Grow Your Brain, Heal Your Emotions and Other Ways Mindfulness Meditation Can Change Your Life

In this episode, Sarah's guest, Kim Thiel, and Sarah discuss the way mindfulness meditation can change the structure of your brain so you can better process your emotions, focus, and regulate your nervous system. Additionally, Kim talks about overcoming negative self-talk and finding clarity about her life's purpose. Kim is a blogger and fellow podcaster who helps women find peace, joy and contentment in the single life. Our culture often leads us to believe that we are more worthy if we are in a relationship, however, this is not so. Kim is "unapologetically uncoupled". Listen and learn surprising things that can happen to you on a meditation retreat and how a meditation practice can help you.

Kim Theil's website: https://courageouslyindependent.com/

Important links:
Sarah's Mindfulness Coaching website: https://www.sarahvallely.com
TSD Mindfulness Coach Certification https://www.tsdmind.org

This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

 I'm Sarah Vallely, professional coach. I help people overcome anxiety, heal from past trauma, improve their relationships, and maintain better work life balance. All right. Ready, set, go? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Got my coffee. I'm ready to go. Hello and welcome to the show. I am here with Kim Theo. She's been practicing meditation for 10 years.

She's a former marketing executive, and now she publishes an amazing website called Courageously Independent. She's got some great articles. I strongly suggest to check that out. We're doing something a little different today. I'm kind of excited. So Kim is actually a really good friend of mine, and she has a podcast as well.

So we are both on here together. We're both recording, and we're going to upload our episodes to both of our podcast accounts. Welcome to the show, Kim. So glad you're here. Well, thank you. Thank you for doing this with me, Sarah. For me, meditation has always been a part of my life, meaning both of my parents were meditators.

When I was two years old, my dad used to take me to an ashram, and as I became a teenager, I was very rebellious against my hippie parents and their  So I didn't do anything like that.  But in my twenties, I kind of circled back around to it. I started taking some classes in San Francisco and worked with a spiritual teacher in Los Angeles for four years.

It's kind of funny how I got into mindfulness. I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. I just wanted to find a group here in Asheville that I could sit with so I could do my meditation that I had been doing. But I found this Vipassana group, which is insight meditation, it's a type of Buddhism. So I started sitting with them for the first few months.

I did my own thing. Then their teachings kind of seeped into my head.  And I was like, huh, this mindfulness stuff is actually pretty cool. That's when I really started delving into mindfulness, which was a good 20 years ago. So it's just kind of funny. I just laugh about it because it was really an accident.

Like I wasn't like seeking out to, I want to learn Buddhist meditation. I was on my like woo woo past life regression journey. It just kind of happened and it really changed my life, which I'm happy to share about. You have a bit of an interesting background in that you kind of grew up with it, right? I think for a lot of us, and for me in particular, like, I grew up where we didn't really even talk about feelings or things like that, you know what I mean?

It was like, it was new to start to talk about our feelings. So you had an early familiarity with it, is what it sounds like, with your parents, is that right? I mean, there were Native American Indians living in our house at one point.  We lived in a commune, uh, so yeah, that was just the way it went. And I do, I really do appreciate that because I do feel really comfortable in any kind of weird spiritual situations, you know, but, you know, there are some things that were hard about it, all the moving around and things.

What is the difference between meditation and mindfulness? And, and I know when you were, lived on the West Coast, you taught a lot and you sort of spearheaded or were the leader of kind of a movement out there. The word mindfulness is misused in a lot of situations, sometimes interchanged with the word meditation.

Meditation's an umbrella. I mean, there's all different kinds of meditation. You can do TM, Transcendental Meditation, Self Compassion type meditation. There's all different kinds. Mindfulness is a very specific kind of meditation. It's very simple and narrow, meaning that you are paying attention to sounds, sights, sensations in your body, thoughts, emotions.

If you're not paying attention to those things, you're really not doing mindfulness. It's a technique, but also mindfulness can be a daily mindset. It doesn't have to be meditation. During your day, you can be washing the dishes and notice, Oh my gosh, I'm totally ruminating about this phone call I had, and I'm going to take a pause and I'm instead going to notice the warmth of the water and the suds.

How did you think about mindfulness? Yeah, there's a lots of different ways to do it. I like the way that you explained mindfulness sort of being a subset of meditation. And within meditation then, I do think there's a lot of different sort of ways to go about it. I had actually written an article for another publication a little while back about philosophy and religion and even modern science, you know, there's this shared belief and that this wisdom or truth can come from within my experience.

I've sort of evolved towards this as to what I go to. Meditation for which is really connecting with something inside myself beyond the fears beyond the noise in my head, beyond the doubts where I kind of just know what's best for myself. I know what's truth in my life. It's a place of support. It's a place of understanding within myself for myself.

I quote Oprah as saying, you know, your life. Is always speaking to you person with her whispers if you don't pay attention, it gets louder and louder. She calls it the still small voice. She says the instinct, the nudge, the call to change. I can really get into my purity, like the pureness of what mindfulness is, you know, like in my definition, like if you're not just paying attention to the sounds and the sensations and the thoughts, then you're not.

doing mindfulness. The core teachings of this Vipassana, which is Buddhist mindfulness, is that there is this, this no self that we can get to. And so I'll tell a story to help illustrate it. This has happened to me a few times during meditation, not a lot, just a handful of times. I'm sitting and meditating and I hear the fan of my HVAC system.

I'm doing it long enough that something happens in your brain. It's so interesting. Your brain stops sending you certain messages. So you get to a point in your meditation that you're not getting the message anymore that the fan is 10 feet away. So if you don't get the message that the fan is something separate from you and it's 10 feet away, there's no difference between you and the fan.

The only thing in this conscious realm that's separating you from the fan is this message that your brain is telling you that fan is, is 10 feet away. So when that happens, I believe, you know, you enter this non self experience is what the Buddhists call it, this non self experience where you don't really see where you end and something else begins.

And so that's how you, on a Wu level, we experience this oneness. The reason that this non self experience is so important is because it's in this experience that we let go of attachment. It's this idea that when we See ourselves as a separate being, then we're also attached to certain things or attached to how life is supposed to look or attached to certain ideas.

This idea I need to be successful or attached to certain needs, like I need to be alone, I need to be in a relationship. To your point about looking within for answers, you sit in this stillness and you get in touch with this True reality, which is how the Buddhists think about it. Like, this is what's truth.

The truth is, is I am no different from the fan. We're all, we're all connected. We're all the same thing and in turn help you find better guidance, better self love, better decisions. And it also is, like you say, it sort of releases the pain, right? The pain we inflict on ourselves by being attached to outcomes, by being attached to Affirmations from, you know, outside sources, things like that allows us to sort of release that pain, be one with the universe and feel comfort in that and calmness in that.

Is that sound right?  Oh, yeah. So that's the suffering part. Suffering that comes with being attached. I think it's healing, you know, in the Buddhist community they don't really talk about healing very much, but, you know, I do in my coaching sessions, it's so much about emotional healing. And the reason we get stuck and we have trouble emotionally healing is because of all these attachments that we have to these ideas, to this shame thinking, to this, you know, not being good enough thinking and all these things they get in the way, or even anger, blame thinking towards other people, it all gets in the way.

Do you feel like you've experienced some emotional healing? I think for me, meditation has been particularly more recently around getting past my own fears and voices in my head and negative thinking, right? And judgment of myself. I tend to get stuck in the blame shame game, right? Easily get stuck there about what's happening in your life or your circumstance or that this is hard or that whatever it may be.

And meditation for me helps me sort of sift through that and in that process. Let go of the painful thoughts that I'm really just inflicting on myself and just see the situation for it in reality without any judgment. You just broke a vase your mom gave you 20 years ago and she's passed away now, like, that is awful and that totally sucks, you know?

But as you get rid of all the other stuff, you say, okay, there's a vase that my mom bought me that's broken there. And then you're also able to say like, oh, but I have all these other things of hers. It sort of helps you get past the pain. Yeah, I like to talk about being mentally neutral, but not emotionally neutral.

So it's like allowing that emotion to come through in its full intensity so it can live out its full course of existence. And that is more possible the more neutral we are in our thinking. I know you actually did a lot with meditation with children as well. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your general journey, your, your longer journey, maybe is a better way to put it. 

Yeah, so like I was saying, I started taking some classes in San Francisco, and then I moved to L. A. and started working with that spiritual teacher. And it was actually during a meditation when I was working with that teacher in L. A. that it came to me, teach meditation to children. And I have a background working with children.

I was a preschool teacher, I was an art teacher. That was back over 20 years ago when nobody was doing that. Nobody was teaching meditation to children. I mean, that's kind of a big thing now. Um, they weren't even really teaching yoga to kids back then. Like it, it was kind of a bizarre idea, uh, which I love.

I love bizarre ideas.  I, that's why I started doing. I got in relationship with a community center there. I started putting up flyers, telling anybody I knew who had kids. I didn't have kids. back then. Kind of had to recruit families and people showed up. People came to my class and parents came and watched and people who didn't even have Children came to my classes.

They were so intrigued with what I was doing because nobody heard of this. So I did that, you know, for about six months or so, and it was great. You know, everyone loved it. And I thought, well, I should teach people how to do this. That was back when people are just starting to do websites. People were writing in HTML, like it was, so I created a website.

The first training that I gave training adults, parents, teachers, and therapists. First course that I put out there, I had people flying in from other countries. Like it was crazy.  I was like, I'm just a girl with a website. I don't understand. I had one lady who got stopped in customs because of her story.

Her story was, well, I'm flying to the U. S. because I'm taking a class about how to teach meditation to children. They gave her a hard time in customs. They thought it was crazy. I love it. Oh, my God. So that's how that career started. And then I wrote a book. I did that for about 15 years. That's incredible.

And tell me a little bit about how it evolved over time. I know you, you've turned to medication or medi medication, , maybe you've also done that, the medication too,  that from time to time there's no judgment and there's no shame in it.  But  to meditation, um, for different things in your life or at during different periods of your life.

How has that evolved since then? Yeah, yeah, great question. Well, I think what is key there is I started writing a memoir. When you are writing a memoir, you start to get really intentional with your life. You're like, Oh, I want this story to be cool. I'm going to do some cool stuff, right? So I came up with this idea or, you know, honestly, I think it came to me in a meditation.

I'm not sure I came up with the idea, but the idea  was that I was going to meditate every day. Okay. day for 60 minutes and that I was just going to commit to that as long as I could. This was kind of the next step is working on this memoir to talk about my ADHD and my journey into learning how to meditate and how that was working with my life and helping me heal my past wounds, and it was really interesting what happened.

I meditated every day for 60 minutes for nine months. I really believe my brain changed on a structural level, and that's proven by science. The science says that if you meditate for 20 minutes a day for six months, Then your, your brain starts changing and some of the things that can change are your, your cerebral cortex, which is around your whole brain.

And we use that a lot to process emotions and that actually grows thicker. I, you know, I had ADHD so badly, I couldn't hold a job for more than, 10 months. I was never anywhere longer than, than 10 months. After that, I was able to process emotions so much better. I explain it in my memoir as I was underwater for all those years, you know, that wah wah kind of noise and, you know, things weren't that clear.

And then after that nine months, it's like I came out of the water. and everything was clear, and life just made so much more sense. So that's one way that my meditation practice shaped who I am now. That's really interesting. You mentioned the brain, that your cerebral cortex gets thicker, and that's where you also process emotion.

You know, do you know what  What that means, like, how that translates into how we think or how we're able to manage things or other biological functions, how it affects those. Well, I mean, it's a hardware situation, right? So, we think about what is the mind? Is the mind tangible? Or is the mind more abstract and, you know, etheric, right?

So this is an argument or a debate that happens within these communities. A lot of scientists, they will say the mind is totally tangible, like the mind is the brain. I don't know. I think there's a little bit of both. I think there is like an abstract part of our mind that we don't necessarily touch. But if we go into that realm of the mind is the brain, then the way we think is directly proportional to the way we think.

Our brain is structured. If our nervous system is triggered all the time, and we're just in a constant state of stress because of these traumatic things that are happening in our life, the amygdala will actually grow larger. Because that's the part of your brain that deals with nervous system triggers and alerts, like caution, you're, there's, there's danger here.

That's another thing that mindfulness meditation will show in the studies is the amygdala will actually shrink a little bit, which means that you will not experience your nervous system triggers as intensely. As far as the cortex. I don't, I don't know the specifics there, but just I've read in, in, in studies that if your cortex is larger and, you know, healthier organ, you know, part of the brain there that you have more hardware to, you know, run those processes. 

deal with emotions, because the different parts of our brain are, deal with certain aspects, decision making for example, the prefrontal cortex has to do with organization. So that's another thing that your brain can grow is the prefrontal cortex can get bigger. So then you'll be more organized. Just in case, any of the listeners are curious what meditation I was actually doing, I was doing an open.

I'm mindful in this meditation, which is a little bit unusual, but it works really well for me. And I was looking at stack stones and all I was doing was looking at the stack stones and noticing the color, noticing the shapes. For 60 minutes, that's, that's all I was doing,  you know, okay, 60 minutes a day, like for a lot of us, I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think for a lot of us being like, Oh my God, 60 minutes a day, sitting there and quiet with myself like that, totally daunting.

Were there times where you struggled to go sit down, where you actually had fear and panic come up to be like, Oh my gosh, and now it's nine o'clock. I got to go sit down and do my 60 minutes right now. I know for me, I do get that sort of pushback mentally and emotionally just because of what I may find in there, my quiet mind.

Did you have that fear going in or did you have sort of resistance and going into those meditations every day?  Yeah, that's a great question. So first I'll say that it's a sacrifice, right? You are making a sacrifice. For me, what I was sacrificing was TV time. During that time of my life, I wasn't watching any tv except i would watch how i met your mother  while i folded the laundry that was it that was my only tv time so i was writing a memoir so i was writing a book so i needed a time for that and then you know time for this meditation practice There's usually something you need to give up, right?

You can't, you can't do everything. There's only so many hours in the day. So what are you going to give up? Are you going to give up looking at TikTok videos? You know, what, what is it that you can give up to fit this in? So yeah, and there are reasons why that you just have this resistance. And so I'll go through some of the reasons and then I can talk about what I personally struggle with.

So one is that a lot of Feel like if we sit down to meditate, it's not good because we're not producing or not thinking. And this is usually unconscious, but we associate our worthiness, you know, how our self worth with how much we can produce, including thought production, like. producing, thinking through something, figuring something out.

If we sit down and meditate, we feel anxiety because we're like, Oh my gosh, I should be doing something not worthy enough just to sit here. That's a challenge. Um, another one is shame about doing it right. It's hard to sit there and meditate because it's like, Oh my God, I can't get this right. I suck at this.

Why can't I do this? I know everybody else can do this. That type of thinking can be really challenging. And that's why mindfulness is so much coupled with self compassion practice. It says we need to have self compassion in our practice. We also need to have self compassion because a really good mindfulness practice is going to open you up to these deep emotions of pain and hurt, which sounds hard, but it's so healing, but we need to have compassion for ourselves for feeling those deep emotions.

Another reason that people struggle to, to sit and meditate is the doubt that it's going to be helpful, right? That, oh, I'm going to waste my time, I'm going to sit here for an hour and nothing's going to change. Another one and this is a real for some people is the feeling of being unsafe. I'm not safe.

This is definitely true with people who've had some severe trauma in their life. I'm not safe to sit. and stop my body and I'm not safe to sit and stop my mind.  Not that we're technically stopping our mind, but we're using our mind in a different way. And that's because when you were a child and you had the trauma, what kept you safer was your ability to keep moving and your ability to keep thinking.

The body is like, you have to keep thinking and keep moving or something bad is going to happen. Physical pain can be another deterrent and trouble concentrating. So, so those are all some typical reasons for me. Uh, one of the biggest ones, which is kind of funny, is, is the doubt that this is going to be helpful, which is hilarious because I've read all the studies that, that show how this changes you on so many different levels.

I wrote a book about it, like, I, my life has changed, like, I know, and, and I had to really sit in mindfulness to  really even get to that, to get to this, oh, I have this doubt that this is even going to work. That's a big struggle for me. And then the worthiness one is another big one for me. I'm, I'm type A, I'm always producing, I'm always working.

And so I have to talk myself through it. Just say, no, you know what? You are so worthy. Even when you sit here and take a break from all those things, because actually all those things that you're doing all the time, that's actually not even why you're worthy. You're worthy because you are, have a kind soul, you have this kindness to you.

That's why you're worthy.  It's I'm definitely a go go go person, right? I think you pack so much in and not to mention you're constantly on two or three devices plus having conversation plus cooking dinner plus doing something else at the same time. Stopping feels like life is going to get away from me if I don't keep addressing all these things on my to do list, right?

If I don't keep doing something or it is like life is going to eat me up. Right? It's bad things are going to start to happen if I don't stay ahead of things. I'm not constantly juggling balls in there, keeping them in the air. If one of these balls falls, bad things are going to happen. And I think the other one too is go, go, go helps me avoid the crap in my life.

You know, the stuff that I'm not happy about my fears, my insecurities, my really why I'm feeling the way that I feel. My  uncomfortableness in my life right now because you end up starting to get to underneath as to why am I uncomfortable? Why do I feel so stressed right now? What's about the balls in the air?

And it's more about I'm just not doing anything that I really want to be doing right now with my life or my time or whatever it is and So it's hard things like that that sort of when you look at them feel like big things you then have to address But you know with the balls in the air too You know something that I have come to find out is when I do meditate and I could stop.

What I'm able to do is I'm able to see the balls for what they are. These ones don't actually matter. And I can easily set them down without shame or guilt or fear. And are these ones over here, here's this other much simpler way to navigate or to handle those balls so that I don't have to spend nearly as much time or energy on them as I thought it did.

Well, I got a question for you. I know that you are this leader in this movement of, you know, it's okay to be alone and not have a partner and, you know, live your best life single and how you can do that in such a gracious way in such a fun way in such a way that feels so good. And I'm curious, I'm curious.

For you, I know you meditate, Kim, and, and how does your practice really help you lead people through this type of life and for you to find this contentment?  It helps me to stay aligned to a purpose. I think I've always in my life felt like I had something more to offer the world in a positive way versus corporate America, making money.

So meditation for me has actually helped me find this whole movement and this whole idea. For me at least, it's constant insecurity, it's constant, like, that's stupid, I'm being stupid, is this too much? Like, does anyone even give a shit? Like, maybe I should just get a job, you know, get a normal job again and sell my soul to, you know, the next private equity firm.

And meditation, though, helps me get past all of the fear, all of the insecurity, and helps me get back to what I really know is best for myself. That is beyond the fear, that's beyond the doubts, but it takes meditation for me a lot of times to get past all that, to hear the differences in the voices inside my head.

Sitting with that fear and insecurity is It's a game changer. And when I work with clients, I help them see that actually fear and insecurity in themselves is actually fine. It's, it's healthy. We're human beings. We're built to experience some fear, we're, we're built to experience some insecurity and that is an emotion.

It's an emotional experience. It's not fact. It's not, it doesn't mean that, oh, I'm not going to be good at this, but meditation practice can help you differentiate these. But I would love to hear a little bit about your meditation retreat stories. Tell me about your experiences.  Yeah, I've been on a few meditation retreats.

I really like Southern Dharma, which is in Hot Springs here in North Carolina, and people come from surrounding states there. It's worth the trip. I love hearing and talking about retreat stories because there's always some kind of like, oh, how did you freak out, you know? Because there's always some kind of like freak out.

And, uh, so when you go on at least a Buddhist retreat by dinner, you're in noble silence, which means you're not going to speak. You might not speak for five days. You might not speak for 10 days, however long the retreat is. I had been meditating for years before I went on my first retreat and I still had my total freak out.

So I remember the first retreat. I felt like I was going crazy. I'm trying to think of like some really good way to describe that insanity, but I just felt like my brain was going to explode and like I just needed to get out of the the environment. I brought my running shoes and I Probably brought my running shoes because I knew this was going to happen.

You're not supposed to like go for a run when you're on a meditation or retreat. You're not supposed to work out or anything like that. But oh my God, I put those running shoes on and I was like running in the, in the forest and that what got me through it. The subsequent. Retreat. I knew I'd gotten a little bit better because I didn't feel like I had to run, but I slept like the first day and a half.

I just slept like I didn't get out of bed hardly. Like it was, and you're not really supposed to do that either. You're not, you're not supposed to sleep all day. And I do remember at some point, I can't remember that retreat or another one. I remember taking my stuff and putting it in my car. I was going to go.

It was like day two, like on a five day retreat day two, I was putting my shit in the car. It's like, I'm hightailing it out of here. I don't care that I spent this money, you know, or, or I signed up to, you know, be the person in the kitchen or whatever. I don't remember how I got myself out of that. Somehow I got this stuff out of my car back into the room.

I don't know. Uh, but on a more serious level, one thing that from a retreat is, is you have this individual time with the teacher. I just, I, I have to figure everything out. And the thing that I couldn't figure out about Vipassana, this mindfulness meditation, was if you're sitting there observing your thinking all the time, because that's basically just what you do, is you just sit there and observe your thinking.

You don't try to stop thinking. That's a misconception. You're not trying to stop thinking. You're not trying to clear your thinking. All you're doing is observing your thinking. And I was like, if you're doing that all the time, how do you make any decisions? Like, how do you, how do you do anything with your life?

Type A personality here, like, what's missing? What am I missing here? And, and so he had a really good explanation, which is. It's the Buddhist explanation, you know, if you ask any meditation, Buddhist meditation teacher, they're going to explain it this way, but is that there's this idea of right thought, right speech and right action.

If you do the practice, which is sitting there observing your thoughts and your body sensations and things like that, then it will automatically set you up to think right. Act right, speak right, and do right. And I believe that. I do believe that. If you just sit there and give yourself that space and time, it sets you up to move in a course that's a healthy course in your life. 

My first experience was an ashram in Pune, India. I had never meditated before then. I had just got out of a 14 year relationship that nearly destroyed me. You know, love of my life, best friend. It was very painful and very challenging. I mean, I was traveling around the world for about 3 or 4 months by myself.

And so I was there for a week. You know, I'm going, going, going. You know, I'm dealing with all this. And a week was a long time. And it was basically like this little campus with different meditation buildings. The first night. Had a meltdown like I was hysterical. I was sobbing. I was what have I gotten myself into am I wasting a week of my life?

There's no TV. There's no internet. There's no nothing obviously they do this to you on purpose those bastards but it's like go go go go go and all of a sudden you just reach to this fault and it's like silence and it just was incredibly overwhelming. One of the things I liked what you said is that in all of your experiences, you listened to yourself, right?

You said, okay, here are the quote unquote rules of this place, but here's me and I don't fit in anyone's box. And so here's what I need. I need to put some, I need to pack my, my shit in my car right this second, right? I need to go run through this forest or, you know, at high speeds. And I did a bit of that also.

And one of the things I did was I did meditations, but I also. Read a lot about meditation and spent a lot of my day reading about it. And for me, that just felt such a, like a nice way to connect to it and understand it on my own. I did have one moment where I was sitting in silent meditation and connecting with your intuition and your knowing and getting past all the nonsense in your head. 

And it just kind of came to me that, you know, my ex had cheated on me, our whole relationship. And I hadn't known that before till that moment. You know, somewhat devastating, but it's also somewhat incredibly freeing and powerful to be like, Holy shit, I have this type of knowledge and ability to see the truth in all this gray and all this dark.

Wow, if I could tap into this on a regular basis. I could really avoid some of the mistakes I make in life some of the challenges and pain like that to me was what kept me on meditation after that because it was like wow like you it really in different ways it can change your life. We're about out of time here.

Um, this has been a super fun conversation. I feel like I could continue to talk about it for another hour, probably. But thank you again for sharing your stories and all your advice and all your, you know, your depth of knowledge on this subject. And for myself, if you're looking for support, inspiration, or just, you know, camaraderie about being single in your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, visit my website and my socials for courageouslyindependent and courageouslyindependent.

com. Thanks so much for being on the show.