Mindfulness matters

written by RACHEL ROTHSCHILD

For Diana Winston, practicing mindfulness is not much different than playing the piano. Although the two activities could not seem more different on the surface, they share certain qualities. Both require a person to practice over time in order to build their skillset, Winston explained.

Winston currently serves as the director of mindfulness education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. She has been at UCLA since 2006, but her mindfulness journey stretches far beyond Westwood. Before coming to the university, she spent 10 years participating in meditation retreats across Southeast Asia, learning the history and traditions grounding her practice. She continues to share this knowledge in a global setting, training more than 500 mindfulness facilitators across the world and leading virtual retreats.

On a typical Thursday afternoon, Winston can be found teaching free drop-in meditation sessions over Zoom, held in collaboration with the Hammer Museum. The sessions regularly attract more than 150 people from across the country. Over the course of 30 minutes, Winston guides participants through a range of exercises, encouraging them to change their inner narrative to words of kindness. She reminds them that it is hard to generate kindness toward others when you are not feeling it yourself.

This fall, PRIME writer Rachel Rothschild spoke with Winston about her mindfulness journey. Read on to explore the benefits of mindfulness and how Winston is bringing the practice to UCLA.

The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

PRIME: To begin, what is mindfulness?

Winston: I define mindfulness as paying attention to our present moment experiences with openness, curiosity and willingness to be with that experience. It’s really about how do we stay in the present moment, not lost in the past, not lost in the future, which is what our minds typically do. When we do that, that leads to a lot of suffering – anxiety, grief, sadness, anger and self judgment. This is what happens when our minds are lost to the past or future. Mindfulness is a state of being in the present moment.

PRIME: What are the benefits of mindfulness for the general public? And then specifically for students?

Winston: There’s been a lot of scientific research into mindfulness. It’s still a young field, but in the last 30 years, they’ve been looking at mindfulness. What they’ve seen is that it’s helpful for physical health conditions that are related to stress. Things like, it boosts the immune system and helps with high blood pressure. It can help with the healing response. It can help reduce inflammation –stress-related physical conditions, that’s one.

The second is the area of mental health: anxiety and depression. There’s a lot of good research on how it helps people with chronic pain too. It can build attention, helping people to focus. There’s been research looking at people with ADD (ADHD). There’s been research looking at how it can improve test scores, even, because it teaches people how to focus.

Then there’s a whole set of research looking at many different things, like how mindfulness can impact altruism. People are kinder. It cultivates positive emotions that helps us work with more emotional balance. There’s even research looking at how it changes our brain. People who practice mindfulness over long periods of time –their brains are thicker in certain areas than people in the same age range, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the part like the CEO of our brain, responsible for executive functioning, delayed gratification, working memory, flexible thinking, all those things.

Why is this relevant to students? I am certainly aware of the statistics in the pandemic about the levels of increased mental health concerns, specifically anxiety, depression and eating disorders. Mindfulness is a fantastic tool for support. It’s not the only thing, and it would never be done to the exclusion of other things such as medication. But as an adjunct tool for working in mental health issues, it is enormous.

PRIME: How did you become interested in mindfulness? And then how did your journey lead you to work at UCLA?

Winston: After college, I was a little lost. I didn’t really know what I was doing with myself. I had spent a semester abroad in Thailand, and I ended up going back there. I hadn’t gotten into these types of practices, but I ended up going back there, and then I went to India, and I got exposed to Buddhist practice there. And I was in Dharamshala, and everybody was doing all this Buddhist meditation, and I was like, “What are they doing?” I was very skeptical, not interested at all.

In any case, I started meditating there, and it blew me away. I was just like, “This is amazing.” Then I went back to Thailand and did my first mindfulness retreat for 10 days in silence. It helped me understand so much about myself and helped me calm my mind, have more peace. I dealt with a lot of anxiety, and it helped me with my anxiety right away.

I then spent the next 10 years off and on doing meditation retreats. I would go, and I would waitress, so I could make money so I could go on my next retreat. Then at some point, I went to Myanmar, to live with my teacher because I had a Burmese teacher, and I spent a year as a Buddhist nun in his monastery. I had to shave my head. You could only eat in the afternoon, and you spent all day long meditating. It was an incredibly powerful experience for me. Also not easy but great and so useful.

When I came back, I was asked to teach, and I got trained to teach. Then I was teaching in Buddhist circles. But I was very clear that after a certain point, these teachings would benefit people not just in the Buddhist world, that anybody could benefit from them. Around that time was when I met (Professor emerita of psychiatry) Susan Smalley, and she was starting to build the (Mindful Awareness Research) Center. We realized we had a similar vision. So, she hired me to move to LA and start the program.

PRIME: If I heard you correctly, I think you said you spent, on one of the retreats, 10 days in silence?

Winston: In another retreat, I spent 365 days in silence.

PRIME: Wow, do you mind talking a bit more about that?

Winston: I did a lot of these retreats. These retreats were silent retreats. Like I said, some were 10 days, some were 30 days, 90 days. Then ultimately, I did the one year. When you’re doing it, particularly when you’re doing it for a very long period of time, you know that it’s your life. You just get used to it, and you don’t talk. I would get up in the morning and meditate and then have breakfast, and then I’d do sitting meditation and walking meditation, alternating until lunch. Then sitting meditation, walking meditation the rest of the day because you weren’t allowed to have dinner – they don’t offer you dinner. It’s one of the rules of monasteries in that part of the world.

You would meet with a teacher every couple of days, and occasionally a teacher would give a lecture. … I was living in the forest in a little hut. There were snakes and spiders and scorpions, and I didn’t like the food. It was intense, and it was hot. I was dealing with the weather and loneliness.

But I was doing it because I was really fascinated by my mind. I knew it was impacting me positively. There’s a lot of ideology connected to it, that if you practice hard enough, you’ll reach a state of enlightenment, right? Then of course, what is enlightenment? In that system, they have a very specific idea – enlightenment means that you begin to release greed, hatred, and confusion, delusion. That actually gets uprooted from your mind, and you no longer are greedy or hateful. That wasn’t my experience, that’s the ideal. But I was really driven by that vision. I was in my early 30s, and I thought that that was a beautiful, beautiful thing to do.

It was an incredible experience. It was so hard. There were so many times where I just kind of lost it and felt so lonely. There was a lot of suffering. But in the end, I feel so grateful that I did that year.

PRIME: How long should you practice mindfulness to see its benefits? And how often?

Winston: Scientists have not concluded something around this. It is hard to know. My experience is as consistent as possible, meaning if you can do it every day, great, because that’s how you build a skill. If you were trying to teach yourself piano, if you just did it one day and then two weeks later, you’re not going to learn to play the piano. You want to have that consistency. I start students with five minutes a day and then build them up to about 20 minutes. I think 20 minutes is realistic and doable for most people. But what you want to do is set the bar low because if you say, “Meditate for half an hour, an hour,” people won’t do it and forget it.

PRIME: What type of mindfulness or meditation practice would you recommend for busy students?

Winston: Mindfulness is not for everybody, I want to be very clear about that. Some people love it, some people don’t. It’s like anything – no medication works for everyone. If you’re interested in doing it, I recommend getting a daily practice and trying to do even just five minutes a day. And I do recommend our app, UCLA Mindful, which has five-minute and three-minute meditations as well as longer ones on there. Doing it with a guide is more helpful than if you were to say, “Just close your eyes and meditate,” because people need support, and they need instruction.

The second thing is that it’s hard to do. We are busy. What can we do? We can have these little moments of mindfulness throughout the day that help you come back to yourself – when you remember to take a breath, feel your feet on the ground, notice what you’re feeling inside. We offer this acronym called STOP. That stands for stop, take a breath, observe and proceed. Let’s say you’re feeling stressed, that you’re feeling like, “Oh, no, I have a test coming and I’m really stressed.” Okay, stop, take a breath and then observe, “What am I feeling inside? My heart’s racing, my stomach is clenched.” Take a few more breaths, calm yourself down and be with what is and then proceed with more awareness. That takes under 10 seconds.

Those kinds of moments, like the research was saying, may impact our capacity to be mindful but will also help when we’re feeling anxious, when we’re feeling judgmental, when we’re feeling upset, angry, all of those things. Having these moments of mindfulness can really make a difference.

PRIME: What would you say to skeptics of mindfulness and its benefits? What about people who might say it’s boring, they think too much during it, or that they don’t have time for it?

Winston: For skeptics, I would say try it. If it doesn’t make sense to you or you don’t like it, then no problem. I don’t have any problem with people being skeptical of mindfulness.

One thing to know is a lot of people quit because they started to meditate, and their mind starts thinking and thinking, and then they’re like, “I can’t do this.” The thing to know is that that’s the normal part of it. When your attention wanders, it’s not a problem. You just notice it’s wandered, and you come back to the present moment. You just keep doing that over and over. Over time, it gets easier because you’re building the skill, right? You’re building, you’re creating new neural pathways. You’re building that ability to stay present.

Sometimes it can be a little boring, and sometimes it won’t be. But wouldn’t it be great to learn the skills of how to be present with boring instead of rushing to distract yourself every second? We have to have times of rest. We have to have times where our brain is not on continually.

One of the things mindfulness teaches us is the capacity to be with things that feel hard. It’s not just about making you feel peaceful. It’s also giving you tools to handle things that are difficult, like grief or anxiety or being bored.

PRIME: If you could tell students one thing about mindfulness, what would it be?

Winston: I would say mindfulness is not something you’ve never heard of or never done before. We’ve all had experiences of mindfulness, like when we’ve been out in nature and just felt really connected and present or when you’re in the zone in athletic activity or in artistic creativity. It’s part of being human. Mindfulness teaches us skills to get there rather than having these spontaneous moments. And it’s not far away from what you already know. ♦