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Nov. 10, 2023
Meditation, Mindfulness & Hacking The Human Brain with Mike Cancellieri
Ever had one of those days where stress seems to be piling up with no end in sight? Well, you're not alone. We've had a riveting chat with Mike Cancellieri from Frontline Foundations, an organization that provides indispensable support to veterans and first responders grappling with post-traumatic stress. Mike educates us on the power of mindfulness, a skill that when exercised and maintained, becomes an instinctive response to stressful situations. Our conversation even delves into Mike's personal narrative of acquiring and cultivating this vital competency.
Imagine the tranquility of being completely in tune with your senses and allowing your thoughts to drift by without judgment. That's the essence of meditation. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not about emptying your mind. Instead, it’s about being present and acknowledging your experiences. We'll guide you through the power and benefits of meditation, its myths, and how it can be a lifeline for individuals dealing with post-traumatic stress.
Lastly, we'll demystify post-traumatic stress disorder and address it for what it truly is - an injury. A change in the brain and endocrine system due to horrifying experiences. You'll hear about Mike's personal journey navigating PTSD and how mindfulness played a pivotal role in his healing process. Furthermore, we'll underscore the importance of seeking help and breaking free from the stigma attached to it. Don't miss out on an episode replete with invaluable insights, practical advice, and a glimpse into the Firefighter Cancer Alliance Clear Podcast.
About Mike Cancellieri:
Mike is a founding member of Front Line Foundations and serves as our Executive Director. Mike attended Stockton University in Galloway, NJ where he earned a BA in Criminal Justice. After moving to New England in 2008, he began a career in behavioral health working with diverse populations in a variety of settings. This experience in mental health crisis work and inpatient psychiatric settings gives him a unique perspective on many of the challenges faced by first responders. His nearly lifelong study of mindfulness and Eastern thought dovetailed seamlessly with his interest in nature when he began working with veterans and first responders in 2018. Mike considers it a personal mission to share these skills and knowledge with our clients at Front Line Foundations.
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Transcript
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This week on All Clear Meditation, mindfulness and Hacking the Human Brain with guest Michael Kancelleri from the Frontline Foundations.
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I'm Travis, eric.
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How you doing today, sir, I'm doing good man.
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It's weird.
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We're actually in the same room for a change.
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Yes, this is different.
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Yeah, but anyway, we are here today and we have a guest with us, and I'm going to let Eric introduce our guest, since he is new to me, but you guys have been working together for quite a while.
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Yeah, I am very excited to be able to introduce Mike Kancelleri from Frontline Foundations of North America in Bellows Falls, vermont.
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Mike and I our relationship goes back four years now yeah, I believe four years.
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From my recovery journey.
00:00:51.322 --> 00:00:59.027
I met Mike and I credit Mike and some of his colleagues up in Vermont to save me my life.
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Mike, how's everything going up your way, brother?
00:01:02.987 --> 00:01:04.349
Pretty good man, pretty good, eric.
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Nice to see you, nice to talk with you.
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Travis, nice to meet you, good to meet you too.
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Thank you, heck of an introduction, and I hope to someday live up to that.
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I'm 100% serious man, what?
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you guys are doing up there is phenomenal work, and I can't thank you enough.
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I've got my wife sitting right here with me too, so Deb is probably very thankful that I was able to go up there and spend some time with you guys, and you guys put these, instill these very important traits, qualities and new lifestyle into me to be able to be here tonight to do this podcast.
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If you could, mike, just fill us in a little, tell our listeners who you are and some of your background, and then we'll get into some of our other questions with you.
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Cool sounds great.
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Yeah, I'm Mike Canceleri.
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I'm the Executive Director of Frontline Foundations, which is a post-traumatic stress clinic, essentially like a health and wellness clinic for veterans and first responders.
00:02:03.909 --> 00:02:06.027
Our office is in Bellows Falls, vermont.
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We have a five-day totally outpatient, mindfulness-based program for veterans and first responders that treats post-traumatic stress and teaches resiliency skills.
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In addition to that, I have three clinicians now who take on clients for individual therapy.
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In addition to that, I go all over to place doing in-service trainings for fire departments, police departments, private ambulance services.
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I'd love to break into the military, but you know how it is with the federal government.
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We'll get there someday.
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And that's just a taste of what we do the mindfulness-based program.
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I'm happy to be here and looking forward to talking with you guys.
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I appreciate that man.
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In the work that you're doing up there.
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Like I said already, it's phenomenal and getting that outreach.
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You mentioned the government.
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I was fortunate enough last week.
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I just spent four days four solid days on a military installation talking to federal firefighters about this kind of stuff Very cool, yeah, it was cool.
00:03:08.063 --> 00:03:13.931
You mentioned several times in your introduction there about mindfulness-based practices.
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Tell us a little bit about mindfulness.
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Cool.
00:03:19.224 --> 00:03:42.472
Yeah, my favorite definition of mindfulness comes from a book called the Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher Germer, and so the definition of mindfulness is the ability to selectively put your attention on what you want your attention on, and we like to learn how to do that in a curious, open, accepting fashion.
00:03:42.472 --> 00:03:47.585
But a couple of things I point out about that definition of mindfulness that are very important for people to understand.
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I said mindfulness is an ability.
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Another word for ability is a skill, and that's really important to know that.
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Mindfulness is a skill that you can learn.
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It's also a skill on the fire service.
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You guys are very familiar with the idea of perishable skills.
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So mindfulness is a perishable skill.
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You can learn it.
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You can get real good at it and then, when you slack off in everything that you need to do to take care of yourself, you can get worse at it.
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Ask me how.
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I know Part of our program is like we all of us that work at FLF have been through traumatic events on the job.
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My two clinicians are firefighters, paramedics.
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My newest clinician, who we just brought on, amy, was a retired police officer.
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I spent a lot of time dealing with daily violence, a variety of psychiatric settings.
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It was important for me in my journey to really double down on that idea that mindfulness is a skill, because I think what people might have a mistake and impression of out there is that mindfulness is a quality that calm people have, or nice people are mindful, and it's really not like that.
00:04:59.526 --> 00:05:14.031
It's a skill that anyone can learn and it's simply the skill of learning how to put your attention where you want it, which might be like on what your wife is saying across the dinner table, as opposed to events in your mind from the past or worries in the future.
00:05:15.300 --> 00:05:20.764
And that is not easy to do sometimes and I've got that first-hand experience.
00:05:20.764 --> 00:05:46.129
Like you said, it is perishable and I found that out the hard way myself after I visited you guys the first time had a relapse because I thought I was OK and you say I'm good, ok, maybe I don't have to do my mindfulness today, or maybe I can skip part of my self-care, and next thing you're down that rabbit hole again and you forget everything and I had to go back up for it, tune up, as I call it, with you guys.
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And then really it really sunk in the second time for me.
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And it is funny that it almost becomes muscle memory.
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Once you get really good at it, you get used to using it where now it's instinctive, a reaction or whatever else to an event that's taking place.
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And I'm going through mindfulness techniques.
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Yeah, awesome.
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And Eric, we were talking about that today.
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When we were traveling up to that class we were teaching.
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I was telling you about the investigation that I had to do.
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That was rough and we'd gotten through it.
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But you did bring up the point that you have to keep practicing what's working for you so that when it does come back up which no doubt it will, in whatever form that you're able to work through it again when it pops back up, even if it's just on a maintenance level.
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Absolutely that's critical.
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Because it's just like anything in emergency services.
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If you're waiting for the big event and you're not practicing your skills and everything on the smaller events, guess what?
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When the big one happens, you're going to suck and you're not going to be good at it.
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So it's, no different with your daily routine, with your mindfulness practices.
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I couldn't agree more.
00:07:02.526 --> 00:07:16.031
And I think to add to that is, if you so, we teach breathing techniques which are more of like how to help you out right now or inside the day, and then we teach mindfulness, which is more of a longer term thing, like cardio at the gym.
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If you only practice these things when you are feeling bad, you are going to get some muscle memory.
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You're going to get some mental muscle memory in there too, and that mental muscle memory might say that, ah yes, when I do these breathing techniques it's because I'm at a nine out of 10 for stress and I'm all wigged out.
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You got to practice.
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You don't have to be perfect by practicing every single day we're all human but you got to practice, it's got to, it's got to be worked into your life.
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That way your body remembers doing your breathing techniques and your meditation sitting calmly at home.
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You don't want that muscle memory to just be when you're all torqued up.
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So it's a message we try to send is working it in every day.
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So working it in when you're not stressed will make it more effective when you are stressed.
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Yeah, very well said.
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It is a skill.
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You have to practice it and you have to become good at it.
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It's not just like a gifted thing?
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I don't think at least for me it wasn't because, I used to think that I stunk at it.
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You mentioned the meditation and the guided meditations when I was up there were extremely difficult for me, because I thought that I was no good at it, because I could not stop those thoughts and I could not redirect my thoughts of hey, I'm not going to pay attention to you right now, I'm concentrating on my breathing and being present in a moment.
00:08:48.503 --> 00:08:49.923
And I couldn't do that.
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I thought that it was being able to shut the brain off.
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And here we are now.
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We're present.
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No, you have to harness that and you have to build the skill set, and the only way you're going to be able to do that is to practice the breath work.
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I find myself doing this on a daily basis.
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I have my daily routine that I have to go through.
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It might not be in a particular order and it might not be in any particular time, but throughout the day I'm going through my routine.
00:09:21.273 --> 00:09:26.208
At some point you mentioned meditation and I just mentioned meditation too.
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You guys incorporate meditation in your program.
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Now wait a minute, let me ask a question here Now, eric, you don't look like the type that's into meditation and that's that type of stuff.
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Yeah, I don't sit on the little pillow and cross my legs in my arms, and you don't have to.
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You sit in your recliner, close your eyes, concentrate on your breathing, be present in the moment, and I like using a couple of apps on my phone to help me guided meditations, and you'd be surprised what a three to five minute guided meditation can do for you, to help you forget about the stress of the day and bring you right back here and say, whoo, there's a little recharge, I feel better and off you go to the next thing.
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If you got to go back and revisit another meditation, go ahead and do it, I like it.
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So is it possible to meditate too much?
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That'd be a question for Mike.
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Mike.
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Too much meditation a reality?
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Yeah, I think too much of anything is a possibility.
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I really draw a comparison between meditation and like running on a treadmill at the gym.
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You want to lose I don't know 10-15 pounds.
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You got to start going to the gym running on a treadmill.
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You're not going to expect huge results in the first 15 minutes of day one on that treadmill.
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You're going to expect small, incremental changes over time.
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And that's what meditation is really about.
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There's a couple of misconceptions about meditation that are very popular out there.
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Anyone who's like just casually googling stuff about mindful listen meditation, they might find something like this.
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It might say meditation instructions Get everybody out of your house can make sure it's nice and quiet.
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Go up to your room, dim all the lights, light some incense, put on some like tinkly new age music, sit down and clear your mind.
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So Nia's not involved in real meditation.
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That's not necessary.
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What I'm trying to, if you like, any more power to you, but I'm like all of these things are not necessary and a big important point is that the instructions that you'll often see on the internet that says clear your mind are very misleading and, I would say, almost dangerous, especially for people like us that know what real emergencies are like.
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We like to get things right, we like to put effort out, we like to have the tools in the town and get things done.
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So if your idea as a person that's brand new to meditation, if your idea is that I'm supposed to sit down and clear my mind, that's going to fail in the first three seconds, when your mind just starts randomly Could be random stuff I got to get hot dog buns on my way home, it could be.
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I can't believe they promoted this guy to lieutenant.
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It could be a memory of something from three days ago, five years ago, but within three seconds of you sitting down and trying to quote clear your mind, you're going to fail at that because that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what meditation is.
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Meditation is the skill, or it's the practice of the skill of being present.
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With whatever your experience is.
00:12:47.972 --> 00:12:51.985
I've we've gone over different iterations in.
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At FLF I've been I changed the focus depending on who's in the program at the time really been focusing on silent meditation more because, lately, because I point out that there's two instructions for meditation.
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This comes from my background studying zen, which is a little bit different from the type of meditation that you'll see in most yoga studios or meditation centers.
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Two instructions for meditation are be still.
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What I mean by that is, if you're gonna, you say you're gonna meditate for 20 minutes, cool, set a timer on your phone for 20 minutes, sit there, focus on your breath, no matter what happens, no matter where your mind goes.
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Do not chase those thoughts around you.
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If, imagine it, you was like oh my god, I forgot to pay my taxes, I got to write a check, go down a town hall immediately.
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It doesn't matter what comes up in that 20 minutes.
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Your goal is to be still.
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And when you do that, you are learning that a couple of things.
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One, the mind does what it does.
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Jack cornfield has a quote.
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He's a meditation teacher.
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His quote is the mind secretes thoughts the way the salivary glands eat saliva.
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That's what the mind does.
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It just kicks out one thought after another.
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And when you get quiet, your mind goes out.
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The goal is to be still, be present with whatever your mind is doing.
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You're not trying to control your thoughts.
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That's going to be a failure immediately.
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You're just trying to be present with whatever your mind is putting up there in front of you.
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And the second instruction that I give number one is be still.
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The second one is fix your posture when you realize that you've been in La land for five straight minutes.
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Holy geez, I'm supposed to be focusing on my breath and I just been thinking about this.
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I just won an argument with my boss and my thoughts.
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You ever have that happen.
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When you come back from that while you're meditating and you realize you've been in La land for five minutes, if you pay attention to your posture, even if you're sitting in a chair, you might notice that your head is slumped a little bit.
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Your shoulders have rounded.
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Instruction number two sit up straight, take a deep breath, focus on your breath again.
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Be still, fix your posture.
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If you do those two things, you are meditating successfully and you've got it right and you're good at it, period.
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That's very important for vets and first responders to understand, because if you think that your mind wandering means you're not good at it, you're going to give up and we all know where that road eventually leads.
00:15:22.437 --> 00:15:26.317
So you're there to be present with your thoughts and any.
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If you do that 20 minutes and you hear your alarm at the end of 20 minutes, that was 100 successful.
00:15:32.413 --> 00:15:33.655
That's very important.
00:15:34.477 --> 00:15:42.085
Mike, when you talk about dealing with, let your mind be with whatever it's thinking about, don't try to control it.
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Yeah, one of the one of the things I know that is a big issue for first responders a lot of times is when they have intrusive thoughts.
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Maybe they keep seeing a certain incident over and over.
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Maybe there's some negativity that keeps coming into their mind.
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How does that play into what you're doing with the meditation here?
00:16:00.506 --> 00:16:01.629
Cool?
00:16:03.173 --> 00:16:08.571
when I was talking about my analogy that meditation is like doing cardio on a treadmill at the gym.
00:16:08.571 --> 00:16:11.941
You're looking for incremental results over time.
00:16:11.941 --> 00:16:14.703
People like us really want to.
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We want to kick a door in and have that be a successful intervention.
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We want to have something happen that actually changes the situation for the better.
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It can be difficult for us to spend time working on a project that you don't see results for a few weeks, but the key to understanding this is that is how those intrusive thoughts are going to become fewer and fewer.
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It's less frequent.
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It's the practice of meditation.
00:16:43.610 --> 00:16:49.529
Over time, it almost feels like a side effect that you notice one day.
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Hey, your family and friends will notice before you do.
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Everyone should know that.
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Your family and friends will be like hey, you just, you know, this guy just cut you off and you handled that pretty well.
00:17:00.590 --> 00:17:01.232
That's weird.
00:17:01.232 --> 00:17:07.932
You're feeling okay, your friends and family will notice before you do, but a day will come barely quickly where it's gee.
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I haven't been that event that I have not been able to keep out of my head for five years.
00:17:14.306 --> 00:17:16.525
I can't remember the last time I thought of it.
00:17:16.525 --> 00:17:17.468
Might have been days ago.
00:17:17.468 --> 00:17:20.194
So it's incremental progress.
00:17:21.198 --> 00:17:24.346
I was just gonna say the the incremental part of it.
00:17:24.346 --> 00:17:27.328
We, our professions, were usually.
00:17:27.328 --> 00:17:29.873
We want that instant gratification.
00:17:29.873 --> 00:17:33.178
Yeah, instant, immediate success.
00:17:33.178 --> 00:17:36.506
And oh my gosh, I actually have to wait for that to happen.
00:17:36.506 --> 00:17:40.321
And when you mention that one day it will click.
00:17:40.321 --> 00:17:58.069
You need that cognitive shift to take place and once that happens, it's like that light bulb just automatically goes off and, yes, this is working and I've got this and it's a huge relief, I know it was for me.
00:17:58.069 --> 00:17:59.733
That's exactly the way it was for me.
00:18:00.076 --> 00:18:02.365
You have to get out long enough to get that, though.
00:18:02.365 --> 00:18:03.108
That's the thing.
00:18:03.108 --> 00:18:05.917
You've done it, but a lot of people fall short of that.
00:18:06.519 --> 00:18:10.548
Yeah, and I didn't realize that it was a cognitive shift.
00:18:10.548 --> 00:18:26.941
But since I've been up there with the last, the research that I'm doing the constant, trying to figure out new ways, new techniques to keep myself on track, the mind-melter classes of psychotherapy, is okay.
00:18:26.941 --> 00:18:30.049
All this stuff is crystal clear to me now.
00:18:30.049 --> 00:18:35.984
You just got to put the time in, you got to put the work in and I'm living proof.
00:18:35.984 --> 00:18:43.105
It will click if you give it 100% effort and you give it the time that it deserves.
00:18:43.567 --> 00:18:43.988
Absolutely.
00:18:43.988 --> 00:18:47.278
I want to say one more thing, because Travis brought up the intrusive thoughts.
00:18:47.278 --> 00:18:52.127
The way to work on that, as we've been discussing, is that meditation.
00:18:52.127 --> 00:18:59.577
But if you're in a bad way and you just can't get this stuff out of your head, you need to do some breathing practices.
00:18:59.577 --> 00:19:03.166
That's like the second big prong of what we teach in the program.
00:19:03.166 --> 00:19:12.844
There's really no point in meditating if you are at 9000 rpms in your mind and you're partnering at 140 sitting in your chair.
00:19:12.844 --> 00:19:14.529
That's not the best time to meditate.
00:19:14.529 --> 00:19:19.903
What you need in that case is to do some real deep breathing exercises.
00:19:20.104 --> 00:19:22.489
We teach just normal diaphragmatic breathing.
00:19:22.489 --> 00:19:25.442
There's box breathing that I'm sure people are familiar with.
00:19:25.442 --> 00:19:29.381
There's all kinds of different vegas nerve reset techniques for breathing.
00:19:29.381 --> 00:19:31.365
All of them are good.
00:19:31.365 --> 00:19:37.165
Intrusive thoughts are going to go away over time through mindfulness practice and meditation.
00:19:37.165 --> 00:19:44.295
But in the moment, if you're worried that you're going to make a bad decision for yourself and your family, that's breathing.
00:19:44.295 --> 00:19:47.942
Breathing is a PRN for my medical people out there.
00:19:47.942 --> 00:19:51.955
Breathing practices are going to rescue you in the moment.
00:19:51.955 --> 00:19:57.647
It's that meditation practice that's going to reduce those thoughts over time.
00:19:58.734 --> 00:20:01.019
And the breath work is critical.
00:20:01.019 --> 00:20:03.885
You mentioned two of them that I practice.
00:20:03.885 --> 00:20:13.278
I do diaphragmatic breathing and I do the box breathing and I do those on a regular basis and people don't understand why that is so important.
00:20:13.278 --> 00:20:20.119
Jen, one of Jen's favorite phrases that she always tells me Jen is a colleague of Mike's.
00:20:20.119 --> 00:20:21.803
Breathe with intention.
00:20:21.803 --> 00:20:25.038
Sometimes we forget how important breathing is.
00:20:25.038 --> 00:20:27.547
Yeah, it does more than just keep us alive.
00:20:27.547 --> 00:20:29.374
We don't even think about it.
00:20:29.374 --> 00:20:35.734
You need to breathe with intention and to get yourself calm, especially during a crisis situation.
00:20:36.957 --> 00:20:37.818
It's very important.
00:20:37.818 --> 00:20:48.996
It's an important thing to have multiple angles of attack in your recovery the breathing practice that's every day and that's what's going to pull you out of a bad way in the moment.
00:20:48.996 --> 00:20:54.694
And then the longer term meditation practice is going to really change your life.
00:20:54.694 --> 00:20:58.644
But that's over time and there's a bunch of other stuff that we can do.
00:20:58.644 --> 00:21:02.200
There's, like, physical exercise, very important.
00:21:02.200 --> 00:21:06.828
There's probably no better treatment for PTSD than physical exercise.
00:21:06.828 --> 00:21:12.468
But the problem with vets and first responders is we think that that's all we need to do.
00:21:12.468 --> 00:21:16.762
So, like you get my, I've worked with people that are in the gym.
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They're doing two days every day.
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