Transcript of How Mindfulness Can TRANSFORM The Relationship You Have With Yourself | Mel Robbins Clips

Could you explain, as a 12 year old, you're walking into this magic shop, first, just kinda how you felt emotionally at that point in your life going through all of the heartache and the hardship

that you did that so many people

do, and how this interaction with an adult woman who you had never met, who just interacted with you, how that actually changed.

Well, what would happen in my situation at home was whenever there was fighting or challenging events, I would get on my bike and ride as far and as fast away as I could. And I rode a great distance far from my house and ended up at a strip mall. And I'd had an interest in magic for a while. I used to have a plastic thumb that I would do tricks with.

My son has 1 of those.

Yeah. Yes. And, I lost it, and so I was looking for a plastic thumb. But, anyway, I saw the magic shop, and I went in. And what was interesting was this woman was there and who was in her mid fifties probably.

And I I still remember her vividly because she was wearing a blue and white mumu. I remember these outfits because she was a larger lady. And she had this flowing gray hair. And she had these glasses that were at the tip of her nose. And she had a chain on them.

And she was reading this paperback. But

You you sound like you're describing the potions professor in Harry Potter.

And she may have been, actually. But, anyway, she looked up from her glasses, and I started querying her about magic. And she said, I'm just here babysitting the shop because, this is my son's story, and he's doing an errand. But this led to her and I having a conversation, and after about 20 minutes, she said to me, she said, I really like you. She said, I think I can help you.

I'm here for another 6 weeks. If you show up every day, I think you could learn a lot. And I had no clue what she meant, and this was before mindfulness or neuroplasticity were in the sort of common lexicon. And I did show up every day. Now I have to tell you, it wasn't because I had any insight or self awareness.

I was a poor 12 year old in despair with a feeling of hopelessness, But I did show up, and the reason I showed up was, 1, I had absolutely nothing else to do to do. 2, she was giving me chocolate chip cookies. So those were the 2 drivers of, my interaction with her. But to sort of understand what happened is she apparently had some exposure to Eastern, meditation practices. Mhmm.

And she taught me, if you will, what is now called a mindfulness practice. Mhmm. And what I never realized was that as a child, I was in a war zone all the time, a constant trauma because you never know what's going to happen. It's chaos. There's always unexpected things.

You can't rely on anyone or any person. And as a result, your muscles are always tight. You're always looking around. You can't focus. And, of course, to learn, you have to be able to attend.

If you can't be present, it's not possible to learn. So she recognized this, and she initially taught me a, relaxation technique, and then she taught me the ability to focus or attend. And then probably the most critical thing was she taught me that the negative dialog that was going on in my head was not truth. And oftentimes, when we tell ourselves we're not good enough, we're not worthy, we don't deserve love, we think there's some truth in that. But we have, as humans, a negativity bias where negative statements have a tendency to stick with us, and this leads oftentimes to rumination.

And once you tell yourself it is not possible, I cannot, that becomes truth. Yeah. And so we create our own limited belief system. And so she taught me a technique to respond with positive self affirmation, but also to not respond to those negative feelings, and just let them drift by, but also to constantly encourage positivity within yourself. And this led me to look at the world in a different way.

And the reason I say that is if you're hypercritical with yourself, you're hypercritical in your the lens through which you see the world, and you're very judgmental. And what I tell people is once I understood what was going on in my own head, it made me look at the world through a different lens, 1 of kindness, compassion, and it also dissipated the anger that I had towards my parents because what happens is, of course, they're supposed to be the caregivers, but if they don't have the tools to take care of their own pain, they can't help you. So that realization, was very important as the realization that people carry baggage, and their reactions oftentimes have nothing to do with you. And so having a much more thoughtful, gentle, kinder way to interact with people, I think is extraordinarily powerful.

How and when did you start manifesting? And can you talk about the kind of overlap and connection between being a neurosurgeon and the interest in the functioning and wiring of the mind itself?

Well, the other thing, I didn't mention was that at the end of this, if you will, mindfulness type practice, we had a discussion. And the discussion was about how to manifest or visualization.

So she taught you how to manifest and visualize at the age of 12? Yes. Wow.

So she asked me to make a list of 10 things that I wanted. Now, I have to tell you this is through the lens of a 12 year old who's poor. So, in typical fashion, I said I wanted, to be a millionaire, which in 1968 was a lot of money, it seemed like. I wanted to have a mansion. I wanted to be a doctor.

And it wasn't so much listen. I was always kind and thoughtful, but I wanted to be a doctor, so people looked at me and said, you're okay. I wanted a Porsche. I wanted a Rolex watch and all of these external, material things that so many people in our society think they need. They think somehow if you get this stuff, that's going to fill the void all of us have.

And, of course, it doesn't. And, but society is oriented, unfortunately, towards seeking external affirmation with a belief that if you fulfill the societal narrative of success, which is money, power, position, that will then translate into happiness. And, of course, this is a story that's been told over and over and over again, and it does not. And I'm sure you know many, many extraordinarily, quote, unquote, successful people who are absolutely miserable.

Well, you know, 1 thing I wanna highlight as you're listening to doctor Doty, and I just am so blown away by, your gift of explaining things and how connected you are to why this is important to you. And it's important to, I think, everybody to understand what you're trying to teach us, is that I think a lot of us know that chasing the external stuff is what society has been prioritizing, but you're going a layer deeper, which is it's not just about the belief that you think those things will make you happy. It's that your lived experience when you feel invisible is that people that have those things are seen. And that is an explanation that cuts at a way deeper psychological driver than happiness. And that experience of feeling like you don't matter, you're not seen, you, are not treated with a level of dignity and care that every human being deserves.

I haven't heard anybody truly connect the dots between the obsession with chasing status and surface level items and actually not happiness, but the fundamental need that we human beings have for connection and the sense that somebody actually cares about you. And you think that that's going to happen because of the shiny stuff that you acquire. And you're here to say that, actually, it doesn't.

It doesn't, at all. And I think, that's a challenge for so many people because, they've been sold this narrative, and it's a narrative of unhappiness, and it's a narrative of fear. And I was saying earlier, when you chase lengths like that, that's because of your own insecurity. And as a result, that activates your sympathetic nervous system, which, of course, is the flight, fight, or freeze response. And when that happens, actually, that has a very negative effect on how your brain functions, but also your peripheral physiology and can lead to a lot of very significant, diseases and, decrease your life, expectancy versus if you shift that narrative, if you will, to the love mode.

And what I mean by that is all of us have the ability to actually shift from engagement of our sympathetic nervous system, which is part of our autonomic nervous system which arises in the brainstem and is distributed throughout all the organs in your body, but especially your heart, to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is really how we evolved to live, as a species. It's not that we were stressed every second. We were stressed periodically. And that stress mode was meant to activate in the face of threat and respond. And either you survived or didn't survive, but then you immediately went back to engagement of your parasympathetic nervous system if you survived.

That is the system we were designed to live in. That is the system in which you care, which you're rewarded for caring, where you have the release of oxytocin and these other neurotransmitters that activate your pleasure and reward centers when you care for another, especially your offspring, but also within, the context of our common humanity. And that is the mode you want to be in, especially if you want to manifest because that is when your cognitive brain networks, your peripheral physiology work at their best. And that is from the love mode, if you will.

I wanna see if I can translate back because those were a lot of big words. I realized that you are a neurosurgeon, and you teach these concepts all over the world, but I want you and I to put our arm around the person that's listening. And I wanna see if I can't shorthand all this science. So you keep using the word fear mode and heart mode, which I love. You also just beautifully explained, if I'm hearing you correctly, that there are 2 modes to our nervous system, parasympathetic, sympathetic, rest, calm, and love, fight or flight.

And that as we listen, is it okay if every time you say fear mode, we just go, okay. He's talking about the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system that a lot of us live in that shuts you off to possibility, connection, potential, and love versus the heart mode, which is your parasympathetic nervous system. And it is where the connection and manifestation and fulfillment and the potential of your life exists. Is that a way to think about this?

No. No. That's, the perfect way to think about it. And, when you're in that mode, everything changes for the positive. And

The heart mode.

Yes. And the possibilities of having your intention manifest are greatest when you were in that mode.

Okay. Got it. So I wanna be in heart mode. How did this amazing woman in the magic shop teach you to manifest when you were 12?

Well, I have to tell you, and I don't wanna mislead people, I thought it was a lot of bullshit initially. And the reason is is because, of course, I had never been exposed to anything like that. Mhmm. I mean, being able to sit and and relax your muscles with intention, Being able to breathe a certain way to calm your nervous system down were completely new to me. So it took a little while for me to understand that.

But once I did understand it, I realized how powerful it was because I didn't constantly have this negative self talk going on and this fear constantly. And so, as you know, these types of mindfulness practice, which are very commonly discussed today and have changed millions of lives, are readily available to everyone. And, fundamentally, what she taught me was this type of a technique, a relaxation technique, a focus technique, and dealing with the negative self talk, looking at the world through a lens of compassion. And we talked about visualization. For you to maximally visualize, that means you have to be relaxed.

You have to have calm. You have to not look at what I want. And this is the difference for a lot of people because they have a vision of what they want but not what they need. As an example, we're talking about possessions. I want a Porsche.

I want a Rolex, which was what I did. And they think that if I just get that, I'll be okay. And the problem is that it won't make you okay. And when you're sitting there self focusing, if I just have that I need this versus, as an example, saying, I want to be a doctor. Now it's not I want to be a doctor so everybody looks at me and says how great I am, which is what I did.

It's I want to be a doctor because I want to help people. Those are completely 2 different narratives. 1 is I want to be of service. That is how we were designed as human beings, not I want for me. And when you change how you look at the world, when you change what you want, you realize, 1, a lot of what you think you want is worthless versus what is powerful, what gives a person purpose and meaning, which, of course, activates every physiology, both brain and peripheral physiology to work at their best is being of service, being connected, caring for others.

And we know through the work of Bob Buettner and the blue zones or the work of Robert Waldinger and the 85 year old Harvard study, when you care for others, when you look through that lens, everything in your life improves. And that is the place where you also have the ability to maximize the possibilities for your intention to manifest. With manifestation or that terminology, there's a lot of woo woo in pseudoscience. Actually, the ability to manifest is fundamentally based in neuroscience. There is no woo woo.

There's no magic. There's no law of attraction. What people don't appreciate is you can't wait for somebody to magically take care of everything.