NASW Social Work Talks - EP43: Faith-Based and Secular Meditation

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

We speak with Raymond Monsour Scurfield, DSW, LCSW, ACSW, author of "Faith-Based and Secular Meditation: Everyday and Posttraumatic Applications" (NASW Press, 2019). This NASW 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient is professor emeritus of social work at The University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast. His work focuses on the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans and disaster survivors. See the show notes for resources and a transcript.

Welcome to NASW Social Work Talks. I am Greg Wright. Raymond Monsier-Skerfield is a professor emeritus of social work at the University of Mississippi-Hattiesburg and a nationally recognized expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. He also received the NASW Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. Skirfield is author of the newly released NASW Press book, Faith-Based and Secular Meditation Every Day in Post-Traumatic Applications. Welcome to Social Work Talks, Raymond. Thank you.

Very happy to be here. How did you first become interested in meditation? I had a girlfriend who was a heavy-duty meditator when I met her back in the mid-70s, and she She was into transcendental meditation, or TM, and I explored it, and I got initiated into it and was assigned a mantra. That was back in 1977, and then I meditated twice a day, 20 minutes after that for a good 20 years without missing more than three or four. And then I have evolved from there to not doing pure TM, but some TM and other meditations since then. So that was my personal side. And then I started teaching some of my clients over the years different meditations and found it to be very helpful for them.

When a person meditates, what are they actually doing? What's going on in their mind and in their body? There are many forms of meditation, and I'm not an expert in all of them. However, one thing that is common to all forms of meditation that I'm aware of is that there's a dwelling upon something. There's something that you focus on, that you dwell upon, that you rest your awareness on. And then there are various instructions as to how to maintain that focus. And so when you lose your focus, you keep coming back to that dwelling place. You keep coming back to it and coming back to it.

And that is the more or less generic description. When you're focusing on doing meditation, what are you actually focusing on? One way to categorize meditations is into two different types. One would be concentrative or shutting down of awareness to focus on a singular something, and mantra meditation is the most common form of that in the West, the West meaning North America, Europe. And the other type is opening up or expanding of awareness, and mindfulness is the most popular example of that. I say the bridge that's in between the two is breath, because breath is central to all meditations. I divided into those three groupings. In mantra meditation, you focus on a word or a short phrase or a series of words, and that is your focus.

For example, it might be peace or calm. So that would be your meditation focus, and you keep coming back to peace or calm. that would be for any type of meditation if you wanted to do a faith-based meditation then you would pick a word that is faith-based or religious for example i am catholic and i use the mantra yesu the latin pronunciation of jesus and so repeating yesu yesu is an example of a faith-based form of mantra meditation. How does meditation affect a person's body and mind? Yes, well, there's been over a thousand research studies on this. So there's an impact on the amygdala or the emergency response center of the brain. It has been found that some forms of meditation help

them to shrink the amygdala so that you're not overreacting. And this would be very relevant, for example, for people with severe anxiety or PTSD who have an exaggerated startle response and constant vigilance and so forth. And most of us are a little too attuned in that direction. And so this is very helpful for that. On the other side of it, there's research to suggest that the prefrontal lobe part of the brain, which is associated with higher order functioning, There's a cortical thickening as an actual thickening of the brain itself, stronger, more pliable, more resilient. There are many physical manifestations of the benefits to include lower blood pressure, a lower standing heart rate. You can go on and on about the examples of that.

I might just give it the one clinical example. I had a client who had very high blood pressure chronically. She went in to see her doctor for her regular checkup. The nurse did a blood pressure reading before she saw the doctor, and her blood pressure reading was something like 169 over 123. And the nurse said, you've got to go to the hospital right now. She asked if she could meditate for a few minutes to try to bring it down. And the nurse said okay, and she started doing what's called 7-11 breathing, a rapid form of breath-based meditation. Five minutes, six minutes later, the nurse came back, redid the reading, and there had been a drop of 30 points in both her upper and her lower blood pressure readings in six minutes.

It can be extremely helpful to deal with immediate stress that's going on, and it can be very helpful to help lower your baseline of problematic emotional states such as anxiety, anger, depression. you can bring your baseline down so it's not so exaggerated. How does meditation help a person overcome trauma? Yes, there is a great lyric, opening lyrics to a song by the Dixie Chicks. It goes something like this. Forgive, I wish I could. Forget, I don't think I could. They say time heals everything, but I'm still waiting.

and this is the theme of so many trauma survivors they they cannot let go of the memories of the images of the emotions attached to past traumatic events and they're unable to let them go and they're unable to stop them when they intrude on their on their daily life and probably if any trauma survivor the most common wish would be if I could just forget about the trauma. And of course, trauma is unforgettable. When you meditate and do it correctly, you do not attach yourself to memories, to emotions, to images that you do not want to attach yourself to. This is the key to meditation. you don't blank your mind out, like some people think. You learn not to attach yourself to those

intrusions. Thich Nhat Hanh, a wonderful Buddhist monk, has a saying, something like, your emotions are like clouds on a windy day. Conscious breathing is my anchor. Meditation, if you will, helps the person to weather the storm, to not focus on the incoming intrusive memories and emotions, and instead to return to your meditation focus. In mantra meditation, to return to your mantra, to gently return to your mantra. You simply note that there is an intrusion and you gently return to your mantra. If you learn to do that, you have to learn to do that in normal situations before you can apply it to when you're having intrusive emergency thoughts going on. So once you learn it, then you're able to apply it to almost any circumstance.

Is this a skill that anybody can learn? Like anything else, some people are more adept at it than others. Some come to it more naturally than others. I once asked a client, have you ever meditated? And she said, I can't stop the busyness in my head, my thoughts, and I can't sit in an uncomfortable position with my legs crossed. And I said, well, neither one of those is required to meditate. You don't have to not have thoughts. We can't not have thoughts. So it isn't a question of whether you have thoughts as if you are able to learn how, again, to not attach yourself to those thoughts. And some people's brain, they are so full of thinking and cognitions and images that they find it very, very difficult to not attach to that.

And so some people then say that their meditation is very turbulent because it's so full of thoughts and they keep essentially attaching themselves to the thoughts. So you have to work with someone to help them develop the skill of neutral awareness of a distraction gently return to your meditation focus i liken this to a bass guitar in a band bass guitarist is playing this bass lick you know to tone to tone tone and then you got the lead guitarist going crazy you got other guitars maybe you got maybe horns growing you got singing you got the audience and what's the bass guitarist doing? Doing that bass lick. Is the bass guitarist blanking out all that other stuff? No, but the bass guitarist is focusing on the bass lick. Well, that's your mantra.

That's your meditation focus. And you can learn to do that no matter how busy your brain is, no matter how much is going on around you, you can learn to let go of that and come back. So if your meditation isn't working, there's a proverb, don't blame the meditation. Meditation has been around thousands of years. And so I would just encourage people who have difficulty with this, they need to search for the right teacher and they need to search for the right meditation that seems to work best for them. When I think of meditation, I think of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Far Eastern faiths. So has there been a resistance in the West to adopting meditation? Yes, very good point. Yes, of course, meditation has its roots in ancient Hindu Vedic scripture going back to 2000 or 2500 BC, and back to Buddhism 400 to 500 BC.

And in Christianity, the three and four AD with the desert fathers and desert mothers who lived in the eastern Egyptian desert and lived a very hermetic life and did prayers all day long. In more modern times, and this is in the West, we have what's been called secular meditation. And secular meditation essentially means that you don't have any religious or faith-based aspect to the meditation. You are using the meditation techniques and strategies without, again, any faith basis to them. And they have a power because of the fact that they work. And so, for example, if you go to mindfulness workshops, one of the first things you'll hear is you don't have to be Buddhist to practice mindfulness, even though mindfulness is steeped in Buddhism. You don't have to be Hindu to practice transcendental meditation and so forth. However, you could choose to be faith-based with those, or you could choose to be secular.

So, for example, just to take mantra meditation for a moment, picking a mantra is very important. If someone's faith-based, I might say you might want to pick a faith-based mantra, such as, for Christians, you might pick Jesus, my Lord, my Lord, my God, Jesus, be with me, let go, let God, as examples. If you want to pick a secular mantra, you might pick something like peace, calm, serenity. In other words, a state that perhaps you aspire to even have more of. If you do it that way, with that secular word as your mantra, then you can practice all the benefits of mantra meditation and not have the faith element involved. Listeners, we'll be right back. We know how hard it is to keep track of constantly changing licensing renewal requirements, and we're here to help. CE Tracker helps you keep track of your continuing education credits, whether you earn them from NASW or somewhere else.

CE Tracker tells you exactly what you need to renew your license in your state. Everything from the number and type of CEs needed to proper documentation. Learn more at socialworkers.org slash CE Tracker. We're back. You have a new book from NASW Press on meditation, and I was wondering what inspired you to write that book. I like to do handouts for clients and when I was a professor of social work. And so I started doing a short handout on meditation and for personal UC Gen with clients. And then that handout grew from one or two pages to five pages to 10 pages to 20 pages to 30 pages.

around about that point i said ray i think maybe you have a book in you on this really the book my manuscript became a living document because i'd be writing the book and i'd go and have an experience with a client and i'd run back home and change part of the chapter because i learned something new so that's what happened it was formed from my early meditation experience so That was the genesis of it, and then I developed a faith-based mantra along with my TM mantra, and my faith-based mantra was Yesu, or the Latin pronunciation of Jesus. That became my faith-based mantra, and then I started, again, teaching secular and faith-based to clients, and then started adapting it to their dealing with issues such as anxiety going into a

crowded supermarkets, or anxiety being in a meeting, or being unable to focus or concentrate because it was so full of different distractions. Why did you focus on both the faith-based and the secular side of meditation? Actually, there's a very significant Catholic presence on the Gulf Coast, but of course This is very Protestant, and you do have a lot of evangelicals and Southern Baptists and so forth. When I meet with people, of course, I'm upfront about my particular faith, but I tell them that if you have concerns about meditation and your faith or your prayer life, we can do secular-based meditation. I said, however, we can do faith-based meditation based upon your faith, and we won't be changing any of the wording of, for example, your prayer life. However, we would just be adopting meditation dynamics and principles to your prayer life to enhance your prayer life.

For example, learning to recognize you have a distracting thought while you're praying and gently returning to your prayer words. I tell people, if you have any issues or thoughts that there are issues about the meditation and your religion, go and talk to your minister or to your healer or whoever you might want to consult with and ask them if the kind of meditation I'm going to teach you, and I give them a handout, if they see an issue with this. And if they do, then we won't do meditation. For example, I have a client come in who had a morning routine of doing maybe a 20-minute prayer before he went off to work. However, he was finding intrusive thoughts about things that weren't prayer-related were coming in. So he wasn't so happy with the effectiveness of his prayer. And so I said, let's learn some meditation. And two things.

Number one, you could meditate first before you pray. That could help you get to a calmer place. And then you could go into your regular prayer routine. You could also take the principles that you're going to learn about neutral observance of distractions and gently return to your focus. You can learn that in meditating and then apply that to your prayer life. So he learned to do mantra based meditation. He used a mantra. He used a faith based mantra. And then he would go do that for 10 minutes and he would do his prayer for 20 minutes. And he said that doing the meditation first brought him to a calmer place, a quieter place. So then when he started his prayer, he was able to just, he was there. And he did his prayer life. It wasn't any different. He didn't do anything different once he started his praying, but he came to it in a more receptive, quiet way.

People resonate with truth if they don't feel like you're trying to proselytize them, you know, to change their beliefs. I'm giving them something to add and consider. And they make their own choice. And the Buddhists are like, the Buddhas only point the way, and therapists don't point the way. That's all I'm doing. If a social worker wants to learn more about meditation, how can they do that? Oh, yes. Well, of course, you should buy my book.

That would be the first thing. Seriously, there aren't very many books that actually go through and apply systematically meditation to various clinical dynamics and issues. There are several with mindfulness that are hard to find on any other forms of meditation. There's no substitute for a teacher. You want to try to find someone who's at least a few steps further along than you are, and hopefully maybe more than a few steps further along. And if you're blessed enough to have a master meditator or someone who truly, you know, is advanced stages meditating, don't pass up the opportunity. Also, there might be a sangha, there might be a community of meditators in your area. And some are online, actually.

To have a community of meditators is very powerful. and and if you can't find that again you need to find an individual teacher of course some people go online and they there are many apps out there and a lot of people rave about different apps and i do it the old-fashioned way uh just me and uh dealing with my thoughts and uh applying the principles the bottom line whatever works for you uh however i would strongly encourage trying to find someone to do it in person with because you learn that you that you're going to come to rough spots in your meditating and you're going to feel like this isn't going anywhere or am I doing something wrong and it's very helpful to have someone to talk to about that to make sure that

you're not just simply maybe doing something wrong mechanically and it's very hard for a lot of us to realize that on our own we oftentimes need someone to give us that feedback it's been a pleasure Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Take care. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to

enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.