagining something really stressful going, you know, that's what the body is living in. That's what it's bathing in. And you do have the choice to recognize that.
00:38:17
Speaker
and go, oh, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to switch to something else. I'm going to come back to the present moment. I'm going to breathe. If I've just imagined the worst case scenario and go, okay, I'm going to press the brake now because that's where my mind went. That's okay, but I'm going to press the brake now.
00:38:34
Speaker
And we can also use, I think, our imaginative creativity to help ourselves. Because if my body is believing everything, I can think some pretty lovely thoughts. I can think of me like, you know, floating in the sea off an island in Greece, like surrounded by glittering glues.
00:38:53
Speaker
and the sunlight on my face. And like, I can feel that difference already in the one, for the one second holiday. So like if, you know, if 95% of our anxiety comes from this future imagining, then 95% of the cure or the vaccine can also come from a lot of like good imaginative thinking. Just, you know, that we can kind of, I mean, that really for me is a shortcut, like using my imagination.
00:39:20
Speaker
to remember, either remember something in the past, like a beautiful color, a beautiful experience, a sense of wonder. I can remember being camping and looking up at the night sky and it being like a firm amount of stars. And there were shooting stars at night. I can feel the wonder, like the wonder in my body.
00:39:38
Speaker
in this moment so like we have really good ways of using memories and we have really good ways of using our imagination but like our mind is pretty wild like we don't want to just let it be running around we leave it like yeah it means a good guardian means to be a good shepherd
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah.
Positive Use of Imagination
00:39:57
Speaker
And in fairness to it, it is looking for the danger all the time, but it is looking so we can stay safe. But we also, it's like a child looking around for the danger. We also need to say, you're actually okay. You don't need to do that right now. You're okay. Spend time with something nourishing, something beautiful. Go to your memory. I remember I swam with whale sharks. Yeah. Oh my God.
00:40:23
Speaker
I feel like, I'd use this language so it's what everybody would get, but I feel like I met God in that moment. It was just below the surface and they have these little spots and the sun was shining in and it like shimmered the whale shark and it was massive, way bigger than it could have been. And the calm I felt in that moment was, I can't describe it, but going back there, just even for a second, it's a real,
00:40:52
Speaker
It's true. Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not saying everybody has foil sharks in their life, but that's one that really set out for me. But like you, I remember standing under the night sky where there was no lights around and going, my God, it's so vast. It's so beautiful that I felt awed by it. And it could be meeting, it doesn't have to be nature, it could be meeting like my friend's kids, their moments with my friend's kids.
00:41:20
Speaker
Oh my God, I want to bottle this moment. They're just so damn cute. And once we start to notice, then it, it kind of has this lovely kind of upward lifting effect. Cause then once we start to notice the good moments, like I had a good moment through the week and I was like, I'm going to save this. This is one of my good moments. Something I can replay and replay, no problem. So I noticed, like we noticed the good when it's happening and then we can tap into it more effectively as well. And it's like, I sometimes think of it as like little solar batteries.
00:41:49
Speaker
You know, yes, like sunshine. And then there's a day like one of our dark winter days. It's dark when you wake up. It gets darker through the day until it's dark. And on days like that, like we need to know where those little batteries are and we need to keep them fully charged so that we can deliberately draw on it because, you know, having one day is difficult, but you don't want that to go on for a long time.
00:42:11
Speaker
it's much easier to feed ourselves as soon as we notice like I am not in such a safe space like emotionally or mentally so I can intervene a little bit just to guide myself to remind myself that there is sunlight. Yeah fantastic absolutely beautiful. Okay so how would people if they wanted to know what services you offer as a mindfulness practitioner teacher tell them tell them what you offer?
Orla's Mindfulness Courses
00:42:39
Speaker
OK, well, I do oodles, so little whistle stuff to work. So it's all kind of co-created, kind, practical spaces and it takes different forms. So I have self-paced courses that people can do online on demand. So there's a course Winterlight, which runs from now through to the first light of spring to kind of end the darkness.
00:43:00
Speaker
and grow towards the light. And it's a lovely journey. So like one episode comes out a week. So you differ. Where is that? How do people get that? So you can go to my website and you'll see Winterlight and then it's on its own little app. So then you can do it on your phone or on a computer. So it's all this. So there's Winterlight, there's the Calm Cafe, which again is little bite sized teachings and practices to make good use of our breaks, because I noticed my breaks
00:43:29
Speaker
on, you know, when I was hooked, my brakes were not nourishing me. I went back to work feeling no more energized. And there's a course called Holding Space for Anxiety. So those three are all different kind of practical approaches. And then I do live courses on mindfulness and strengths.
00:43:46
Speaker
on cultivating happiness or how we can make a habit of happiness. And I do mindfulness and poetry retreats, days of mindfulness and one-to-one sessions for teenagers and for grownups. And then a course for families. And then I loaded stuff for businesses as well. So all of that was kind of translated into a business environment as well. OK, wow. You're quite busy, so. Yeah, OK.
Orla's Book and Future Plans
00:44:13
Speaker
Little moment.
00:44:14
Speaker
And actually, in never a dull moment, you wrote a book. You wrote a book called We Are All Flowers, a story of appreciating others. I went and got it before. Good.
00:44:25
Speaker
Look at that, it's so beautiful. So what is the book about? Why did you write it? So the book is a so it's a practice that Thich Nhat Hanh teaches called flower watering, which is a deliberate practice of appreciation to help us cultivate kind of genuine appreciation and gratitude for the humans, the animals, anyone in our life who is supportive. And so I wrote a poem so I for maybe the last
00:44:51
Speaker
eight years you've had a children's mindfulness group based in Dublin where children bring a grown-up in their life so really families come but you know if we were friends and we have one grown-up who could bring us that's all we need one supportive grown-up and so firewatering is something we do really regularly
00:45:08
Speaker
And I wrote, so I wrote it so that the children could teach each other because, you know, the kids are quite expert. So when a new child joins, they tend to introduce the practices to each other. And this is a way of doing it without imitating me, which turns out classic way to see, would anyone like to introduce flower watering? And it turns into like a Saturday Night Live sketch or something.
00:45:33
Speaker
actually by having a poem or being able to read something or do something they can emulate it for themselves so yeah so it's a practice of the idea is that you know we're all flowers so we have that in our imagination and some days we're like a springtime flower like
00:45:51
Speaker
We're unstoppable. The frost doesn't matter. Cement in the pavement doesn't matter. We are coming up. We got it. Unstoppable way. Feels so good. And some days like it's not so easy to be us and we feel a bit droopy. So we need to know how to refresh.
00:46:07
Speaker
each other and how to refresh ourselves. So it's a very specific practice of appreciation where you think of someone who's easy peasy to love and take a moment to sense how it feels when you're close to them. And then you choose one thing about them that you really appreciate. So it can be anything. It can be like they make the best chocolate cake. I love that. They read me a story every bedtime. I love that. They listen to me when it's hard. They're trying to fix me.
00:46:33
Speaker
And then, and then we can share that with each other. Then we just, you know, share, so it can be like your dog, your cat, like anyone can have their flowers watered. And, and again, over time, what it means is that we notice kind of the tribe of support around us, like we noticed the goodness in us.
00:46:53
Speaker
when we still have it, you know? Yeah. So, so then when we feel rubbish, when we've made a big mistake or we feel like a great big loser, then we actually know, cause we've done it on ourselves. We know, well, I made soup yesterday. I brushed my teeth this morning. You know, I did lots of good things and that's not nothing, you know? So we can remind ourselves and remind each other of, of all the things we appreciate. So it kind of gets a much more nuanced sense of gratitude in our life and the goodness
00:47:22
Speaker
in our life. Yeah. Fantastic and beautiful. And to introduce it to kids so young, I mean, what a, what a wonderful, wonderful skill because Jesus, you know, I don't know about you, but growing up, these weren't things that we were taught about, you know, and our parents weren't, you know what I mean? It's not a, you know, we just didn't know about it. And the fact that we have so much on offer that this book is on offer. That's fantastic. And it sounds beautiful. Beautiful.
00:47:52
Speaker
So what does the future have in store for you in the profession, or do you think that far ahead? Is there anything you want to let people know about? Yeah, so I guess I'm more.
00:48:02
Speaker
I put more focus on the direction rather than the pace, although, as I said, there's a lot going on. So the pace, it's not luxurious. But I think once the direction is right, the direction of travel and for me helping to build happier communities is just really close to my heart. It's what I want to do. So, you know, at the moment I am writing another book I'm working on.
00:48:26
Speaker
getting my own app developed. There's two new courses that I'm working on and I'm also forever learning. So that feels quite... When do you sleep? I sleep so well and so deeply and I'm diligent about getting a good night's sleep. Brilliant. That's a book I'd read. That's a book of boundaries and sleep. Yeah, go for that.
00:48:50
Speaker
non-negotiable for me, a great answer, so important. Okay, so watch this space. So then, okay, I will get to where people can find you, but just before I get to that, if people wanted to learn about mindfulness, what's a book, what's a go-to book that you'd recommend?
Resources and Connection with Orla
00:49:06
Speaker
I thought about this before we talked. So because this is particularly about healing and trauma. So the book you mentioned earlier, The Miracle of Mindfulness was the book, you know, 20
00:49:18
Speaker
six years ago that I picked up in the bookstore that made perfect sense and started my journey but this is the one I chose for your reconciliation and it's healing the inner child and it's written by Thich Nhat Hanh and it's this and again very gentle approach of like the inner child and that's all age four or age eight is still alive in every cell in my body so you know she carries
00:49:45
Speaker
old hurts, old notions, old judgments, and that we can actually reawaken this profound friendship with the child in us.
00:49:56
Speaker
And what happens is when you heal something, my experience of it is, when you heal something that happened when you were four, it's like, it's like a seam of gold, you know, that suffering and that judgment was played out the whole way through your life. So it heals the whole way through your life. So for me, this sense of befriending the child in us, allowing a sense of playfulness and possibility and curiosity and wonder, and of
00:50:22
Speaker
questioning kind of beliefs that we might have had, like, that's just the way you do it. Like, because I think when we're four years old, we develop this inner monologue voice, which is like a bit of a waggle waggle voice, the way things should be. And it's a bit half-baked because our brain is a bit half-baked. We're four, yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
We kind of, we got some stuff from grownups and teachers and parents and we squatted it together into one waggle waggle voice. This is how we do it. We never have questioned it again. We're just like, that's just the way it is. I'm just lazy or, you know, I've just made a mistake again and mistakes are bad or being late is bad or whatever it is. So going back and like questioning everything we believe is so frustrating and liberating. So I love this book, Reconciliation.
00:51:08
Speaker
Going back and questioning everything you believe. That's no small feat. I'm going to unravel my whole life. More than a weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just pause everything there for a moment, yeah. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so reconciliation. Okay, beautiful.
00:51:26
Speaker
Okay, so then if people want to get in touch, where can they find you? I'm going to put all the details in the post so that they can find you, but where's the best place to ask them? So the kind of one-stop shop is that every Sunday morning I send out a newsletter to start Sundays with Happiness, which has a little, it has a little invitation for a practice. I share resources, so guided meditations, recordings.
00:51:50
Speaker
And I share every single thing that's coming up. So it's kind of like, rather than kind of going around. So I also have my website, OrloSullivan.com. I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. I just reawakened Pinterest. So, and Twitter. So I'm on all those, but like the newsletter is, is your easiest place to, yeah, the news of what's coming up.
00:52:13
Speaker
OK, and you're also on Insight Timer, aren't you? I am. The Meditation app, so people wanted to use it, as I know I recommend it to a lot of people, if they wanted to find you or not, they could find you or not. And on your website, you have resources, you have meditations, you have poems, you have, you know, all of them into your book as well. People wanted to get the book, can they get it on your website or is it?
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah. And actually on my website, so it's linked under resources. We are all flowers. And there's also a reading of the book. There are resource packs for teachers that you can download for free. There's coloring pages for families. So there's oodles of ways to help you do flower watering together as a family or as another group, classroom, girl guides. So yes, there's loads. And actually I'm on YouTube as well. So my YouTube channel.
00:53:00
Speaker
the way a lot of people practice with me. So there are ample ways and means. And YouTube, is that just Orlo Sullivan? Yes, I think it's called Orlo Sullivan Mindfulness maybe. Okay, I say we'll have a chat after this and I'll make sure that I have everything and we'll put them up on
00:53:20
Speaker
Orla, thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation. I think, you know, if people aren't running out looking for books on mindfulness and having their cup of coffee and peace after this, I don't know what's going to come of us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I feel like I've had a really nourishing breakfast together. I feel really heart warmed and, yeah, inspired. So thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you. OK, folks, thank you very much for listening.