Finding Spiritual Peace through Mindful CBT || Seth Gillihan

authored multiple books on mindfulness and CBT. His lady's book is called Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy A Simple Path to Healing, Hope and Peace. In this episode, I talked to Seth Gilahan about mindful CBT. Cognitive behavioral therapy is often used to address mental health issues. Although proven to be helpful Seth believes that adding the component of mindfulness will not only improve our well being, but can also help us

find meaning, purpose and peace. He shares with us the think act be paradigm and ways we can be more in tune with ourselves. We also touch on the topics of alignment, spirituality, suffering, and openness to experience. This was a really really meaningful special chat for me, and I know it will be for you too. Seth is deeply sensitive, deeply thoughtful human being. It's been a pleasure to call him my friend for a couple of years now, and

I just find his writings really nuanced. But also they combine typical CBT approaches with a whole other level of spirituality that you often won't find in CBT approaches. So I really think you'll find this episode really unique. I did so without further ado, I bring you, Seth Gillahan.

And also I think I was just too protective of myself, you know, too guarded. I wouldn't have been willing to admit that I was just you know, like felt like killing myself at times, or just felt you know, completely done, or I was you know, pissy with my family or that kind of thing. Like I thought I needed to present a certain image of myself. But it's you know, it's BS, and it's I think people know that.

with as people who are severely depressed. And then in kind of the next round of my training, I learned a lot about a behavioral approach, so you know, practicing ways of like facing fears and doing things that are rewarding and energizing to treat depression and anxiety. And those worked pretty well, I mean really well in a lot of cases. But then a lot of times there were things that weren't really didn't really seem to be affected

or sometimes even really touched by those techniques. So, for example, if someone came in with a ton of worry, there's worrying, worrying, worrying all the time, and worrying if this bad thing is going to happen, and this bad thing is going to happen, I could try a cognitive technique with them where you say, like, all right, well let's write down you know what you're worry what's the likelhood that's going to happen, what's the evidence from the past, what's more

realistic prediction and maybe they could see through that worry like, Okay, it's not that realistic. But then because of the way this goes in a condition like generalized anxiety, it just switches to the next thing. So it's not so much much about the content of the worries as it is the process. It's kind of like just this this beacon of worry and it just finds things to attach to. As soon as one thing passes in, it disconnects and

then reconnects to that next thing. So for that, my supervisor at the time, doctor Lissa Kushner, introduced me to a mindful approach where instead of trying to combat the thoughts directly, you shift your relationship with them by noticing them, being aware of when you're worrying, and then instead of really kind of engaging with that worry and getting wrapped up in it, you just allow those thoughts to pass like we would any kind of experience of conscious awareness

when we're doing meditation. This isn't necessarily happening in meditation, but it's that type of meditative, mindful response to things. And then another part of the mindfulness approach was just living your life even with these worries and fears and not waiting for the worries to go away before doing things that were important to you. So that was really how I came to it, But it took me that

was probably twenty ten or so. It took me close to another ten years to realize that mindfulness wasn't just kind of another like another silo within CBT, cognitive approaches,

behavioral approaches, mindful approaches. You can add them kind of as needed, but to really see that these three ingredients are completely commingled, that within a cognitive technique we can do it in a more or less mindful way that in a behavioral approach, you know, I could do an activity with more or less awareness, more or less focus

or attention in the present, more or less acceptance. So you know, with that CBT triangle, think about the thoughts, feelings and actions in those you know, those those three vertices. And so with mindfulness, what it seems I think it did for me is is it introduced a dimension of depth. You and I may have spoken about this, but instead of a triangle, it's more like a wedge of cheese. So we can locate ourselves not just in terms of what we're thinking, feeling and doing, but but what's our

relationship to those experiences? How present and where are we and how how open are we to receiving those experiences instead of resisting or rejecting them. Wow, that's a lot.

find huge areas of overlap. I think some of the differences I tend to keep more the elements of traditional CBT, at least in my reading of it, so you may be directing more more explicit attention to dealing with thoughts rather than focusing kind of waiting the mindfulness and acceptance part of things more strongly. There's also, you know, mindfulness based cognitive therapy so mb CT, similar to mindfulness based stress reduction. It's based really closely on mindfulness based stress reduction.

Tends to be an eight week program group format and that really emphasizes more of the cognitive side of things along with this mindfulness approach. So I think there are different flavors of this. I mean, then there are other ones too. Liz Romer and Susan Orcillo have their approach, which is what I learned from from doctor Kushner as a as an early as a new psychologist. But I think, I mean the approach that I that I've developed myself, I feel like has its own kind of flavor, like

each of these does. And yeah, so it's interesting. It's like like everything else, I guess to some extent, it's a It's like if something is a good idea, it's probably a recombination or reformulation of someone else's idea, and it includes our own stamp, in our own voice. I think that's a lot of what makes things unique is just the voice we lend them.

the claims of regular CBT. I don't think I've never heard Aaron Beck, the founder of CBT, say that CBT helps with spiritual peace. Maybe he has maybe has said that, But can you talk about a bit what? What? Why? How? How's this? How does this thing so revolutionary? What? What are the best components of it you think that are contributing to such deep inner peace?

issues of meaning and purpose. My guess is, I mean it's these are things that are really difficult to test, and CBT is so connected to a real research tradition and also within psychiatry and that world of evidence based research, I can imagine there may be a lot to lose by making these kinds of what could be considered grandiose claims within a kind of straightforward, maybe dry, academic setting.

So that's my guess. That's pure conjecture. But from the little, that little contact that I had with doctor Beck, I mean, as you know, he was such a deeply human person and it seemed like he really understood the you know that that were not just a collection of thoughts and feelings and actions. But there's something now completely projecting this

onto him. But my sense is he he I mean, like I think, like most of us, we recognize that there's a part of us it's neither mind nor body, something that feels maybe a little closer to the heart of who we are. So with all that as as backdrop, I mean, I I wasn't really looking. I wasn't looking for a spiritual approach, not consciously. I wasn't setting out to I'm going to develop a spiritual form of of CBT.

But I was, you know, I was in a lot of pain, emotion, mostly emotional pain, and just uh mental and mental confusion and bewilderment. And following this this prolonged physical illness that that you know about we've talked about and that I wrote about HM. And after you know, months, maybe maybe a couple close to a couple of years of that, I'd reached the end of my own what what I what I knew within myself to do. I mean, I'd seen every doctor that I had been referred to.

Nobody could find any any real answers. All the answers were like, your brain looks fine, good news. Your your heart is healthy, you know, oh you're you don't have to sleep apnea, Like, okay, all right, And my wife would say, well that's good, but why are you having these symptoms still? I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, there's still that. So it kind of culminated in this one this one night, and I was, I was lying

on the couch after dinner. This was kind of typical for me at this time, and I was and I reached this point in the day where I was just like, my mind wasn't really functioning that well anymore. I had no energy, my nervous system was was totally raw. I'd been you know, doing therapy all day. It wasn't like I'd been you know doing I mean, it was deeply emotional work, but it wasn't like the work was leaving me completely raw, like there was just something going on

physiologically that was not there wasn't well. And so I was lying on the on the couch just you know, this refrain in my head like I've reached the end of myself. I've reached the end of myself, and this awareness just came to me that that, like this this great relief that the end of myself was not the end, that there was a part of me that began where the small me ended, and it was it was a

larger self. It was a self that wasn't diminished or even really touched by the things I was experiencing, by the struggles I was having, but it was also a witness to all that experience. It was it was a part of me, but it was also a witness to my to everything about me. It's like I knew me right, like I met myself in that moment, and that deeper part of myself was connected to the divine. That's how

I experienced it. So it I mean, I think in a way it really departed from what we might think of as academic CBT, but in a way that to me felt like It sort of redeemed CBT for me because I was at a point where I was becoming a bit disillusioned with it because it felt incomplete to me, at least the way I was practicing it. It felt

like it wasn't quite fully human. But realizing that I could incorporate this part of this mindful part, which to me felt like bringing the heart, you know, to the head and body of CBT, felt like it's like I was. I was really excited and energized about CBT again. And that's where really kind of developing these ideas began, after I had kind of worked them through in my own life.

that was the original. That was the That was the origin of it, But I didn't realize at the time how integrated they could be. I was just thinking of it at that point as these these three sort of you know, connected but but somewhat separate approaches. You could sort of, you know, choose one or the other or a couple of them. But it was a bit a bit fortuitous, I guess, because I feel like my thinking around that has evolved. The label still still works.

we're struggling in the moment. So if I'm you know, really suffering at some point, I can say, like wait a second, Okay, are there are there certain thoughts that aren't helping me here? That's the think part, Or I can think, you know, are there is there something I need to do in this moment that can help me to move through this experience. That's the act part, and the bee is am I closing down to this experience

in a way that's not helpful? Like I was having an argument with my wife the other day and I realized that I was I was really like pushing away that experience, feeling like like, you know this, this should not be an issue. We shouldn't be having this argument like this. I don't want this to be happening. And then when I was like, oh, yeah, I don't have to resist that, it made things so much better because

I wasn't fighting two fights. I wasn't dealing with the issue itself and also dealing with my issues with the issue. And then I was like, all right, yeah, this is this is a thing probably that a lot of couples deal with, and we can just deal with that instead of you know, this this idea I'm sure from Buddhism about the second arrow. You know, the first era that hits us is like some some issue, you know, some problem.

But then we add that second arrow, that second layer of suffering, which is like, you know, why is this happening or this shouldn't be happening, or that that struggle that just makes the unavoidable difficulty much more difficult.

Start right, take a breath. All right, now I'm back gathered up all my all my horecruxes or whatever parts of myself that I had distributed widely, So I'm back together. And then from that place and I can ask, all right, what's going through my mind? So that that presence then helps us to identify our thoughts, helps us to be aware of what we're thinking, and our changes in our thinking and accepting things as they are can help us to shift our actions. Our actions then, in turn can

affect our thoughts. What we do can affect our mindful awareness, so the whole thing is integrated and is self reinforcing in a similar way, but an opposite way. As our unhelpful thoughts, unhelpful actions, our lack of presence also tend to be reinforcing. In kind of a negative spiral, we can enact a positive spiral to move things in the other direction.

first thing, like connect with my body. Notice, like all right, what's what's going on with my body right now? Like how does it feel? Are there? You know, what's the sort of quality of energy of my body, Are there certain emotions that I'm aware of, and then we can

take that connection with us throughout the day. But coming back to it as often as we need to, I find it's usually easier to or more effective, to set some specific times to check in with ourselves instead of just kind of having this global I'm just going to connect to myself all the time, because all the time can easily kind of become none of the time. So like meal times I think can be a good time to pause and to sort of check in, like, oh, yeah,

still here, still got breath in my body. I don't know if other people have this experience, Scott, but but so often I have this realization and like, oh, like I was somewhere else, Like my body is always here, but it's like my mind was in another place, and you know, it's like we're not We're not a unit, unitary being in those moments. And I think that that kind of that kind of fracturing I experienced, that fracturing

is very uh. There's there's a sort of quiet unease about it, like it's not a state of ease to be disconnected from ourselves. And conversely, coming back to ourselves, just even it's like taking breath and being like, oh, yeah, I'm right here, I'm right here. There can be something

so calming about that. Like just today I was moving from you know, doing laundry in the basement to coming back upstairs to move on to the next thing, and I realized that I was ahead of myself, like I was already projecting myself like to the top of the stairs when I was in the middle of the stairs with this this kind of this pervasive sense that I need to be doing the next thing. I shouldn't be here right now, I need to be on too, the

next thing. But that creates a state of like a conflict between who we are and who we think we need to be. Like again, it's subtle, but I experience it in a as a very as a powerful thing that because I'm at odds with my body, like my

body here is a problem. If I think my body needs to be there, and if I just come back and like, oh, I'm on this step, I'm on the sixth step or whatever of the stairs, that becomes like it had been a sort of nothing experience that I wasn't even conscious of, but suddenly it becomes like an everything experience. I'm just on this step and that's everything.

for granted. And the same was too with my writing. Like my editor had similar reactions At times it's like, what are you talking about, Like be true to yourself or the truth of who you are? Like what the hell does that even mean?

relationship with our experience. And so when I'm connected to my body and my mind and my attention is really in the present, in that kind of that thin slice of what's actually happening right now, that tends to be really, I guess, a strong place to operate from, but also a very peaceful place.

some of the ideas in there. And it doesn't mean to like say yes to life, which is also you know, a Victor Frankel book book title, say Yes to Life.

maybe therapy can address issues of meaning and purpose. I mean, that's a lot of what I've loved about existential approaches. But saying yes is man, there's a there was a there's a a priest what did I forget what is what? Order? He's with Richard Rore. He's written a lot of great books. He's great, but he there's an interview where he described what happens for him in meditation, and it basically it sounded like it was for him it was an experience

of getting to yes and getting past that. What I often experience as as just this automatic kind of no resistance to what's happening. I don't like this, I don't want that. I reject that, and the only things that are really sort of allowed in are things that feel like pleasure or gain or comfort. But it's just not a very lively way to live. I mean, it's it's probably how I've lived most of my life, you know, kind of rejecting a lot of experience and only wanted

to pursue certain types of states. But so much more is open to us when we when we're willing to say yes to what's happening. So I think that's these ideas I do find there. They can be abstract and something it's hard to articulate. I think, in the end, you know, somewhat impossible to fully describe. And yet I think we I think most of us have this experience of the kind of there's an energy, an energy of no, or an energy of okay, an energy of resistance, and

an energy of acceptance. So that's that, to me is kind of the basic the basic premise, and it I mean I had to I had to practice a lot of a lot of saying yes because I've been saying no for a long time to the struggles I was having. No, I don't want this, This doesn't belong to me, This shouldn't be happening to me. Surely this is not mine. This is you got the wrong address, buddy. But no,

there it was so working working with that. What a different starting point that is, to work with what is instead of to say no, no, this is this is wrong, and I'm not going to deal with this until I, you know, sort of waiter comes and takes back this wrong order and brings me the right one. Then we can have a conversation.

can find in our attitude. We you can't change ourself circumstances, and obviously he knew suffering like like few of us have experienced. So yeah, that's it's interesting, Scott, how I feel like so many traditions come to this like sort of the deepest expression or one of the one of the most profound expressions of their philosophy, whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or probably Judaism, which I don't know as well.

But it's the idea that our well being does not have to depend on our circumstances, which is not to I don't think that's to deny that things affect us, or to imagine that we should just be completely indifferent to what happens, and you know, completely you know, quote unquote zen regardless of what's happening. It seems like a

kind of non human way to live. But I can be upset and overwhelmed and you feel terrible and still have a part of me that that is not defined by or identified completely with those experiences, that can observe them and and still find some equanimity and offer compassion to myself in that moment that you're having a having

a tough time, aren't you? I did that once and I was I lay down to take a nap, just exhausted and miserable and m hm and crying, and then I had that experience of like, well, you know, there's a there's a part of me that can can observe what's happening here and and offer connection and compassion in this moment. And so I sensed or or you know, had that part of myself say like, you're having a tough time, aren't you? Yes, I'm having a hard time.

But it really felt comforting, which is I just find amazing. You know, it's because it's just me and me, but in that moment, it feels like something bigger.

Is that a requirement? Because all these Buddhists and all these self help people and all these like mindful people are like, oh, let's be an alignment. I'm just like, does that necessary?

I mean, it's you know, as if it's this kind of rarefied experience that it's only available to certain people, or you have to be a certain type of person, you have to wear certain clothes and do certain practices. But so that's why I love your question and I love the spirit behind it. Yeah, which, No, we don't have to we don't have to be perfectly aligned good, we don't have to be perfectly accepting. We don't have to do any of this stuff and not like and

I don't mean that like well to you. I mean, if you want well being, it's your choice, not at all. It's we can be mindful and open and accepting of everything, including I think times when we're not so. Right now, I'm having a really hard time accepting reality. That's what's happening, and that can be part of my awareness. All right, that's what's happening right now. I'm pissed off, I'm bitter, I don't feel grateful, and maybe that can be part

of our awareness too. It's all part of our experience. So I think part of real openness to our experience isn't coordinating off certain things, is like, well this is appropriate and these kinds of things are okay, and you need to check these other things at the door or else you're not being mindful as if I maybe I'm sensitive to this kind of thing, Scott, but because I'm our religious background. But at times it feels like there's this sort of this sort of judgment about like, oh, nope,

you need to be more mindful. You need to like you need to pray.

mean so many things. But like we can align with our what I think of as our care instructions, like aligning with our needs for you know, the company of other people at least in certain doses, with our needs for adequate sleep, aligning with our need for exercise, for good nutrition, and then on a maybe a broader level, you know, aligning with the types of actions that are called for. Like if I'm let's say, I have something I need to do and I'm putting it off, then

I'm out of alignment. I think I'm no longer aligned with the needs of the moment or what's being asked of me, or if someone wants my you know, the need might like like my child needs my attention and I'm working on something else. Then there's a misalignment between the demands of that moment and where I'm placing my attention and I'm going to experience that is.

deeper part of myself is calling for. Just take a moment and listen for that, and then with that awareness we can choose to act and bring ourselves more into alignment. I think some of these ideas might sound big, like living in alignment with your true self, but that can be really simple of just like doing activities that you like doing like boom aligned alignment check.

huge misalignment. I'd probably literally misalign my bones if I did that.

address it. But it doesn't have to mean O I have to fix this thing or the first thing that I want. It has to be that way. Maybe I'm lonely and I want to be with people, but that's just not available to me in that moment. I can find alignment by accepting that that's the way things are, and then also maybe making plans for you know, when I can to develop more connections so I experienced less less loneliness. Cool.

In our our deepest realities, we are connected. That the separateness we imagine is not the ultimate truth of how things are anyway, that's a bit abstract. But I realized that that we were, that we can come home to ourselves in so many, so many different ways, Like just coming home to or connecting with ourselves in the moment is a kind of homecoming. Yeah, like oh yeah, I'm here,

I'm right here, and that's right again. I Mean, I've talked about this already, but but there's a there's a sense of peace and calm that comes from that that that for me, I experience it as addressing this fairly constant drive I have to improve things or change things, change my experience, look for things that are better. But that's that tends to disconnect me from what's actually happening in a way that I don't really experience things as

they are and definitely don't appreciate them. So if I'm sitting at my table, you know, at a meal, for example, I might be thinking about, you know, these these problems I'm dealing with, or these things I'd like to change, and I'm not really realizing, you know, like I've got this this table to eat out, I've got food, you know, as much food as I want. I have these people that I can share these meals with. But I'm looking

for something better, something different. But when I just come back, I'm like, like, notice things as they are, Like even you know, the plates that I'm using, or the you know, the fork that I'm holding, the glass in my hand, the water that I'm drinking. It does it just it just feels like a homecoming, and it feels like it's satisfies that deep craving that we have to to be

at home with ourselves to feel comfortable. I think if home is a place where we feel comfortable, we can put up our feet and maybe that's not the home we grew up in. Maybe home is not a place of comfort and ease, but but we can find a true home, that kind of that kind of mythic home that's that's always right here. I think it's always here when we come back. And because even for you know,

for people who are listening right now. I think even just taking a moment that can be we can tap into that and I realize like, oh, like I don't have to search everywhere else for that, you know, the peace of mind that I'm looking for, you know. I compare it to having your glasses on top of your head and looking around everywhere, like where are they? Where are my glasses? And you're like, oh, they're right here, They're right here. Yeah. So that's what I what I

come to in the book spoiler alert. But the home we're looking for is always right here. It's always available.

this approach, and for all the people you're helping. And I hope whenever you're feeling down. You can reconnect with your own self by remembering and reminding yourself just how many people, how many people's lives have changed thanks to your work. So hopefully you can remember that to help you reconnect with yourself and have your own homecoming. So thank you so much, Seth, thanks for being on my podcast.