Shannon Harvey - A Year Of Living Mindfully

Welcome to Untangle.

I'm Patricia Karpis.

I'm really excited about this last podcast of the year because I love how this guest goes on her own personal journey to understand how meditating for a year straight can actually change your life.

Our guest is Shannon Harvey,

An award-winning Australian health journalist,

Author,

And filmmaker.

Overwhelmed with insomnia,

An autoimmune disease,

And a family history of mental health issues,

Shannon was highly motivated to find a way to address the challenges she faced,

But also those we all faced with the growing epidemics of stress,

Anxiety,

Depression,

And addiction.

Out of this mission and a deep curiosity,

Shannon committed to meditating every day,

As I said,

For 365 days.

And to put meditation to the test,

She enlisted a team of top scientists from around the world to measure the impact of meditation.

They tracked everything from her stress hormones to her immune function to her cellular aging and gene expression to her subjective well-being.

Could learning to quiet our busy minds,

She wondered,

Be the simple solution the world so desperately needs?

What began as a self-experiment transformed into a life-changing experience for Shannon.

Now,

Here's Shannon.

Shannon,

It is so great to have you on Untangle today.

Thanks for being here.

It's my absolute pleasure.

Yeah.

We've already introduced you as a journalist and a filmmaker.

I would love for you to tell us a little bit about why you decided to make this particular film,

Which I've already seen twice.

Why you decided to be the filmmaker and the subject of the film.

I wish I could tell you that my motivation was purely professional and for the good of the world,

Which is partly true.

I'm a health journalist.

At the time I began making this film,

The leading medical science journal,

The Lancet,

Had just published a special issue declaring that every country in the world,

Including where you are,

Including where I am here in Australia,

Is facing and failing to tackle a host of mental health issues.

I went in search of answers to that big global problem.

But the honest truth is I was also personally really struggling.

At the time,

I had my second child and life as a full-time working mother with two young kids was really getting the best of me.

We've got family history of mental health issues.

I was looking at my two kids and I was thinking,

What can I do to protect and nurture and nourish my mind,

But what can I teach my kids as well because they're growing up in this crazy world of ours.

So there was really that professional mission,

But it was also quite personal.

Yeah.

And the other part of what you mentioned in the film is by 2030,

Depression will overtake heart disease and be the biggest human problem we all face,

Which is really scary when you're raising little munchkins.

And then you also talked about your personal condition,

Which is an autoimmune condition called lupus,

And that you had terrible insomnia.

So you were dealing with insomnia and pain.

It was like a perfect storm for you as a journalist and a filmmaker.

You had all of these motivations.

Exactly.

Yeah,

It was interesting.

As part of the project,

I interviewed Willem Kuyken,

Who is the director of the Oxford Mindfulness Center and a real expert in mental health.

And his research is kind of really focusing on preventive mental health now.

But what was really interesting in talking to him is I had rated my own mental wellbeing at the beginning of the project before I began meditating every day as sitting just below the halfway line.

If you think of mental health as being on a spectrum,

I wasn't in a full-blown crisis and requiring hospitalization,

But I was far from flourishing.

And Willem said to me,

Don't you think it's absurd that we wait until people are at the equivalent of stage four cancer before we intervene with mental health?

When he put it like that,

It really just landed for me.

It's that this idea that mental health isn't something that just happens,

We get sick.

Mental health is something that we can actually train and nurture and nourish.

It's interesting that we've only taken mental health out of the closet over the last several years.

I feel like people were thinking when you didn't have good mental health,

It meant something extreme and scary and you weren't able to be honest with people about how you felt.

And I think people thought mostly about medication versus these other tools.

So you're absolutely right.

It has been this big scary thing.

The other thing about it is that I do have this autoimmune condition,

Which causes arthritic flare-ups throughout my body from time to time during times of high stress in my life when I'm not really looking after myself.

And so the other piece to this is this chronic pain epidemic.

And I know there in the US,

You guys are facing a crisis of opioid addiction.

So I guess I was also looking for answers at that level as well as my insomnia.

So I've suffered from insomnia ever since I was a teenager.

And at the time before I began this project,

One or two nights a week,

I would go right through the night just unable to sleep.

And as the sun rose and the dawn chorus of birds began,

I would still be awake and my entire day would be a write-off.

So that insomnia piece in and of itself is something that I know many,

Many people struggle with.

Did you also struggle with,

You talk about rating your mental health,

But if you have chronic pain and insomnia,

That seems like a ticket to depression and anxiety.

I mean,

Those are such hard things to deal with.

Anyone that's spent a night not sleeping or has chronic pain,

It does feel like your mood changes,

Your personality changes.

These are really hard things to manage.

And was that what you were experiencing when you say you were rating your mental health as low?

Well,

I think it's,

You've probably heard mental health professionals talk about a downward spiral.

And I definitely feel like I was on a particular downward spiral.

I feel like I had been knocked off my base.

I think I'm naturally a very chirpy character.

My natural disposition is to be quite cheery and positive and content,

But really I wasn't doing great.

And not to overstate it,

It wasn't like I was in a full-blown crisis,

But I knew I needed to intervene because I just,

I wasn't well.

We're heading in that direction.

And I'm just curious to go back,

You said you started having insomnia and I know you were diagnosed later on with lupus in your early twenties,

But you started having insomnia when you were a teenager.

Did you have trouble sleeping when you were younger?

If you look back at yourself as a 10 year old,

Did you feel any of these stressors then,

If you can recall?

Yeah,

I think like many people,

I'm the sort of person who loves to solve problems.

And I have been that from a very young age,

But unfortunately there was some sort of family circumstances where people in my life were really,

Really unwell.

That we have family history of illnesses like depression and addiction,

Bipolar.

When I was younger,

A family member committed suicide.

And I guess my tendency was to try to think away the problems,

To try to solve these problems that really weren't mine to solve.

And so that really,

That thinking habit all through the night started very much in my teenage years.

So when you started thinking about doing this particular documentary,

What went through your mind as a health journalist and putting yourself at the center of it and this looking forward at this journey you would be going on,

Did it evolve or did you plan out what the year was going to look like?

I mean,

Tell us what it was like to make this documentary.

Well,

My first step was to go in search of the mental equivalent of a 30 minute workout or,

You know,

The mental equivalent of eating my fresh fruit and vegetables daily.

I wanted to find something that I could do and something that anyone could do,

Regardless of their personal circumstances and their levels of education,

Something that we could do for ourselves that didn't involve expensive trips to see a psychotherapist or any form of medication,

Something,

A mental health workout.

And what was kind of astonishing to me when I looked and believe me,

I looked,

There was really only one thing that was getting towards that and that was mindfulness meditation.

So just to be really clear about this,

We have infinitely more research,

For example,

On using exercise to treat depression or diet to treat depression than we do have at this stage on using mental training such as mindfulness to treat depression.

So I don't want to overstate how much research there is currently on this issue,

But mindfulness training was really pretty much the only thing that could be delivered in group settings,

That somebody could practice it for themselves at home,

That wasn't extremely expensive.

So that's how I started the project.

And I then sought the advice of a number of mindfulness experts and they gave me the instructions of how they thought I should go about it.

And one thing they made very clear was don't do this in a kind of a month long challenge,

Do this in a really longitudinal meaningful way and really commit.

Then the next step I did was because I'm an evidence-based health journalist is I really wanted to know whether this mental training was actually worth putting on my already overburdened to-do list.

So that's when I got on the phone and I recruited a whole team of scientists.

And throughout the year-long experiment,

They tracked everything from my stress hormones to my immune function right through to my cellular aging and my gene expression.

And they also tracked my subjective well-being throughout the year.

It's so incredible to have that experience.

So you start this year,

You find the,

I think you've said something like 18 of the top scientists to be working with you.

They're testing everything.

Had you meditated before you started or was this a really clean,

Like I'm starting in the beginning of the year,

We're going to do this longitudinal study throughout the year?

Did you have any experience meditating?

I know you said you started using an app,

But what was your experience with meditation at that point?

I had tried meditation on and off.

My first film,

Which was released six years ago,

Is called The Connection.

And it's a film which explores the new evidence emergent,

Which is demonstrating that when it comes to the chronic disease epidemic,

We need to start taking a mind-body,

Whole person,

Whole life approach if we actually really want to turn this disease ship around.

And back then when I made that film,

I'd been fortunate enough to meet people like relaxation response pioneer,

Herbert Benson.

I met Jon Kabat-Zinn a few times.

So I was kind of in this situation where I'm a health journalist who knows that there's this very promising research coming online,

Demonstrating that we need to find mental training techniques in order to kind of reintegrate ourselves,

Our mind and body and our health.

And I'd go through these bursts where I'd try to give it a go.

So for example,

In the lead up to having my two kids,

As I was feeling particularly worried about that,

I'd practice quite diligently,

But as life got busy,

The practice would fall away and I had never ever really committed.

I wouldn't say that I'd ever been quote unquote,

A meditator.

So were you looking forward to,

I mean,

Of course,

This is your baby,

This project,

This film and everything that you have experienced,

But were you nervous that you would somehow not be able to do the meditation practice?

I knew enough in my work that I've done previously to know that meaningful and lasting change is very difficult to achieve and that the chances were,

Depending on how difficult it is in terms of a change that we're trying to make in our lives,

The evidence demonstrated that I had between 40 and 90% chance of failure.

And often people fail within the first week.

So I think as anybody who's ever made,

Made and failed with a new year's resolution will tell you,

Lasting change is really difficult.

So for that kind of element of the project,

I turned to a lot of behavior change science to use various techniques to give myself the best chance of success.

And if you like,

I can go into some of those.

Yes,

Please.

Sure.

Okay.

So my favorite example comes from another self experimentalist who's based there in the US whose name is AJ Jacobs.

He's an author in his,

One of his books called Drop Dead Healthy.

He described the fact that he could not give up dried mango slices no matter what he did.

He just couldn't give up these sugary treats.

So he wrote himself a check to the American Nazi party and made his very,

Very hard ass wife promised to mail the check if he ever ate another dried mango slice.

And he emailed me to say that he has never eaten a dried mango slice since.

And that concept is what researchers would call an Odysseus contract or a commitment contract,

Which is essentially where the you of today doesn't trust the you of tomorrow to actually follow through with the commitment.

So my commitment contract with my year of living mindfully was enlisting this team of scientists.

And so if I didn't actually do my homework,

There would be nothing interesting for the scientists to actually investigate to see what,

If anything,

Changed over the course of the year.

The great thing is that these kinds of contracts don't need to be quite so elaborate.

There are infinite different ways that you can make these contracts,

But it definitely demonstrates that this kind of pre-commitment can make a difference.

I'll just share with you one more of my favorite techniques that meant that I actually followed through with this.

This has been developed by Peter Goldwitzer from New York University,

Who's been studying for decades.

It's called the intention behavior gap,

Which is where we really,

Really,

Really intend to do something,

But then we actually don't follow through.

And he's developed a technique called if-then planning,

Which enables us to kind of essentially state what we're going to do,

When we're going to do it,

But then plan for what we're going to do when we inevitably slip up.

So over time,

My if-then planning has evolved,

But today it looks like this.

If it is 6 a.

M.

,

Then I will sit up in my bed and meditate for 45 minutes.

If my children wake up early and interrupt my meditation practice,

Then I will meditate at the first opportunity on my lunch break in my office.

If I don't get a lunch break,

Then,

And it goes on and on and on and on and on until finally,

If it has been all the way through the day and I have not had a chance to meditate,

Then I will meditate right before I go to sleep.

And to this day,

I'm speaking to you on day 1,

185 of what was supposed to be a year-long commitment to meditate.

And I haven't missed a day since.

That's incredible.

So when you approached these top scientists,

Were they encouraged?

Were they like,

Yes,

Let's do this.

I'm on board.

Did you have to convince them?

What was the initial feedback that you got when you started approaching the scientists?

There was two categories of scientists.

There were the ones who were already studying mindfulness,

And they were really helpful in guiding me through the year and helping me to set up the experiment itself.

But the scientists who actually tracked me were very much objective observers.

So for example,

One of them is a scientist who studies brain function and structure using MRIs,

And he's an expert in brain aging.

And at the beginning of the project,

He actually said to me,

Look,

I'm interested,

Really interested,

But I don't think we're going to find anything.

So he came from that perspective,

And many of the others who tracked me throughout the year came from that perspective of like interested,

But not expecting anything.

Another scientist was tracking my gene expression throughout the year.

So he's looking at my very DNA,

And he wasn't sure that he was going to find anything of interest.

And for people who have seen the film,

Or who haven't seen the film,

Rather,

I won't be giving too much away.

But he was absolutely fascinated by the fact that after I did a 10-day silent retreat,

One of the genes that moderates my immune function with my illness actually turned right,

Right down,

Which has some very interesting implications for future research,

But also for people like me with overactive immune systems.

Can you give us in layperson's terms what kinds of things that they were finding in the brain and in the immune system?

Yeah,

So again,

I'm quite a cautious journalist,

So I don't want to oversell this.

The headlines were interesting in that the scientist who is particularly interested in an aging brain found that although most people's brains start shrinking from the time that we're in our early 20s,

Key regions in my brain that are associated with memory and with emotion regulation,

They actually did the opposite and grew.

And that was really interesting.

And they also sort of observed network,

I guess you could call them highways,

Also growing in my brain just from this mental training.

So that was interesting.

But at the same time,

I don't want to get overexcited.

So another scientist tracked my telomeres,

Which are the little caps that sit on the end of my DNA.

And as we age,

Our telomeres start shortening and shortened telomeres can be associated with all sorts of chronic diseases.

Now,

Although one of the tests that they used did demonstrate that my telomeres grew throughout the year,

Which is fascinating,

This was a very cautious scientist,

And she used three other different scientific techniques to measure my telomeres.

And the two others showed different results.

I think what I really learned from my year of living mindfully,

First of all,

Is that this was an experiment of what people call n equals one.

So we can't necessarily say the changes that happened in me will translate across every person in every circumstance at every gender and age.

That's the first thing.

But the second thing is that we really have a long way to go with the science.

And in some ways,

Probably personally,

The most interesting thing for me is that I was three quarters of the way through the project,

And I just completed my first silent retreat.

And I knew that regardless of what the scientists found,

I would be continuing to meditate.

I hear you.

It's funny because I've talked to so many people on this show.

And when we get into the science,

Most people will say,

If there were no science,

If there were no research,

I would not give up my practice for a day,

Which I just find so awesome.

So you said you did mindfulness meditation,

And you started it with 20 minutes a day.

So was that focused attention,

A focused breath practice?

And did you increase the time over the year?

Yeah.

So I started using an app.

I actually used a number of apps in the beginning,

Just until I settled on the app that I felt was working best for me.

And I committed to just 20 minutes a day.

And what became very apparent to me though,

Is that the app was useful,

And I still use an app every single day.

But I started needing a little bit more specific,

Personalized guidance.

So I knew I needed to find a real life teacher,

Which is when I then signed up to an eight week mindfulness based stress reduction course.

And that was interesting because the requirement in MBSR is to start meditating for 45 minutes a day.

And that really changed.

By the end of the eight week course,

I could notice a palpable difference in my experience of the world,

Just from that dose,

Changing that dose.

And then eventually that 45 minutes a day,

It helped me train for,

As you know,

The mindfulness equivalent of a marathon,

Which is a 10 day silent retreat.

After that retreat,

I was just,

I was in,

I was a meditator.

I loved the part of the film when you were at the silent retreat and the cameras weren't allowed to be anywhere.

There were other people you weren't allowed to speak.

So you wrote in little notes that you would hold up saying blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Yeah.

That was so great.

Said the retreat totally transformed you.

Did you see a big change in your labs before and after the retreat or was it not so specific?

There was one really fascinating thing that happened after the retreat.

And you need to bear in mind that the retreat,

There was a lot of meditation,

Of course,

For hours and hours and hours endlessly all day long.

But I was in a beautiful bushland setting.

I was being served delightful vegetarian meals.

I was practicing yoga,

My email,

My children,

The real life stresses of the world were not present.

But after that 10 day retreat,

Genes that are associated with my illness turned right,

Right down,

Which is completely fascinating.

And my personal subjective experience after that retreat was that it was as though something that I had been looking for my entire life had finally arrived.

It was though the narratives that you would know very much about this from all your previous guests,

But that default mode network that me,

Myself and my,

That thinking,

Planning,

Remembering everything that is associated with me and is important for helping me to remember who I am every morning when I get out of bed.

But I was able to actually intentionally turn that default thinking off.

And what that made way for was a sense of inner peace and an interconnectedness with the world around me that to this day,

I still think is the number one reason why at the end of the project,

My subjective wellbeing data was off the chart.

It's incredible to think about that.

In the film,

You talk about the fact that we're bigger than our narratives and that there is this unintended mind wandering that happens that is perhaps the cause of a lot of our internal trauma,

If you will.

And so when you were on retreat,

But also throughout the period of the year,

That narrative started softening for you.

And you said at the retreat,

And we talk also about the self narrative,

Not hijacking the other parts of the brain.

Did you feel like that was what was happening?

You just all of that internal chatter,

Any kind of inner critic just softened.

Yeah,

The way I think about it is that from a really young age,

We teach our kids not to believe everything they hear.

It's just this kind of story.

And what I realized is that this mindfulness training is a skill that teaches me not to believe everything I first think.

That's so perfect.

Has it changed you as a parent?

How old are your children actually?

At the time,

They were very little.

My youngest had only just turned one.

They're now,

My eldest is seven and my youngest is four.

And how has it changed your parenting?

I really don't want to give you the impression that I'm somehow this perfect parent who,

You know,

Walks around in unstained white clothing with a kind of orange glow around my head.

It's just not at all who I am.

But it does give me a lot of space in my parenting.

So after a really long day at work,

When my kids might be having a bad evening and exhausted and grumpy and complaining a lot,

Rather than responding to that,

By snapping at them,

I've got this opportunity to recognize it and to sit outside of my immediate reactions and to respond a little bit more wisely.

Another element of my parenting is introducing them to this idea of what I call being discomfortable,

Which comfortable despite life's inevitable discomfort.

So for me,

One of the big changes that happened in the year was being able to experience contentment even if I'm experiencing chronic pain.

And the word that I came up with to sort of explain that is discomfortable.

I realized in my parenting that my natural instinct when my kids are suffering in any way is to try to make them feel better,

Is to distract them,

Is to soothe them instead of just teaching them how to hold it.

So a small example is one of my kids recently had a birthday and the little one was feeling really disappointed because he wasn't being given presents and he was really in his way,

He was really suffering.

And rather than try to distract him with another toy or try to appease him in some way with some kind of treat,

I just sat with him and just said,

Yeah,

It's really disappointing,

Isn't it?

It's really hard to see somebody getting presents and you're not.

And we just sat together and felt that together.

And then I got him to pay attention to the moment he no longer felt that.

And I think,

God,

If somebody had taught me that when I was younger,

That could have been really helpful.

So true.

How is your relationship with your pain or has your,

I know you don't want to be put on a pedestal that everything has been cured,

But did you feel like your relationship with your chronic pain has changed?

Oh,

Completely.

Yeah.

As I'm speaking to you right now,

I'm so well that I have no pain.

And I recently had a blood test.

It didn't show that I'm cured for my illness.

I still have kind of markers for an autoimmune disease,

But they're so incredibly low that if my blood test had been taken today for the first time,

I probably wouldn't have been diagnosed with an illness.

So I'm really,

Really,

Really well physically.

So I don't actually have any pain,

Which is amazing because when I was first diagnosed,

That particular specialist doctor painted a story for me of you might be in a wheelchair before you turn 30 and you may have trouble having kids.

And I think that all the things that I do in my life are the reason why that story hasn't become reality.

Absolutely.

And the insomnia.

What's so interesting is the film was released.

We had the North American premiere of the film at a film festival in California in the first week of March.

And we had the screening and pretty much the following day,

The mayor shut down that festival and went into lockdown.

And we had to cancel 150 screenings around the world of the film and pivot to an online release.

And then I came home and I had to quarantine for two weeks at home with my kids.

And then we in Australia went into lockdown,

Six weeks of lockdown.

So here we are in the middle of this online pivot with two young children being homeschooled in lockdown.

And I haven't had insomnia once.

That's incredible.

And this is,

You would have that be a direct result of the 45 minutes a day of meditation.

A hundred percent.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

But I don't also,

Just again,

I know I'm giving you a lot of caveats,

But I recently spoke to a very,

Very long-term meditator.

She's far more experienced than I am,

Far wiser than I am.

Her problem with sleep isn't that she has any trouble falling asleep,

But she has a condition that means that she's a light sleeper.

So she wakes in the middle of the night having had four hours of sleep and then her body's ready to wake.

I don't want to tell you that mindfulness will cure everybody's sleeping problems.

Right.

But it did yours.

It did mine.

Yeah.

Because my sleeping problem was caused by an inability to switch off my thinking or to change my thinking.

So I now have that skill,

Which means that I'm able to get to sleep.

So I want to switch gears a little bit here because I want people to see the film and I want you to give away every result,

Which I found fascinating.

But towards the end of the film,

You decided to go to a refugee camp and I want to understand what happened there and what inspired the decision to go work with some of these refugees.

Thank you so much for asking me about this because a lot of people are skipping over that part of the story,

Which is actually,

I think,

The most important part of this piece.

As I said,

About three quarters of the way through the project,

It became infinitely clear that mindfulness was something that I would continue for the rest of my life and that the benefits would definitely worth it regardless of what the scientists found.

And it was almost as though with my own oxygen mask in place,

I then had this greater capacity to turn my mind to others.

And I returned back to my original question that sparked this quest,

Which was,

Can mindfulness be part of the solution to this mental health epidemic and can it actually really be used to help people who are in far worse circumstances than my own?

That is how I found myself in the Middle East because although I there are plenty of really incredible stories of mindfulness being used in prisons and disadvantaged schools,

There's really nothing else like the current humanitarian crisis,

The frontline of which is in the Middle East to really put this pending mental health epidemic into a global perspective.

So I went to,

At the time,

One of the largest refugee camps in the world called Zadari,

Which was right on the border of Syria and Jordan.

And to give you a perspective of this camp,

We had a drone in the refugee camp and we could not get the drone high enough to capture the edges of the camp.

So we're just tens of thousands of people.

When I was there,

They were estimating about 80,

000 people packed into these glorified shipping containers with no home to return home to because that particular population had pretty much all come from one city that had been completely destroyed from airstrikes.

So I was looking at this scale and in that camp,

There was one psychiatrist and I thought,

How on earth are we going to treat this mental health problem?

Because these people are experiencing trauma,

They have completely uncertain futures and what are the impacts going to be on the future generations?

Because we all know now about how mental health problems can be carried throughout generations.

And that's why I was really interested in the incredible work being done by Professor Amit Bernstein,

Who is from the University of Haifa,

Who has taken the best of programs such as MBSR and married that with the best current knowledge that we have from trauma.

And he's developed what's called a nine-week mindfulness based trauma recovery program for refugees.

And I went over and filmed with him when he was halfway through the first randomized control trial.

And then we've subsequently had the results and they were very,

Very promising.

So it was really a pivotal moment for me.

One of the refugees told me that because I was feeling all this white privilege guilt,

But for me,

Here I am complaining about all the problems in my life when some of these refugees that Amit Bernstein is working with are actually recording the highest levels of post-traumatic stress and other mental health issues than any other refugee population on the planet.

And it's like almost like mindfulness is a luxury.

These people are kind of worried about survival,

Let alone mental health.

And this particular refugee,

Mogos,

Said,

It's not a luxury,

It's medicine.

And that really landed for me.

Another very brief story that I'll tell you while I was there,

Because it was so pivotal for me in setting,

I think,

The direction of the rest of my life really,

Is one of the refugees took me aside after we finished filming.

He was the cultural liaison.

So he was kind of helping to translate the program into Tigrinya,

The East African language.

And his name was Dawit.

He'd been a former child soldier.

And like most of the refugees in that particular population had witnessed or been tortured.

What these people have been through is just beyond anything we can imagine.

And he said,

Shannon,

If somebody offered me 10,

000 Israeli shackles to make my problems go away,

Or this mindfulness training,

I would take this mindfulness training because it is the first time in my life that anyone has ever taught me how I can help myself.

And he didn't want handouts and he didn't want that there's a problem with that particular population because they're considered infiltrators in Israel rather than refugees.

And he didn't want anything else other than somebody to help him help himself.

And as I left,

I can remember that old expression,

Which is give a man a fish and he'll be hungry tomorrow.

But teach a man to fish and he'll be fed for a lifetime.

I'm just personally very dedicated to helping him meet,

Roll out and test this program in other settings.

And that's the next step.

Yeah,

That's incredible that he was able to create a program with such humanitarian benefit and that the people,

I mean,

You filmed a single mom with three children that I think in the beginning was saying she was saying she'd kind of rather die if I'm remembering correctly.

And I guess I'm wondering what inspired some of these refugees that were in such devastating mental place?

What inspired them to even be open to something like mindfulness?

The mom in the refugee camp wasn't being given any form of mental health support at all,

Apart from some prescription medication from the one psychiatrist in the camp.

And she pretty much said to me,

If not for the fact she actually had six kids,

She said,

If not for the fact that I have six children,

I wouldn't want to live.

She said,

God is just keeping me alive because I have to feed these kids.

But it was over the border then in Israel where a meet is working with this population of East African refugees and rolling out this very considered and very controlled program.

And I can see how it would have such a big impact on your life.

What a gift to make this film.

Mindfulness at the moment is very much seen as something for privileged people to do.

But I do think when I saw how effective it was for this particular cohort in a meets program,

And knowing as well that they're not being given anything else I'd seen in the camp,

That woman on harm's day,

Who actually was not being given any form of support whatsoever.

And you can just see the potential for something like this to be rolled out at scale with some very skilled mindfulness instructors.

You can actually see this training being delivered in a very robust way.

And some of the research that a meets been doing lately throughout the pandemic is I don't think he's published it yet,

But it's coming,

Is showing some really promising results for the intergenerational transmission of mental health issues.

So like we talked about earlier with my own parenting,

My daily practice actually changes how I parent.

And when you think about that from a scale of people who are experiencing trauma and post-traumatic stress,

The potential to prevent future suffering is also quite intriguing and exciting.

At the end of the film,

Again,

Without giving away too much,

You talked about structural changes in areas related to self-awareness,

Memory,

Emotional regulation.

And then you were very clear that these are very much the early days for this science.

And so I guess my maybe final question is,

What do you hope for,

I know you mentioned that your next film is going to be on areas related to behavioral change,

But what do you hope will come out of this film and what do you think is next?

My number one hope is that the film will spark meaningful conversations that lead to really tangible changes regarding our current approach to mental health.

I'm under no illusion that mindfulness is going to quote unquote work for every person on the planet.

But I think that it is a start.

And I think we need significant investment.

We need those wonderful researchers who are featured in the film,

And all of their colleagues are fighting for every single dollar in their research.

And when you compare,

For example,

What we're spending on researching treatments for cancer to what we're spending researching mental health,

Either treatments or prevention,

It's it's night and day in terms of the amount that's being spent.

So I hope that there's going to be meaningful conversations happening around kitchen tables.

But I hope that there's also going to be meaningful conversations around people who can actually make a difference at the policy level and the funding level.

I also hope that the film reaches a new audience because I think we're in a situation now where most people have been exposed to mindfulness training in some way,

Shape or form and have made up their mind.

And they're either deciding that they're interested in it and they practice,

Or perhaps they're interested in it and they don't have time to practice,

Or they've completely dismissed it.

And my hope is to reach a population of those people who have dismissed it with this film,

Because I think that it's definitely got a lot of promise.

And there's nothing better.

And I guess,

Thirdly,

My own personal mission,

Which we've already spoken about is I would really love to see a MEATS project rolled out more widely.

And one of the really great outcomes so far is an enormous interest from various partners around the world who are doing refugee mental health work.

And they're interested in trialling the program amongst their populations of refugees.

So my real hope is that that actually gets some legs,

As we say here in Australia,

And really kicks off.

Sallen Wow.

Shannon,

I really want to thank you so much for being on Untangle.

We just love,

Love,

Love having you.

And I hope this film gets out to more and more people every day.

Well,

Thank you so much for having me.

And thank you for sharing this work with your audience.

Thanks so much to Shannon for being with us today.

She has contributed so much to our understanding of how meditation can impact our lives.

Wishing you all the very best as you bring in the new year.

We will see you next week.