In this episode, Anne Muhlethaler interviews Dr Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D.
Dr Kaplan is a licensed clinical psychologist, author and teacher, an expert in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), an ACT therapist (for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and also works with the application of mindfulness and meditation in psychotherapy.
Dr Kaplan runs the SoHo CBT + Mindfulness Center, he also teaches courses to undergraduates at The New School in “Mindfulness and Meditation in Psychology” and “Culture, Ethnicity, and Mental Health.” Prior to that, he taught graduate courses in “Evidence-Based Practice” and “Mindfulness and Meditation in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.”
He is a visiting faculty member at the Nalanda Institute (which is how Anne came across him), and has held numerous other teaching positions in the past. Dr Kaplan has also written several books, with subjects including the application of mindfulness to city experiences and viewing love and relationships from a modern behavioural perspective. In fall 2020, he also contributed to a playful gift box that incorporated mindfulness with the care of houseplants (i.e., Plantfulness).
Over the course of this interview, Anne invites Dr Kaplan to talk about his path, which led him from California to Japan and back, and how he left an early career in law to get into psychology, first working on a suicide hotline. He tells Anne about how he began to meditate while serving as a psychology intern, having to lead patients with psychiatric disability in meditation, and the effects he observed on them. The two of them also talk about Urban Mindfulness, the title of the online column and subsequent book Dr Kaplan wrote, and how those of us living in noisy big cities can find calm and navigate through it all. They discuss some of the practices outlined in the book, including how to deal with sensory overload and what Dr Kaplan calls the mindfulness of diversity, to help us explore our biases and blind spots.
To conclude, the two of them discuss the powerful possibilities and psychological flexibility offered by ACT, how it can help us work with limiting stories, away from cognitive diffusion or experiential avoidance, and how this method (which leans on mindfulness) encourages us to act in the world according to our values.
A deeply engaging and fascinating interview, full of insights. Happy listening!
Selected links from episode
You can find Dr Jonathan Kaplan at the Soho CBT Center
His book, Urban Mindfulness
and his other book ACT and RFT in Relationships
The blog post Anne wrote after her a-ha moment, thanks to Dr Kaplan and his lecture on ACT.
ACT (to sound as the word ‘act) or Acceptance & commitment therapy
Steven C Hayes, founder of ACT
Dr Herbert Benson and the relaxation response
Transcendental meditation or TM
Wu wei – or the concept of non-doing in Taoism
Walden, the book by Henry David Thoreau
Full episode transcript
Anne Muhlethaler:
Hi. Hello. Bonjour. And Namaste. This is Out of the Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I’m your host, Anne Muhlethaler.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So I have a question for you. Have you ever been stuck with a problem that has either been present for you or recurrent for many years? Is that your case? It’s certainly mine. So whether you know this about me or not, now would be a good time to tell you that outside of being a coach and consultant and a podcaster, I am also a mindfulness and meditation teacher.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now, in the course of gaining my certification, I also realized that I love studying and I wanted to continue to study mindfulness, meditation, and that I’m also particularly interested in these studies being supported by a scientific lens. So lucky me, I found just the right program at the Melinda Institute in New York. It’s in the course of watching one of the guest faculty lectures back in January of this year that I came across today’s guest, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan. So Dr. Kaplan is a licensed clinical psychologist, the author of two books. He’s also a teacher and an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy, an ACT therapist, for acceptance and commitment therapy. And he also works with the application of mindfulness and meditation to psychotherapy. So I had heard of ACT before, because it had been introduced in the coaching training that I completed last year, but in watching his lecture, following his prompts, I had a major aha moment about something I’d been feeling really stuck around for a very long time.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So long story short, I wrote a blog post about it, wanting to sort of reflect on my own experience. And so I decided to get in touch with Dr. Kaplan. And I was delighted when he accepted to connect and to be a guest on the podcast. So over the course of our conversation, Dr. Kaplan tells me about his path, from studying in Japan, to how he became a psychologist, which incidentally had something to do with his contact with mindfulness and meditation. We also of course talk about ACT. We talk about values, how to work with our inner narratives and much, much more. I hope that you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. And perhaps you too will find something of value that helps you get unstuck. Who knows? Thanks for listening, and enjoy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Let’s get started. Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, it’s such a pleasure to see you again. Thank you so much for making it on Zoom today. Welcome to Out of the Clouds.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me and I appreciate it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s my pleasure. I find that often when I listen to podcast, we dig straight into what people are doing, into the subject of their work or anything that they’ve recently released. I like to take the exact opposite track and to say, I’d love to know more about who you are and where you’re from and how you got here.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I was born in California in the United States and mostly raised on the east coast in Maryland. I had an opportunity after I graduated high school to do a lot of traveling. So went to Boston for my undergraduate schooling. After that, moved to San Francisco, spent some time in Japan, both as a study abroad student. And as I was doing my graduate work, which was based in Los Angeles, but lived in Tokyo for a while. Also lived in rural Ohio. And now currently living here in New York City. So I moved around a lot, which has given me an opportunity to learn a lot about different cultures, different places. And in those contexts, also learn a lot about who I am as a person.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Currently, I’m working as a psychologist. I also have an opportunity to teach. Every year I teach a college course on mindfulness and meditation and psychology. Over the years, I’ve written books or co-written books, published various things, and also finding myself positioned with very privileged identities here in the United States, being white and male and able bodied, and seeing also how that informs my being in the world.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. Now, I read that you first graduated from Tufts University in Asian studies. My curiosity was immediately peaked. I wanted to know what directed you towards Asian studies.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I majored in Asian studies. And in all honesty, it was a major that I declared second semester of my senior year.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Okay.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So it was really the last possible major for me. But what I had done when I started school is I decided that I wanted to learn something practical. This was a college and not a trade school so I couldn’t learn automotive repair or plumbing. And what I came up with was I could learn a language. And given the nature of how I work, internally I decided to pick the hardest one, which at school was Japanese. And I started studying Japanese. And through that process and building on an interest that I had previously, I was also taking courses in Asian history, Asian religion. I had an opportunity to do a study abroad experience in Japan while I was an undergraduate. But each year I actually changed my major. So as a freshman, I was majoring in international relationships. As a sophomore, it was psychology. As a junior, it was Russian history, which lasted just until I was about to graduate. And then it was Asian studies in part because I had maintained focus on the language and related classes for all four years.
Anne Muhlethaler:
How’s your Japanese today?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
[foreign language 00:06:42].
Anne Muhlethaler:
Which means?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It means I studied it in college, but I’ve forgotten everything.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, that’s great. It’s like my German. Yes. But you mentioned that the travel that was involved as well as the discovery of the language was something that became very formative. Would you tell me more about that?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah, so probably the most influential experience I had in college was doing a study abroad experience in Japan. And it drove home two things to me. The first was when I went to Japan I realized that everything that I considered to be “normal” was actually culturally determined, how we communicate, how we are in relationships. And prior to that, I relate and had an experience of recognizing that what I was really operating with was cultural programming. I just thought like, “This is how the world is and this is how it works.” But Japan obviously has all different cultural norms, and experiencing that first hand was really eye opening for me.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
The second experience I had was the first time I was a racial minority in a culture, and that really opened my eyes and gave me a little bit of a taste of just how difficult it can be for BIPOC folks in this country and seeing how many of the privileges that I have as a white person were taken away in that context. I had the opportunity coming back to the United States, of course, to get them back but it really made me realize just how difficult it can be in that kind of situation.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s really interesting.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I did my first study abroad experience as I was an undergraduate at Tufts University. When I came back, I had such a bad experience. A big part of it really is that I didn’t understand what I’ve been through. I also, at the time, had a pretty bad home stay experience when I was there and there was alcoholism in the family. It didn’t play out very well in terms of the kind of environment that I was living in. After that, I came back and I resolved at the time initially not to go back. But I was still interested in Japan, the language and saw that there was a career opportunity so I thought that it might be beneficial for me to go into international law, given my knowledge of the language and culture.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And so I ended up moving to San Francisco where I decided I would work in a law firm first before I actually pursued the study to be a lawyer, which actually ended up being really, really helpful for me because I was put in a law firm and working in litigation, which here in the United States it’s pretty brutal and there’s a lot of antagonism. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but a lot of fighting even when you’re on the same side. The nature of the work I was doing was essentially defending polluters, which I found to be morally repugnant and realized like, “I really can’t stay in this field.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
Now that sounds like it was really intense. So from there, then you went back to UCLA, is that correct?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So from there I had a bit of a crisis. And this is what I’d been planning to do, to go into international law. And finding that law wasn’t for me, I didn’t know what to do. So I’d always been interested in helping people. And given the nature of the work I was doing, I felt like I had to do something morally and ethically to redeem myself. And so again, looking around and trying to decide what’s the most difficult thing I could do, I decided that it would be to work at a suicide crisis line and talk to people who are feeling like killing themselves. So that’s what I did. I became really interested in helping people in that way. I met with therapists to talk to them about what their experiences are like as therapists. I ended up doing research over at UC Berkeley, looking at cross-cultural differences and emotional expression. And through those experiences, as well as taking some psychology classes, I was able to have enough information to decide on a career in psychology and fortunately was able to go to UCLA and initially was working in Asian American Mental Health.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s fascinating. I kind of want to ask you about that trait of yours to try and find the hardest thing to do.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Where does that come from?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I think to put it simply, I like a challenge. Right? And it’s all self-identified. I’m sure somebody else would think that something else is the hardest thing, right? But that’s just part of how I navigate the world, is I think about what might be interesting or challenging and then see if I can do it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s fascinating. So 2010, you wrote and publish your first book. I was fascinated about the fact that it was the result of a longstanding column that you’d done online. How many years was that column online?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I think at the time it was online maybe for two years, which was a lifetime at that time for having something like that in existence.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Absolutely. And so it was called Urban Mindfulness. I really loved the subtitle, which I feel is something that I could imagine all New Yorkers would need. Cultivating Peace, Presence, and Purpose in the Middle of It All. So would you talk to us how you got into Urban Mindfulness and perhaps into mindfulness in the first place?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Sure. Happy to. In the late ’90s, I was doing a lot of reading about mindfulness and meditation. I ended up actually going back to Japan as a graduate student, which helped me have a better understanding and appreciation for the culture and doing some meditation practices while I was there. My first real experience of doing meditation in a prolonged way happened as I was an intern in psychology and having to lead a group of people who were on psychiatric disability in meditation. And these were people for whom the state of California had determined that they were too disabled to work, which typically meant that they were often hospitalized, they had severe diagnoses of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they were often homeless. It was put upon me along with my supervisor at the time, Lorraine Allman, to lead them in meditation.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I thought it’d be very hypocritical of me to be doing that if I didn’t have a practice myself. So I started meditating with them, not just in leading the meditations, but also in establishing a regular practice that was based on Herbert Benson’s approach and the relaxation response. Are you familiar with that?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I am, but would you actually speak to it for our listeners that may not be familiar with professor Benson’s groundbreaking mindfulness research?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Sure. So professor Benson actually passed away recently, but he was the first American researcher to start scientifically studying meditation. And this was back I think in the 1970s. He was interested in cardiovascular health. And at the time, there was a very popular meditation movement of TM or transcendental meditation. He was approached by a number of TM practitioners who offered themselves up for study. And because at the time he was a very young academic at Harvard, he was worried about his reputation, he was worried about his colleagues’ opinions of him so he agreed to do the studies of them, but only if they came in through the back of the building and late in the evening.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s quite something.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the arrangement they had. He had people do their meditation and he hooked them up to a whole host of physiological measurements, measuring blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductivity for a measure of stress, temperature, things like that. What he found was in doing the meditation, that people were able to have lowered blood pressure, lowered heart rate, lowered stress, lowered temperature. Everything that he saw seemed to him to be the opposite of the flight or freeze response. And so he dubbed it the relaxation response, which he posited as the opposite of the fight, flight or freeze. And he said that we have this hardwired ability to relax in this way, but there’s one key aspect to it, which is that it does not happen automatically. That the stress response happens whether we want it to or not, right? We get activated and stressed. But it’s not as though we’re walking down the street and suddenly we feel relaxed. We actually have to induce it, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
True. In my experience, certainly.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mine too. I imagine for your listeners as well. And in doing this research, he identified four key aspects to the meditation. First two are relatively straightforward. You have to have a comfortable, relaxed posture, be in a comfortable space. Third one is that you need to have some kind of word or phrase that you repeat in your mind over and over again, right? For the folks that we’re practicing TM, this is their mantra, this is the sound, whatever they’ve been given. He maintained that it doesn’t have to be that. That it could be any other word or any other phrase as long as it’s relatively emotionally neutral. So you don’t want something that’s going to be too provocative. You don’t want to be thinking to yourself, “Death, death, death.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
No, probably not.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
No, no. Or the other way, just thinking about the name of your lover over and over again. It’s like, no, those are too provocative.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yes.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So something fairly neutral, relaxed, peace, one, lampshade, whatever it is you want. And the fourth and last component is that we need to have a passive attitude towards distracting thoughts. And so you focus on whatever this word or phrase is. And whenever other thoughts come up, you just think to yourself, “Oh, well.” You just go back to whatever the original focus is.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, it’s so fascinating.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It is. It is. So that’s how I got started with meditation and working with these folks who were not only on psychiatric disability. Most of them were African American or Latino. This was in South Central Los Angeles and they were also Baptist or evangelical Christians, so a lot of folks in picking their word or phrase pick scripture.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, beautiful.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. And so the meditation for them became a form of prayer. And it was a wonderful experience not only seeing how they were able to use the meditation to help themselves feel better and to calm themselves, but also it prompted many of them to reconnect with their religious communities, and they started going back to church.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wow, that’s absolutely incredible.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. I love that that was happening in an outgrowth of that group. So starting from there, I continued to practice meditation in that way for a while, and at a certain point realized that there was something called mindfulness meditation and that wasn’t what I was doing. Started be to become more interested in that. Started practicing different forms of meditation. At some point, started going very deep down a Buddhist rabbit hole because I became curious about where did all this come from. And so when it came time for me to be writing Urban Mindfulness, I already had an established background in meditation, I’ve been exploring Buddhism for a long time. And prior to writing that, I’d actually been living in a very rural setting.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I remember you telling me, but now it clicks back in of course. So you go from the Buddhist rabbit hole, a regular meditation practice in a quiet space, to New York City?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if anybody else has had this experience of going from a quiet to a loud place. It was disregulating and stressful. I’ll often say that we aren’t physically designed to live this way. There’s an overwhelming amount of sensory stimuli in cities and we’re often prompted by the written word, which I think activates the verbal mind, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I remember you mentioning that. Would you tell me more about that?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. So in cities, and particularly here in New York, you can’t open your eyes without seeing something that’s written. And it’s everywhere. Not just signs and street signs, but it’s on buses. It’s on the turn style parts. The things that go around, they have advertisements there. And if we contrast that, I would say going for a walk in the woods, there are no signs. There’s nothing in that environment typically demanding our attention. It’s not as though we go for a walk and it’s like, “Tree! Oh, another tree!” No. No. But here, everything is really trying to call attention to itself and they’re all in competition, right? And we are just walking around in this environment. What we try to do typically is to shut it out, right? So I’m going to put on my sunglasses and I’m going to put in my headphones and I’m just going to overwhelm it with my own stimuli, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
You’re describing me. Yeah. 100%.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So I’m laughing yesterday, I was out in the city and I saw this woman walking down the street. She had her sunglasses on, she had her earphones in, and she was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Like, wow. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s a really intense way to be doing it. I love it.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It is. It is. I think that’s kind of our natural response, is we try to shut it out. And so what I became curious about, and this is one of the fundamental themes of the book and of the column, was how can we actually be present in a city and not block it out? How can we actually be open to experiencing these stimuli, but in a way that allows us to experience them and then let them pass through so that it’s not as though it comes in and we get stuck with it?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So practicing mindfulness with the non-judgment, non-attachment, letting it go, but with what I think Jack Kornfield likes to call now loving awareness. So not having an antagonistic point of view with that environment when it rubs up against us, I guess.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Exactly. Exactly. So when I was on the book tour for example, one of the chapters I would get asked most often about was the chapter I wrote about noisy neighbors.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I’d love to hear more about that.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And how can we bring, as you’re suggesting, the loving awareness to that experience, right? That’s not typically what we do. We’ll get stuck in, “They shouldn’t be so loud” and, “What’s going on over there?” and, “This is unreasonable” and… All of that, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And yet we can find a way to relate to the sound, to relate to our neighbors, to relate to members of our community in a different way, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It doesn’t mean that we don’t say something if they’re blaring music or something’s really loud. We can certainly intervene and we can talk to folks. But maybe we can actually talk to people in a way that’s loving and understanding as opposed to angry and antagonistic.
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s fascinating you should say this. Well, I was talking about this with a group I lead online and I was joking. We were practicing mindfulness of sound. I was saying that I feel like my environment is just queuing me every morning when I sit down to meditate, because that’s exactly at the same time as the garbage collectors truck arrived.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
They’re really loud and there’s three different kind of garbage trucks. They come twice a week. And then there’s the school outside. And I swear, there’s a bunch of kids, they are trying to get to me. That kind of screaming is almost non-human. But obviously I say this jokingly because this is coming on the other end of the pandemic. And while it was quiet and enjoyable for it to be quiet sometimes, it was also eerily weird and unnatural. And part of the joy and the difficulty about these noises is the noises of a functioning city and aliveness, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Because I remember what I was like when I was a kid and I’m pretty sure I was screaming like the rest of them. So it’s interesting how we can observe our own tendencies to react positively or negatively against some of these and just see if we can let it be, and let it be for what they are in that moment without attaching ourselves to it and let that be part of the practice.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And Anne, I love that, really as inviting our practice to be part of all of our experiences, right? And instead of this sort of special rarefied thing that’s so precious, we have to protect it. And it’s like, “No. Garbage sound, children sound, noisy neighbor, bring it all on. Bring it all on.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
Absolutely. One of the other students who is in our group, she was saying she had a big aha moment when she realized that her practice didn’t need to be conditional to elements she had preset for herself. She needed to practice in front of her altar at a specific time of day, I don’t know if she needed to be seated a certain way, and she thought, “No, no, it can be here and now wherever I am, however imperfect according to my own standards.” That felt very opening to me.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You mentioned Jack Kornfield and I am reminded by something that one of his teachers, Ajahn Chah, talked about, that how he would meditate in the monastery and he would hear the sounds of the local village and get really annoyed by the sounds, married men to celebration. I don’t know. And then he had this inside or epiphany that the village was just doing what it was doing and he was the one that was going there to be annoyed.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that’s so true. I think it was him who was also joking about, you think it’s easier in a mastery, but there’s still going to be other monks making noise. I mean, you’re still living in a community.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was looking at some of the chapters of the book. I remember seeing in your CV and you mentioning today in our conversation this connection you have to different ethnic realities. You wrote a passage about mindfulness of diversity and I was wondering if you could speak to us about this a little bit.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Sure. Yeah. I think it’s important to know aspects of ourselves and our own identities and how they influence sort of not just how we are in the world, but also how we interact with other people. And there’s real opportunities I think for us to use our mindfulness practice here to become aware of the biases that we might have towards other people, to become aware of attention in the body when we encounter somebody that we see that’s different from us. It really provides us with an opportunity to work with these things at a different level. So as opposed to just automatically working in accordance with whatever biases we might have, there’s an opportunity for us to sort of see these things in operation.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So for example, if we go to a party, who do we lean into, right? Who do we approach and who do we lean away from? If we go to a meditation retreat, who is not here and who is? Right? This is one of the problems I think with mindfulness, is there’s such an emphasis on paying attention to what’s here, we don’t pay enough attention to what’s missing or who’s missing, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I worked with that a little bit, but I feel like this is something that I could get reminded of, I think. I remember having a moment of realization. I think it was about a year ago where I noticed that as a woman walking down the street at a time where we were coming out of lockdown, I had particularly strong reaction towards men in general regardless of their color.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And I don’t know why, but even though I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, which is, as things go, pretty safe place to live.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And yet, perhaps because for so long we weren’t interacting with others and I did spend most of all of these lockdowns on my own, there was a sense of dread that sort of even though it wasn’t very marked, but I paid attention and I noted it. It was strange. It subsided. I think it was very tied to the situation, but an odd thing to notice.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
No. An exquisite thing to notice, right? And in a way, that can allow you and other folks to try to work with that in a way that depending on the situation or context can underscore a feeling of safety perhaps, right? And of honoring that feeling, but also perhaps finding ways to work with it, right? That don’t do violence towards you or anyone else, but also help metabolize it in a way that’s going to be ultimately helpful, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have a tendency to use what’s called stealth metta. So for those who don’t know, metta is the Pali word for a practice called loving kindness, which is my core practice. And so over time, as I meditated every day with loving kindness over time, I started saying mentally to myself when I crossed someone’s path down the street, “May you be well.” I later on with Tara Brach that she nicknamed it stealth undercover metta. And so I now am more conscious of that. And so whenever I see or recognize someone who I could feel a sense of disconnection or separation from, instead of looking away, I look at, and I direct stealth metta.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Nice. That sounds like such a lovely practice.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What I like about it is this also forces us instead of looking away, to look towards. So I think it’s the start of a connection with others, you know?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. And inviting us to engage in a way that is positive, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So I wanted to come back to how I connected with you and found out about your practice and your work. So, as I mentioned very much in passing earlier, a student with the Melinda Institute, we meet weekly. I’m just finishing my first year in mindfulness, exactly, in contemplative psychotherapy. And you lectured last year. I watched a couple of hours of your recorded lecture, which you gave on ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. And I’d been introduced to ACT in my coaching training last year with Martha Beck, which I was very intrigued by. And so I promptly had decided to buy a bunch of books on ACT, which I hadn’t read yet until you came around.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So giving the listeners just a tiny little bit of understanding of what happened, I was in a nail salon getting my pedicure on, which is as an ex New Yorker is called self care. I was multitasking. I was listening to your lecture and I had my iPad. At the beginning of your talk, you asked everyone in the room to write down something that they’d been struggling with for a while. And then you asked everyone to raise their hand if they had been struggling with this for more than one year. And then I couldn’t see the room, but I could deduce from how you continued. And then you asked everyone to keep their hand up if it’s been more than a year, more than five years. And so suddenly you realize that the entire room has got their hand up, and that we struggle most of our lives with a few things that are incredibly important to us clearly. And that was your beginning to introduction on finding solutions and getting a flexible brain. I liked your talk so much. I think I listened to it three times.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Wow. Wow.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And I got an AI transcript so I could get the best bits in front of my eyes because I felt like there was so much practical opportunity for us to connect and break out of patterns in a way that didn’t feel like hard work. I remember what I connected to most. So you spoke at some point about a patient of yours. Do you remember this guy?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yes. Yes, very much so.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, would you talk to us about that example?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Sure.
Anne Muhlethaler:
About how stuck he was, because he really helped me actually. Just so he knows.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Well, first I want to mention that exercise is something that I learned from Steven Hayes who is one of the originators of ACT.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, yeah, whose book I’m reading. Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Fabulous. Sometimes folks will see acceptance and commitment therapy and see the letters A-C-T and they’ll just say it as ACT. But actually as we’ve been doing, if you’re familiar with it, you’re encouraged to just sound it out as ACT. But to come back to your question, I predominantly work as an ACT therapist. Many years ago, I was met with a gentleman. I think he was in his 80s. He’d been in psychotherapy for decades, in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapies. He unfortunately had had a fairly traumatic childhood and he had learned from these various therapies that his parents didn’t value him as much as his sibling. He was always kind of second fiddle and wasn’t desirable and he’d had these experiences growing up and he developed through these forms of therapies, a pretty sophisticated understanding about sort of why he was stuck. And it became his story.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Unfortunately, because of that past experience and because more pointedly his attachment to that story, he didn’t see any way to break out of it. And it’s true, right? We can’t go back to the past. It’s done, right? But essentially what he was doing was reifying this is his experience over and over again, as being unlovable or unworthy of affection or attention. All he had was him and this story of just how bad he was. And unfortunately, he had this belief that he had to somehow overcome this before he could actually be dating. And what I suggested to him was, “No, you don’t at all. That you can be out there in the world trying to meet someone and trying to date still having had these experiences, still having this story. Even very tightly held, you can still be out there doing this.”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
He was essentially horrified when I explained this to him and we talked more about it and he became really, really despondent as it dawned on him that he could have been living in a different way for many, many years. And so what I’ve seen in doing the ACT work is that it’s really, really powerful in suggesting that maybe we can still find ways to live the kind of life that we want even when we’re struggling with aspects of ourselves or aspects of our experience that we don’t.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah, for me it was so powerful. Perhaps first of all, hearing the experience of someone at that age and realizing that me or anybody else listening, without making an effort, aspect of ourselves can get stuck in the current reality that we’re in if we don’t make the active choice of seeking how to break open from them. And I loved how immediately accessible ACT was. So perhaps you could tell our listeners a little bit more about what is ACT.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. ACT is a form of psychotherapy that posits that our main difficulty in life stems from the fact that we’re stuck, and it’s termed as psychological inflexibility. And there are certain processes that keep us stuck. But in order for us actually to get unstuck and to be living in a way that feels more authentic and present, there’s certain things that we have to do. One of the first things we have to do is we have to learn how to relate differently to the stories in our head, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
To give you an example and perhaps to talk more generally of what this gentleman was struggling with, oftentimes what I’ll see is folks struggle with a narrative of not good enough, right? That there’s something wrong with me. I’m defective, I’m bad, right? Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough. And what we do is we engage with that in a way that we think, “Well, I need to get good enough in order for me to do X, Y, and Z,” right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And so from an ACT perspective, instead, it’s a matter of realizing that that’s your narrative and that’s your story. And even if there are aspects of your life that aren’t as good as you want them to be, that can still be fine, right? How can you actually live with that story with that voice in the head, right? And unfortunately, what people will do is they’ll try to do things to counteract the narrative, which actually aren’t helping them live in a full way, right? So people are struggling to feel good enough, or they’re struggling to have self-confidence, or they’re struggling not to be nervous in social situations without experiencing these things. Not to be flippant, but good luck with that, right? It’s very difficult to do that. And ultimately what we’re doing is prioritizing a feeling over a behavior.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s very interesting.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And once I feel different, I will do differently. Part of what ACT leads to is actually “No, why don’t you do different and then you’ll feel different?” Right? Maybe not at first, right? Maybe not ever, right? But maybe part of that doing something differently will still have some worth and value for you. So one of the key aspects of ACTs is this area that’s called cognitive diffusion, which is how do we relate to our thinking, the stories, the voice in the head and the way that doesn’t make us so bound with it, where we’re not as stuck with what it says and believing in it in a way that prompts us to live in a very inhibited way. Does that make sense?
Anne Muhlethaler:
So much. It makes me think of that Rumi quote, which goes something like, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
And so we are very imprisoned by the narrative and we don’t notice that it limits our experience.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. You can have the thought and relate to it differently, right? And that’s what this process in ACT is about. Now, in standard cognitive behavioral therapy for example, there might be some emphasis on trying to prove or disprove a thought, right? To trying to change the thought. But within ACT, the emphasis is not on changing it at all. The emphasis is on how can we relate to it differently? How can we make it lighter for us in a way that encourages us to act in the world in accordance with our own values?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Great. You used the word values. So there’s two things that I thought were really interesting about ACT; how important values can be and also the relationship between acts and mindfulness. Would you mind speaking to both these things?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. So I mentioned one area or process of ACT is cognitive diffusion, and there’s five others. Acceptance, contact with the present moment, selfless context, values, and committed action. As it relates to values and mindfulness, so mindfulness is a key part of the process for us to be actually living in a present moment so that we’re not sort of worried about some sort of imagined future or filled with regret or remorse over some kind of past experience, right? And our capacity to change is really based in us being fully present, as well as our capacity to accept things, right? To allow for experiences. And here from an ACT perspective, typically what we’ll do is… This is what all of us do, I think, is we try to avoid discomfort. More pointedly, the emotional discomfort, right? So, “I don’t like to feel anxious. I don’t like to feel sad. I don’t really like feeling angry.” So it’s like, “All right. How am I going to contort myself to make sure that I don’t have these feelings?” Right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
The reality is that we’re going to have these feelings whether we like it or not, right? And unfortunately, sometimes the feelings will come up in situations where we might actually want something that’s important to us, right? And this is where the values work comes in. So we need to know what’s important to us values wise. And there’s at least a couple ways to approach that. But oftentimes it’s not enough to know what’s important to us. We also have to work with the obstacles, right? We need to be committed to moving towards that value even when we’re experiencing difficult emotions, even when the narrative or story in our head is really loud. Like how can we still lean in, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
It’s a fascinating practice. As I was saying to you just before we started taping, I just wrote a blog post about values. It’s something that I use in coaching with one on online clients, but I feel like I have even more of a commitment to helping companies be very in touch with their values. And working with them, not just naming them and sticking them in a corner, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Anne Muhlethaler:
But I think your lecture, sometimes even our core values can come into conflict. I think that one person had raised her hand and said, “But how do we do this?” And it was really interesting to see, we just have to work on a case by case basis, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a silly example is, let’s say we value honesty and we also value kindness and relationships, right? We go to a dinner party where our friend makes a dish that’s really pretty horrible. It’s kind of gross. And then we’re presented with “Oh, how’d you like it?” It’s like, “Oh, no.” If I we’re to be honest, “It’s really bad.” And if I leave with kindness, then does that mean, I lie and like say, “I loved it”? Right? Do I try to thread the needle in some way? It’s like, “Oh, it’s not for me,” right? So to your point, Anne, just because we know what our values are, it doesn’t mean that it’s smooth sailing. And oftentimes we might prioritize one over the other or find some way to squish them together.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I was talking to a friend who’s very passionate about her work, but has a tendency to work way too much. And I can see myself in that. One of my core values is passion or enthusiasm. I was reflecting in this blog post that perhaps for me, thankfully, the leading value is courage. And I have the courage to stop when I need to stop in order not to be led down the rabbit hole that will be against my wellbeing overall. It takes a lot of courage sometimes to step away and say, “You know what? I need to not do anything.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was reflecting on that because also just before seeing you, I was telling some friends about Brene Brown who you must have heard of, who recently, I think it was just a week ago, announced that she was posing up until after Labor Day, going dark on social media and stopping, taking a breath for both herself and her organization. And I was thinking that it was both privileged and incredibly courageous and a great example and perhaps not something that everyone can relate with, but certainly an example of someone leading with her values.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I know it’s the case here in New York City and I’m sure elsewhere too where the emphasis is really on ambition and striving and doing, right? And you probably know, I think it was Jon Kabat-Zinn at one point talking about how we’re human beings, not human doings, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s such a great phrase. Yeah, I think the word productivity comes up in most conversations I have with people even though when they themselves don’t declare any specific ambitions.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I work with a lot of folks in the tech world and a lot of what I hear is optimization, right? Which is doing even more efficiently. I don’t even know what it looks like, but if I’m 90% optimizing things in my career, what’s 95%? Right? As opposed to what you’re suggesting, which is actually maybe we take the foot off of the accelerator, right? Maybe we sort of ease up some. And if we maybe actually think about times in our life that have been really special and wonderful and filled with awe for us, those are typically the quieter, slower moments.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. That certainly rings true for me. Now I ask myself the question about what those moments look like.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. For the past couple years, I’ve actually been pivoting from exploring Buddhism to exploring Daoism. There’s this principle of, I’m probably pronouncing it wrong, but “Wu Wei”, which is this principle of non-action and kind of being able to rest very actively in non-doing and allowing things to naturally unfold. So for example, that plant behind you probably is not pushing itself to grow dollar. “I’m going to really get bigger and…” No. It’s just naturally growing, right? No pushing, no striving, no unnaturally balanced ambition there. And it grows, it grows.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I was thinking towards the end of that writing exercise. Even though I didn’t place it in there, one of the coaches I studied with is called Tara Mohr. She has a whole module in her training called I think Making it Easy. And sometimes we thrive so hard, we forget that we can stop and actually say, “How could I make this just a little bit easier?”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
In the spirit of that plant and with more of an attitude of non-action. Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, the non-action doesn’t mean not doing, right? It doesn’t mean that we don’t grow, but it means allowing for things to unfold at a more natural pace, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Or at least having some flexibility to go into that space periodically, right? I mean, certainly there can be times when we need to push or want to push or have to, and that’s fine, right? And then as you’re suggesting, perhaps with Brene Brown or yourself or others of us, recognizing times when we can also pause or we can also slow down, and it’s still okay.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I gather that it’s also what we all do when we sit in meditation. It doesn’t need to be 12 weeks, although that sounds great. But sometimes 12 minutes a day is a starting point for a different kind of perspective.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Absolutely. I love that you brought that up because the same attitude of pushing and striving, we bring it into our meditation, right? More is better, more often is better than less often, right? And I got to double down and buckle down on this experience, right? And certainly there are times when approaching the meditation practice in that way can be helpful, right? It can lead us to particular breakthroughs or insights if with intensive practice, right? But we also have to recognize how a lot of the narratives that we have, we bring into the practice too, right? And one of the things that I’ll talk when I teach folks meditation, especially as folks are beginning, is what’s better than nothing?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
What’s better than nothing, right? Because the mind will set up… At least I’ll talk about mine, but it’ll tell me what counts as meditation, right? And there’s so many criteria. It has to be at least 20 minutes long, preferably 45 minutes to an hour if this is outside of a retreat setting. Now, I have to be fully absorbed in what I’m doing, right? It can’t be any distractions. All of that, right? Or else what? In my head, the mindfulness beliefs are going to come after me somehow. It’s like, what is this nonsense, right? It’s like, “I don’t know. Like, Okay.”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So sort of seeing that and being able, hopefully, to laugh at it so that we can approach the practices in ways that are still beneficial for us. And this is kind of that loving awareness. This is kind of the acceptance or allowing that can come with the practice, right? And I’ll tell folks spending an hour fully absorbed to say and feeling yourself breathing in and out, that’s really boring. What are you getting out of that, right? Certainly physiological benefits.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Sure. Mm-hmm.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
That comes with it, right? But part of the what’s really helpful in the practice is cultivating these attitudes of acceptance, and allowing, and love. And we can do that by even examining our relationship to the meditation practices themselves, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I remember recently hearing Sharon Salzberg explain very so clearly and so simply that this is resilience practice. We noticed that it’s very hard to follow our breath or our thoughts or our body sensations. And instead of blaming ourselves or getting cognitively fused with whatever narrative is happening in that moment, we learn to let go. We learn to let go over and over and over again. And that’s actually building up resilience for how we let go with every other annoying situation that’s going to happen daily in our lives. I had never looked at it like that. But then when I looked at how my own behavior changed from reactive to less reactive after I’d become a practitioner, I was like, “Oh, that’s how that worked. All right. That makes sense.”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah. In that example, Anne, what are you letting go of?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Any thought that passes by. So it could be anything that captured my attention. I love this saying, “Mind producers thought the same way mouth produces saliva.” And the day I heard that, I realized I need to stop being angry at my thoughts. It wasn’t their fault.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Nope.
Anne Muhlethaler:
They’re just happening, but I can just stop attaching to them and following them. And when I notice that followed, instead of blaming myself, I can just be like, “Oh, there we go. Let’s come back. And do it again with the next one and the one after that.”
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And recognizing that the mind is a thought machine that’s always on, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Especially for folks that might be new to meditation, in some sense that stereotype perhaps we have to clear our mind, right? That’s not the case at all, right? We might, depending on the meditation, want to focus on a particular stimulus or meditation object, but there’s going to be a ton of thoughts. Ton of thoughts, right? But being able to allow for that reality is really, really important, right? Especially emotionally.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. So recently a friend of mine, when I said, “Oh, I’m doing a meditation workshop. Do you want to join?” He said, “Oh no, I’d try yoga with you. But meditation? That’s too hardcore.” This is someone who’s incredibly athletic, who does a lot of really dangerous practices on sea, on snow. And for that person to tell me that meditation is hardcore, took me by surprise. But then I think that the coming into contact with the thoughts is what people feel can be too hardcore because I think a lot of us are sufficiently happy with being distracted with whatever’s coming out from the outside environment so that they don’t have to really look in words.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that can be the case and that a lot of things that can come to mind can be upsetting, right? That we can spend time, even in meditation, kind of rehearsing very limiting stories, right? The initial research on mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression was it that when they used it for folks who were actively depressed, they became a little bit more depressed.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Interesting.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I think part of that is that if we’re depressed or if we’re new to meditation, we can spend a lot of time just rehearsing those stories over and over again with exquisite attention, right? That can be really scary. That can be really intimidating. And so we need to find ways to, you know, whether it’s letting go or unhook or to come back to whatever other object we’re attending to, right? This can even relate some to what that ACT process of cognitive diffusion, right? It’s going to being able to notice that it’s there and “All right, I’m coming off of it. My mind’s telling me I’m a worthless human being again. Okay. Next.”
Anne Muhlethaler:
Exactly. Moving on.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. “Got anything new here? Yeah, no? Okay.” I’m not sure if I shared this in this talk, did I talk about cable TV?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I loved it. This is one of my favorite things that you talked about. Yeah. It felt like such a hilarious way to understand the ways in which we function.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So we can think of the mind as being a little bit like cable TV, right? And if you think about cable, there’s different channels. Each channel has a theme, right? So there might be a cooking channel. There might be a sports channel, right? Every show that appears on that channel might look different, but it’s going to still be consistent with the theme and the programming. Not surprisingly on each channel there’s going to be coming attractions, there’s going to be a lot of reruns. There might be some shows that are in syndication that come up over and over again, right? And this is what we can see in terms of how our own minds work, right? Maybe somebody has not good enough channel or maybe somebody has a worry channel, right? What might come to mind in any particular moment might be, “Oh, what if this bad thing happens?” and “Oh, what if I don’t get that promotion?” Or, “What if I lose a job?” or, “What if something happens to my kids?”, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Now, they might seem different and they are, but there are different shows on the same channel, right? And as we practice meditation and mindfulness in particular, we start to learn what our channels are, right? Unfortunately, just like if we sign up for some kind of cable TV package, we can’t say, “Oh, I want all of that, but I don’t want the cooking show,” right? It’s like, “No. No. You got it all. You got it all.” And you’re kind of stuck with it. Unfortunately, if we try to develop some counter programming, the, “I’m good enough show,” or the, “Don’t worry, be happy show,” it’s going to run on that channel and it’s not going to be renewed. It’s just not. So you have a short run and we’re just going to go back to the usual worries, back to the usual insecurities, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
But?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
But what we can do and as come back to what you mentioned earlier, values, right? This is something that we can very deliberately, very purposefully cultivate as a new channel for us, right? As you were suggesting earlier, maybe we have a love channel, right? A metta channel. “Oh, okay. How do I do that? What does that look like?”, right? And the example you gave was wonderful. It’s like, “Oh. Well, when I’m going down the street, I might see somebody and wish them well.” Awesome. Awesome. And that helps us develop new ways of thinking, new ways of being in the world that are consistent with really what matters to us, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. It’s endlessly fascinating how values can touch us at so many level. I was coaching a collaborator a couple of days ago. And when we let ourselves explore all of the layers of the metaphor… Because I think any value we choose can be interpreted in multitudes of ways, right? Whether we talk about generosity or whatever it is, whether it’s a personal core belief, whether it’s a value attached to your work, letting ourselves see all of the reasons why this matters.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
As beings, as how we show up in the world, as how we show up for ourselves, for others, in our work, and how that also maybe linked to how we want to the rest of our lives to play out, right?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
100%. 100%.
Anne Muhlethaler:
You tie this back to the 80 year old gentleman who hadn’t necessarily figured out his connection to his own values.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
But there’s certainly ways if we’re more flexible with how we think about moving forward and valued directions that we can still make some progress there, some movement in that direction.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m so glad you used that word because I was thinking that apart from the pause, so the pause that we take in meditation or in being present, the second thing I think is super valuable is moving. Sometimes we also even need physically to define motion to shift perspective. There was a friend of mine who runs a digital marketing agency. In the middle of a brainstorm, he said, “We’re going to get a coffee. And when we come back, everyone’s going to shift seats around the room.” And even just the act of getting up, going to use the restroom, grabbing glass of water and a cup of coffee and sitting in someone else’s chair, refreshed everyone’s minds. Movement.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Nice. Movement, right? I don’t know if you’ve ever had this question, but sometimes I’ll hear from folks some version of, “I’m mindful. Now what?”
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s excellent. “I’m mindful. Now what?” So what do you answer?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, first I probably do a little bit of a stereotypical, like notice what comes up for you as you ask that. What’s going on in the body? Just be present with that question a little bit. But I don’t treat it as rhetorical usually. But instead we’ll explain like, this is where the values come in, right? This is where you might find a way to move forward in something even when it’s really hard, even when it’s really hard. So if somebody’s, I don’t know, valuing creativity, how can you make something, how can you be creative when part of your narrative might be that you’re not good enough or part of your narrative is imagining other people judging you negatively?
Anne Muhlethaler:
I think you’re just pointing to every writer and artist in the world. I mean, I feel like pretty much everyone I know who does anything remotely artistic or creative basically sits down to work thinking, “God, I’m terrible.” But yeah, so thank you. But this is, how do we work with that?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, lots of ways. So many ways. Well I’ll tell you how not to work with that, I would say, is one, it’s not that helpful to argue with it. Nobody’s looking at you, nobody’s paying attention. “I am a wonderful person. I am great and creative.” It’s like, “Sure, how long is that going to last?”, right? But instead, being able to recognize that this is a story, this is a pattern. This is that one of those cable TV channels that you got on, right? So is there another channel you can put on, either values wise, right? Maybe instead of giving all this attention, to paraphrase you, the mind and saliva, maybe instead we notice, “Okay, I’m thinking that. What am I feeling in the body? What do I notice around me?” right? Maybe slow it down, taking other sensory information. Not just what’s happening in the mind. What are my ears telling me right now? What’s my body telling me right now, right? Find ways to ground in that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks for making this a really easy transition. So in reading your CV, I got curious when I read that you got an early career award with the American Psychological Association for impressive contributions to the profession and helping students learn more about the mind-body connection. My personal experience of studying to become a teacher was hearing lots of people, especially my mentor, Solwazi Johnson, talking about feelings and sensations in the body arising in the conversations we had and me thinking, “I get the point. It’s really hard. What’s this all about?” And I think the reason why I was interested in studying yoga, studying mindfulness meditation, and now with Nalanda is actually to better understand the mind-body connections. So would you speak a little bit to what you’ve uncovered in your work?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. I don’t think that any of this is really new information to us. We can even look for example just in terms of meditation, right? Here’s a “mental practice.” What I’m doing is bringing my attention to a particular object or question or experience. And it has effects on the body, right? What we know from research on meditation, it is that it is very, very helpful for the body. One of the things that really blew me away many years ago and prompted me to continue the practice was reading a research study that talked about how the practice of a very focused meditation led to the reversal of artless sclerosis. It reversed scarring around the heart. I was like, “Whoa! What?” Just meditation.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I mean, wow.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
I was like, “Oh. All right.” That is pretty powerful medicine right there.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wow.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Very powerful, right? We see this in other ways too, right? How exercise or lack of exercise affects the mind or brain. How what we eat affects how we feel. I mean, it’s just all interconnected.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. The biggest surprise for me was certainly to get to understand how much better life feels when we’re more in contact with the sensations of our bodies because that means we also get messages ahead of our mind. Sometimes the prefrontal cortex is not the one with the primary information. It catches up later. And so I think developing this sort of intimate connection with ourselves is an essential practice. For as long as you’re going to be a living with this sort of bodysuit, we may as well optimize our connection, to use your earlier word, optimize our connection to it so that we can better follow its guidance as well. Because I think it has a lot of wisdom that perhaps we don’t listen to.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It does. It does. We can see this when we look at animals that don’t have a prefrontal cortex, that don’t have the capacity for language and thinking that we do, right? I watch, for example, I have cats. And I’ll watch how, whenever they wake up, they stretch a lot. A lot, right? And I think to myself, “Huh? When I wake up, am I stiff? Do I need to stretch?” Typically, I just go and do something else, right?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. As you say that, I’m thinking, “Mm-hmm. Well, yeah.” That’s so funny.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Not only they eat when they’re hungry, they sleep when they’re tired, right? They prefer to nap in the sun presumably because it feels good.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot that we can learn from watching them. That’s for sure.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So I wanted to ask you… Obviously you are based in New York City. We’ve just gone through a global pandemic. I was wondering if you would share what you’ve been doing over time in terms of your personal rituals for grounding, for wellbeing, your favorite practices. Because I think we all approach it differently. I appreciate the fact that you shared that you tried lots of different types of meditations. I do too. I’m non sectarian, even though my main practices are deriving from Buddhist and Buddhism and mindfulness. So what works for you?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
One of the things that I’ve always believed as a therapist or even more generally as a healer, or as a teacher, is that in order for us to be best able to help other people, we need to take care of ourselves, we need to be functioning as well as we can, right? And just like if a surgeon is going to perform surgery, you don’t want her using a dull knife or a dull scalpel, right? So we have to be sharp, which means that we have to take care of ourselves, right? And for me, what that’s meant is a number of things. As we talked about earlier, it can mean saying no to different projects and extra work. It means having some kind of mindfulness and meditation practice that’s evolved over the years.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Since November, I’ve been doing a very specific Daoist practice for a particular reason, but that’s a nice, nice aspect of these practices, is that depending on where we’re at, we can find something that’s helpful and nourishing for us. As a therapist, and maybe other people have this experience too, I spend a lot of time sitting. And so really recognizing the importance of movement for me. And so I have exercise regimen and exercise five to six times a week pretty vigorously, but I’d have to say probably the thing that I like the most that I’ve missed during the pandemic has been dance with others.
Anne Muhlethaler:
What kind of dance are we talking?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I like ecstatic dance. For folks that don’t know, it’s usually like some sort of electronic dance music, but there’s a lot of encouragement in listening to the body as it relates to the music and then moving with how the body is wanting to move. So I really see that as a mindfulness practice and really love that aspect about it. It’s not performative. Maybe the body just wants to sit there and that’s fine. So that’s the kind of practice that I personally like. I like doing that in community with others.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Yeah. I relate to that. Yeah, there’s a lot to be said about moving and connecting to body and music. Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
And finding the things that are nourishing for us whatever that might be.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Whatever that might be. Now, there’s a few questions that I like to add to all of my guests. The first one is what is a favorite word of yours that you care about enough that you could tattoo on yourself for a little bit? Because it’s not the same commitment when you’d choose a word that you love and choosing a word that you could carry on your skin. I’ve noticed.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think if there were, can I pick two?
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh yes, please.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
First one that comes to mind simply is love, and really finding that to be such an important way of being in the world, a way of treating other people and a way of treating myself that’s really uplifting and affirming. The second word would be play, and that I think that we have a tendency sometimes to take ourselves too seriously. Sure, there’s a lot of serious things out there and a lot of things that are difficult and hard and important, right? We can still approach them with a certain amount of playfulness, a certain amount of lightheartedness that actually I think can make it like where we can actually do better in some of these areas with that.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I love that word. It’s a great word.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So what would you say is the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to you?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
The sweetest thing? Sweetest thing would be the birth of my children. So I have two kids. With each of them… Well with the first child, I felt that my heart grow bigger. And that suddenly this being that didn’t exist, suddenly existed. I felt such love. It was really amazing, really sweet for me. For my second child, I was worried. That I had so much love for first child, how is there going to be any room for another one? What I discovered with my second child is my heart grew bigger again. That’s kind of how I’ve been relating to love ever since, is that it’s not a finite resource. That it can just get bigger and bigger.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That’s so touching. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
You’re welcome.
Anne Muhlethaler:
So what is a secret superpower that you have?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Secret superpower? Well, nothing conventional. No flying, invisibility, teleportation, no laser eye beams. None of that. I would say a secret superpower I have that has even been on display today is I can think very easily in terms of metaphors.
Anne Muhlethaler:
That is a great superpower.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It’s just the way my mind works. I don’t know why. It just does it. And I’ve learned that other people’s brains and minds don’t work like that, but mine does.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I can relate to that. What’s a favorite book of yours that you can share with us?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Walden.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Walden?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yep. Yeah. Hands down. Favorite book. It’s been that forever, and really loved Thoreau’s writing and coming back to the simplicity of nature and living in nature and how living in societies and villages and cities and all that, the constraints that are put upon us in ways that might not even be that natural. The writing is very of the time. I made the mistake several years ago of reading my favorite book to my children at the time. I think they were like 8 and 10. They had no interest in it. I love that book. I don’t know. If you had… Oh, wait, hold on. I can show you.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, yay.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So your listeners won’t be able to see this. This is what my copy of Walden looks like now. Cover’s off.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Oh, I love that.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
It’s actually been through the washing machine. Underlines everywhere to things that I thought were particularly insightful and important. Little scribbles of my own epiphanies based on his writings. But hands down, that’s been my favorite book.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I’m going to give you just two more because I know we’ve gone a bit over time. So imagining that you can step into a future version of yourself, so future you, what most important advice do you think that future you would come and give to present state you?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
So what advice would future me give to present me? Yeah, I think the advice would be to follow my heart and to honor that in a way that makes it just as important as things that I might think.
Anne Muhlethaler:
I understand that conflict. That’s wonderful.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. Yeah. I try to put that in practice, and it’s not easy.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Uh-huh. Yep, that sounds good. And so my last question is what brings you happiness?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Brings me happiness. So many things really. I think especially when I take the opportunity to slow down and experience things in a sensory rich way. I’m fortunate enough to be able to tap into all kinds of pleasant, sensory experiences, right? And whether it’s, I don’t know, tasting some delicious food or the bitterness of my decaf in the morning, the experience of being in conversation with my family, working with folks in therapy and seeing them grow and overcome challenges and obstacles, I really think what’s key to that is just being able to slow down and notice these things and appreciate these things in ways that can open the heart, in ways that the heart can feel. Yeah, so many things. Many things.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. So this concludes our time together. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sure. Anne, you’re welcome. You’re welcome.
Anne Muhlethaler:
How can people get in touch if they’re interested in talking about ACT or find out more about your work as a therapist or your work as teacher?
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Folks are welcome to… Let’s see. They can go to psychotherapy website, which is sohocbt.com, Soho and the CBT for cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s probably the easiest way. There’s like a contact link in there and folks can get in touch with me that way.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Wonderful. I will put the link in the show notes. Thank you again so much for your time. I hope that one day we’ll get a chance to meet in person perhaps in New York City. Well, have a lovely rest of your day and hopefully we’ll connect again soon.
Dr Jonathan Kaplan:
Sounds good. Sounds good. All right. Thanks so much, Anne. I appreciate it.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. Bye.
Anne Muhlethaler:
Thanks again to Dr. Kaplan for being my guest on the show today. You will find all of the relevant links in the show notes. So friends and listeners, thanks again for joining me today. If you’d like to hear more, feel free to subscribe on whatever platform of your choice. And if you’d like to connect, you can get in touch with me, @annvi on Twitter or on LinkedIn, or @_outoftheclouds on Instagram where I also share some guided meditations and other daily musings about mindfulness and meditation. You can find all of the episodes and more as well on annevmuhlethaler.com. Or if you don’t know how to spell that, go to outoftheclouds.com. So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to Out of the Clouds. I hope that you will join again next time. Until then, be well, be safe, and take care.