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Integrative Psychiatry

Mindfulness and Stress Reduction with Janet Solyntjes, MA

What is mindfulness? Come and join Janet Solyntjes as she talks about Mindfulness and Stress Reduction.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

This is the story of how we are now in 2020 have mindfulness as a household word. Everywhere I go, people are familiar with it. And it all started in terms of the mainstream focus in the mid-70s. So, Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered like the grandfather of the mindfulness revolution.

The Deep and Wide Path

The deep and wide path came from Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson. So anyway, tribute to them. So, these traditions go way, way back, ancient lineages of Buddhism. So that would be called the level one, the pure form where people’s motivation was enlightenment. So, that included long or long periods either in solitary retreat or in monastic communities, for the most part. So that practice, formal meditation practice, was your job. You did that 10-12 hours a day. And you did it for years on end.

The View

 The view is important, how we view ourselves when we’re sitting down to practice meditation, or when we’re walking through our life matters. And so, Jon Kabat-Zinn, this is a quote from him. “As long as you are breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or despairing you may be feeling in a given moment.”

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a natural part of the mind; we are always paying attention to something. We might be paying attention to our to-do list or a conversation we had, or maybe paying attention to something that we’re anxious about coming up in the future.

This particular kind of paying attention really is about the present moment.

Here’s just obviously a simple picture. And if you look at the thought balloon on the left, so much of the time, when we’re out in nature, or in a meeting, or in a session with somebody, our mind might be filled with many extraneous things. So, we don’t need to block those. We don’t need to pretend that meditation is an empty thought bubble. But on the right, we just see that sense of being where you are just present, mindful.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (8 Week Course)

Emphasize the importance of making each moment count through formal and informal mindfulness.

Taking an MBSR course means that you do home assignments or home play, and that you build a practice you do 45 minutes a day of one of the mindfulness tools, and you have other things that you kind of reflect on, your relationship with things that you call pleasant and, and you kind of look at that in terms of the body and the thoughts and the feelings, emotions around that, and unpleasant.

It is an engagement. It’s a change in lifestyle for those eight weeks.

The other thing is that it is about caring for yourself and how do you engage in that own care, so that you develop an understanding of feel for your role through your whole lifespan?

How can you find ease? How can you do it by yourself whether or not you can get body work or have a meaningful conversation? What is it in you that will help you care for yourself?

Frederick Barrett is a cognitive neuroscientist with training in behavioral pharmacology, and the Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Dr. Barrett has been conducting psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins University since 2013, and his research in healthy participants and in patients with mood and substance use disorders focuses on the psychological and neurological mechanisms underlying the enduring therapeutic and other effects of psychedelic drugs. In 2017, he received an NIH “R03” grant as Principal Investigator to investigate biological mechanisms of psilocybin effects, the first federally funded research since the 1970s administering a classic psychedelic to people with psychedelic effects as the primary focus. He has developed measures of subjective effects of psychedelic drugs, and has also published first-in-human studies characterizing the acute and enduring effects of psilocybin on the brain. He is currently leading clinical trials to investigate the use of psilocybin to treat patients with major depressive disorder and co-occurring alcohol use disorder, and he is leading a number of ongoing studies aimed at better understanding the psychological, biological, and neural mechanisms underlying therapeutic efficacy of psychedelic drugs.

Will Van Derveer, MD is co-founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), along with friend and colleague Keith Kurlander, MA. He co-created IPI as an expression of what he stands for. First, that anyone can heal, and second that we medical providers must embrace our own healing journeys in order to fully command our potency as healers.

Dr. Van Derveer spent the last 20 years innovating and testing a comprehensive approach to addressing psychiatric challenges which transcends the conventional model he learned in medical school at Vanderbilt University and residency at University of Colorado, while deeply engaging his own healing path.

He founded the Integrative Psychiatric Healing Center in in 2001 in Boulder, CO, where he currently practices. Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass. In addition to his clinical work and teaching, he was co-investigator in 2016 a Phase II randomized clinical trial, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He continues to support this protocol, now in a Phase III clinical trial under break-through designation by FDA.

Dr. Van Derveer is a diplomate of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine (ABoIHM) since 2013, and he was board certified in the first wave of diplomates of the new American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABIM) in 2016.