May I be healthy, safe and strong. May you be healthy, safe and strong. May all beings on planet Earth be healthy, safe and strong. May all beings throughout all time and space be healthy, safe and strong. This episode is all about peace and loving kindness.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman, where we explore the power of creativity through neuro aesthetics, art therapy and innovative thinking. I'm Dr. Amy Backos, your hostess and creativity expert, bringing you the art and science of creativity through our conversations and creative insights. I'll provide simple tricks and practices that demystify the creative process so you can live a more authentic and expressive life. Let's get started.
What if I told you I had a magic formula that could lessen your self-criticism, improve your wellbeing, even reduce cellular aging, reduce your experience of physical pain, give you greater resilience, better relationships, and even better mental health. Would you believe me that I had that for you? Well, it gets even better. The treatment is non-invasive. It's not a drug or a chemical. It requires zero changes to your diet or exercise. It has zero negative effects on your body. It takes less than five minutes a day and it's free. Do you want to know what it is? Would you commit to doing this if it gave you all those benefits? Well, here's the magic formula. The loving kindness meditation. The loving kindness meditation is simple and it softens your relationship with uncomfortable thoughts. It allows you to diffuse, take a step back and feel better about what's happening in your mind. It also gives you new perspective on your core beliefs and your values. It helps you see new ways of relating to yourself and to other people. It is the antidote to anger, grief, and rage.
What is this magic formula? I read it to you in the beginning. There's many versions of the loving kindness. It's actually an ancient Buddhist practice that cultivates goodwill and universal friendliness towards yourself and towards other people. And I would say the fruits of the Loving Kindness meditation include an open and fearless heart and enhanced ability to manage conflict, and one of my personal favorites, the ability to take things less personally. There are many variations on a loving kindness meditation, and I want to experiment with a little bit. And I encourage you to just check out YouTube and see what ones appeal to you. And then of course, you can make up your own. Now listen, there is zero pressure to do this right. There's not a perfect way to do this.
However you do this will be great. So I want to give you a little more instruction on the meditation and see if you can experience a little bit of relaxation. And then I'm going to give you a lot of the research behind why this works. So the first step is noticing yourself getting centered, bringing your attention to the present moment. And as we all know, peace starts from within. So the first line is May I be healthy, safe and strong. Now you can change this to whatever you want. You could be safe, happy and strong the next you want to imagine. Other people might be someone in particular or a group. May you be healthy, safe and strong and then expand it even further into your neighborhood, to your country, to the whole continent, the world. All life forms on this planet. And you say, May all beings on planet Earth be healthy, safe and strong and here's my favorite part. Imagine the Earth, space, and all life forms in the cosmos. And you say, May all beings, throughout all time and space be healthy, safe, and strong.
The Buddha gave us 11 reasons why we need to practice a loving meditation where we focus on loving and kindness. And what I found is that he was encouraging some monks to feel okay and feel safe while they were meditating in the woods. And the benefits that the Buddha said we got from practicing a loving kindness meditation. Better sleep awakened, refreshed. You won't have bad dreams. Other people will regard you with affection, and even animals and pets will regard you with affection. He says you'll be free from injury. You can concentrate quickly. You will have a bright complexion. You will die peacefully, free from fear and agitation. Now a lot of these are actually documented in science. Science has given us a whole body of research on the loving kindness meditation. It reduces self-criticism. Just this simple practice of loving kindness helps us be more gentle with ourselves. And we all know that self-criticism leads us away from our values. It makes us feel like we're unhappy, and we can struggle a lot when we criticize ourself. It quiets that inner critic and it just makes us more accepting of ourselves.
Loving kindness Meditation research also shows enhanced well-being when people practice the loving kindness meditation. It increases vagal tone, which is a physiological marker of subjective well-being. Basically, do you feel okay and what do you think? And this really improves the quality of life as well as life satisfaction. This one really struck me. Loving kindness meditation has been shown to reduce cellular aging. The meditation practitioners experienced a buffering of the telomere. Shortening and telomeres are the tips of your chromosomes, essentially, um, how you continue to create new hair, new skin, how you continue to grow your body. And when we age with a lot of stress, kind of like it's almost like frying off the tips of the telomeres. They don't work as well. But the loving kindness meditation really buffers that stress and allows us the benefits of reduced cellular aging. Wow. The Loving Kindness Meditation also has a large body of research showing that it reduces pain symptoms. When people have chronic pain. Loving kindness meditation allows them to experience it at a subjectively lower level. Loving Kindness also has research showing that it gives us greater resilience and in particular, people who have trauma and a PTSD diagnosis experience less trauma symptoms and flashbacks when they are regularly practicing loving kindness meditation. There's a lot of research about how it improves our relationships. It gives us greater stability in our social relationships. It also increases empathy for strangers. This is huge when we think about the context of war.
Empathy for strangers can be improved through this meditation. Loving kindness increases our social connections at work. Work becomes more enjoyable. We have more friends there and that means we can do a better job at work. Loving kindness also improves mental health symptoms. This one seems really important a reduction in rumination and negative mood for people who are experiencing depression or a low mood. They ruminate. They think about the same challenges over and over again. They kind of get stuck on a self-judgment, a criticism. This can be ameliorated with a loving kindness meditation. And interestingly, lovingkindness meditation has yielded a reduced symptoms of hallucination and delusion for patients who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. This is really significant findings. And wow, there is even more research.
I'm giving you more and more studies to support the use of loving kindness meditation, because I want you to really understand that this is well researched and it can have a huge impact on our day to day life. A study in 2021 found that physicians who practiced loving kindness meditation increased their empathy, which ultimately improved their communication skills with their patients. And you can imagine the long term impact of that on women survival rates and being able to receive effective care from their physicians. Lovingkindness also works great with art and art therapy, and I found one study that loving kindness increases present centered, selfless focus for people who are experienced meditators. And what that means is the more you do this meditation, the better able you will be to make contact with the present moment. And a selfless focus means you're not centering yourself in the narrative. You're not thinking of things as relating only to you. You're able to see the big picture. And when we see the big picture, we have less symptoms of anxiety and we have more life satisfaction.
A meta analysis is a large study that reviews lots and lots of past studies to come to a strong conclusion. And so when we come across a meta analysis, it means that there's been a lot of research and we can feel pretty confident in the results. One study reviewed 237 research studies, and they found significant improvement in people's experience of anxiety when they practice loving kindness meditation. They are confident that this overwhelming amount of research to reduce anxiety really is an honest result from the loving kindness meditation. Now, we've also discovered that studies that combine loving kindness meditation with a mindfulness meditation. And that's what I talk about when I say present moment awareness and making contact with the present, noticing what's happening. That combination. Outperformed studies that only use the loving kindness meditation. How do we apply that information? It means we get centered, we make contact with the present moment, and then we practice loving kindness, and we're going to have an even stronger benefit. 1s I've been thinking a lot about peace and the need for our own inner peace, and then extending it out to our families, our communities. All the places that we interact are opportunities for us to act on peace. I want to share eight things that I've given up or almost completely given up, and what I've replaced them with to have a more peaceful inner and outer life. And I really want you to consider that you could make this shift as well. These are uncomplicated strategies to help bring more peace into the world. The first thing that I recommend we give up is gossip. And I used to think that a little bit of gossip was a way to bond with a friend, bond with another woman, and how wrong I was. I wish I could take it all back when I quit judging myself. I no longer wanted to judge others. It takes a little bit of work to figure out which comes first, the chicken or the egg, judging ourselves and judging others. It's judging ourselves that causes us to judge others. It also is an environment that we're in.
When people gossip, we might join in just because they're gossiping. You can work on this challenge, this thing that is taking us away from peace, gossip by stop gossiping and stop judging. And it takes a little bit of practice. You have to kind of commit to it, maybe try it for a week, go on a gossip free diet for a week or two. Gossip can really get in the way of our social life and our professionally, because when we gossip long after the story or the person that we're talking about has been forgotten, people will remember that we gossiped, that we said negative things about others. And there's even research to show that people will associate those negative things we said with us, not the other person. They'll think that we are whatever negative we're saying about the other person. This can ruin social reputation, professional reputation. It can cause people to be bypassed for promotions. There are a lot of reasons why gossip is really, really bad for us. What can you replace negative gossip with? You can replace it with silence with just listening. You can interrupt it. Change the subject. If you listen to what someone is saying about another, then you can talk to them, check in with them, see if there's anything you can do to support them. Help them feel good. You can say kind things about people when they're not there. It's good for you. It makes you feel good. It makes the person you're talking to feel good. And maybe it will get back to that other person and it'll make them feel good.
The next thing I want to encourage everyone to give up is complaining. Complaining can be pretty addictive. If you are in a work environment where people like to complain, you're kind of stuck in this situation where people complain over break or lunch and it makes us feel bad. Venting has been shown to damage relationships, so if you go vent about your job or whoever you're upset at, it can hurt the relationship between you and the person you're talking to. It does a lot of damage. It also gives us the false impression that we've done something about the problem by getting upset complaining about it. That's actually not doing anything about the problem, but it gives us this illusion that maybe we did do something and it prevents us from taking action.
So complaining hurts not only the relationship between you and the person you're talking to, it can limit your enthusiasm, energy, and creativity to take actual steps to change the situation. There have been places I've worked where I made great efforts to avoid people who complained a lot. It was very challenging. I've also worked at places where I was complaining, and I realized how uncomfortable I ultimately felt after complaining. The third thing that you can give up to give yourself a little more peace of mind and more peace in the world, is having terrible self-talk. In the morning I used to wake up and this is often what I would say to myself, oh boy, here we go again. That's so terrible. It's an awful way to start the day. Oh boy, here we go again, I replaced it, it took a little bit of time, maybe more than a year, to replace it with something that I was excited about in the morning, and I might have shared this before. This is what I say every morning. Today is the happiest day of my life. I had to post a note by my bed. I had to read the note. I had to override the brain's tendency to have a negative or anxious feeling in the morning. This is a huge impact change. It requires very little work on your part. Just put a little note by your bed and the return on investment for this one is huge.
You can think of something magical to say in the morning. I am so excited for today! Here I come to start the day, whatever you want to say. And when I started saying today is the happiest day of my life, I full on did not believe it. You can choose something that's a little higher than you might naturally believe to get you out of that negative thinking spot that can often happen in the morning. The next one that I would encourage you to give up so you could have a little more peace. And the people around you can have more peace is you have to give up insufficient sleep. I used to give myself not enough time to sleep. I thought I'd had to work more. I would stay up past my bedtime if I tried to set a schedule, and then I gave up and I just had no schedule. Sometimes I would go to bed early. If I was real tired. Sometimes I would stay up late, or I would just kind of get stuck sitting on the couch.
I want to share this quote from Gift Google Mona. She says A woman of peace sleeps well at night because a peaceful night is her ultimate reward. Putting myself to bed on time is my number one strategy for self-care. It is the first thing that I ask about when I'm working with women. What are you doing to get to bed? And it really is that easy to start feeling better. Remember, women are designed to sleep nine hours at night and ten hours during menstruation. That eight hours a night recommendation came from studies on men. The next thing you need to give up is doom-scrolling. You know what I'm talking about picking up your phone, maybe to check the time and you end up scrolling through social media or shopping. There's a lot of negative consequences to spending a lot of time on social media. It's pretty well documented. Here's what you can do about it.
You can take one day off a week from your phone, and you might need your phone with you for actual phone calls, but anything else can wait till the next day. So that means if you're posting on social media, you schedule it the night before. It means if you are doing a lot of shopping, you're skipping it that day. You're not looking at your phone. I also started taking my teenagers phone when he comes home from school, so that the evening is devoted to unwinding homework. Dinner is a family relaxation, and I feel like it's had a big improvement on his mood and just the environment.
The next thing that I think has to go, if you're working for peace, is withholding affection because you're afraid of vulnerability. And I think I used to be pretty reserved with my friends around affection. And now I tell my friends all the time how much I love them, how great they are. I have no idea what I was waiting for. What you have to add in is the feeling of potentially some vulnerability. The feeling of you might be rejected. Someone might not say it back to you. We are social creatures. We are designed to connect and have emotion and so when we are withholding affection from others, were also withholding it from ourselves.
The next thing is distraction action. And I used to get really motivated to do something. If I was feeling anxious, I better do something about it. Clean the house and send an email. Work on something. Work harder. And then I came to realize that sitting with the discomfort, essentially taking no action in that moment really helps. When I quit taking action to get rid of anxious or uncomfortable thoughts. Guess what? I stopped having such intense, uncomfortable thoughts. My feeling. Settle down a little bit. The more we try and avoid, the stronger the feeling gets and the next time it comes around. We've already taught ourselves something like, I can't handle it, I have to avoid it. And distraction action can get us into all kinds of trouble. We can really end up overspending. We can end up overeating. We can end up picking fights. We can make things really uncomfortable for ourselves and for others. The wish to discharge an uncomfortable emotion is natural. We don't want to feel bad, but the action taken from that causes so many problems at work and at home. The solution is really just sitting with the discomfort and avoiding taking action from that place of anxiety or fear.
The next thing that we need to give up to have a more peaceful mind is telling unpleasant stories about ourselves. And there's one I hear a lot of women tell me about. They feel like they are too much of something. I used to think I was too emotional, or then I was too intellectual. Was I intellectualizing was that a problem? Just telling stories that how I was not good enough and women tell these stories about their bodies, their mind, their emotions, their behaviors that something's just not good enough or it's too much. And you can replace this with almost any other better sounding story. I'm just right. I enjoy who I am. This is who I am right now. I have big emotions in this moment.
And the last thing that I really want you to consider giving up. The thing to give up, that'll give you more peace of mind and more peace in your home, is to give up violence as entertainment. And I'm talking about film, the news, television shows that are about violence, that show violence, and tell you violence. I think there's a long tradition of people wanting to see violence in some old fashioned, primitive way that people have always gathered around to observe violence, from the Roman gladiators to atrocities against African Americans in the United States, there is a tendency to gather around and observe violence. And it's bad for us. It's toxic. It damages us. It is on a level of like a soul injury.
And I always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with television. We didn't watch very much of it growing up. Our TV was very small. We didn't have cable. It's kind of tucked in the corner. I went a lot of years with no television in the house, and that felt really good. I liked those years a lot more. Working at the Veterans Administration Hospital. A very wise psychologist suggested that I not go see a movie that was about the Vietnam War. It had just come out and they said, be very careful with your mind. Like, is that really what you want to do for entertainment? Especially because I was listening to people's traumatic stories at the VA. Do I really want to go now, create pictures in my mind. And that advice really helped me understand what I'd already kind of been naturally doing, which was moving away from violence in what I was watching. Can you make a commitment not to consume violence as entertainment? And you can replace that with almost anything knitting, reading, painting, playing cards, going for a walk, even doing chores is more enjoyable than watching violence for entertainment. Play with the dog. Talk to your family. Journal, Take action of cutting out violence in entertainment that you consume can have a huge impact on your ability to see people as human and deserving of compassion. Giving up violence as entertainment allows us to have more empathy and loving kindness for all human beings. You could even try a diet for a week or a month to just see what it's like. If you turn off the TV when there's violence happening. Turn off the news. And I think a lot of you might say, I can't do that. We watch a lot of TV in the house, or there's violence and everything. Yeah, there is, but when we commit to peace, we're not just posting images on social media about the atrocities of war.
We are actually making motions towards a more peaceful life internally and externally by not dehumanizing other people for our entertainment. I want to invite you, as a modern, creative woman, to consider letting go of some of these old habits that cause us to feel ill, at ease internally, and to create unhelpful situations around us. And if this speaks to you, do let me know how you're working for peace. It's unnecessary to do large things to get started on your peaceful journey. Taking simple, peaceful actions every day is how the movement towards peace begins.
Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Women on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.