Neuroscience researcher and Martial Arts specialist (United Kingdom) who took part in the conference 02: Stories for Healing? and 04: Storytelling: the Business of All?
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Dr. Tamara Russell is a neuroscientist, author, clinical psychologist, martial arts expert and leading Mindfulness Innovator. She has helped people all around the world transform their lives using her ground-breaking applied mindfulness techniques that are designed with the brain in mind. These applied translational neuroscience tools allow everyone the chance to make better decisions in line with their core values and live well.
With two PhDs and a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu, Tamara’s work integrates mind, brain and body in a totally unique approach to well-being and thriving that combines movement, neuroscience and creativity. Her three applied mindfulness programs include Body in Mind Training, Tools to Transform and The Dragon Way to Mental Wealth (and for Families and Young People – What Colour is Your Dragon?).
Tamara is involved in international research investigating how mindfulness changes the structure of the brain. She lectures in Neuroscience and Mindfulness at Kings College London.
Tamara is the Founder and Co-Director of a not for profit organization The Mindfulness Centre of Excellence. This organization was founded in 2011 after sharing the stage with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Sao Paulo Brazil at a Symposium exploring how ancient contemplative technologies can inform the challenges of modern living.
Tamara is the author of three books “Mindfulness in Motion”, “#whatismindfulness”, and “What Colour is Your Dragon?”.
— an interview by Vassili Silovic, Writer and Director of documentary films, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie “What stories for our time?”.
Tamara Russell
« Finding the words, through the body »
Train the brain, as well as the body.
I suppose people to have the experience that I had, when I first saw a brain in a jar, it’s kind of a really interesting moment to think: “wow, this is one part of this Powerhouse of what it means to be a thinking feeling creating human being”. And it’s this crazy thing that we really know not very much about. Of course, there’s been a lot of advances over the last decades and particularly with the Advent of neuro-imaging techniques where we can study the live brain. But there’s still so much that we don’t know and Consciousness is another topic as well.
Do we overestimate or underestimate our brain?
Probably both…
We overestimate in terms of believing what our brain tells us, which can be problematic in many cases, but we underestimate its potential and particularly the potential that can come from training it. We think about going to the gym and training our bodies. I mean we’re obsessed with going to the gym and training our physical body. But we don’t really do very much to train our brain.
Stimulate attention.
I think there are multiple ways that you can train the brain. And, for me, the place where I’m most interested in training the brain is, training the attention networks of the brain. This is particularly important in our modern culture, where our attention is really hijacked by multimedia, by the pace of life, and it’s news to many people that we can train various faculties of our attention. So, we can train ourselves to notice how the aperture of our attentional focus narrows and widens, and we can then use that function more flexibly knowing when is it important for me to really narrow the focus, when is it important for me to really widen the focus, just like we do with the eye or with a camera.
“Zooming in” vs. “Zooming out”.
When we’re working particularly on creating there is this movement where we might really zoom in. And we might really want high quality sustained focused attention. But anybody that’s experienced a kind of writer’s block or a creative block maybe recognizes that there’s a moment where you’re just kind of stuck with this narrow focus.
To lose focus and free the creative process.
What often helps there, is things like going for a walk, taking a shower, because then you’re releasing the lens of attention and it’s becoming wider and broader and you’re feeling the wind on your face, you’re feeling the shower on your skin, you’re smelling the body wash or the shampoo that you’re using. So, you’re widening and loosening the lens of attention, and it’s often when you do that, then: The Genius idea!
Our feelings and their impact on creativity.
This thing is constantly full of information from our body constantly. I mean, even just the basics of me maintaining a posture is taking up huge amounts of brain. There’s an awareness of maybe feeling a bit nervous, sensations in the body… But mostly, people are very much up in their head in the thinking part of the brain.
Listening to your body
What’s referred to as the default mode Network, thinking about stuff, remembering, planning, imagining. Thinking about ourselves, our personal narrative. And it’s nice to spend time there but, it’s only such a small portion of our sensory experience. And mind is also like so tricky, it can trick us so easily, it can delude us so easily. And there’s something to be gained by dropping into the body, inviting the body to have its turn at sharing its wisdom with us. Whether that’s a feeling or, maybe the body is telling us that we need to take a break from sitting at the computer, trying to write something for five hours, maybe it’s responding to the body’s needs: hunger, needing a drink of water… basic needs and care of the body. But it’s also a very rich source of data in the creative process.
Explore & Experiment to create.
I often encourage the people that I work with to become a scientist of their own experience. We’re quite conditioned to think “oh well I’ve got to write something. So, I’m going to sit down at the computer” or, “I’m going to be with my notepad and I need to kind of come up with ideas”. I would encourage people to explore and experiment, what are the postures for you that support your creative process? Is it sitting in a chair, is it on a stool, is it at a desk?
What are the environments that support your creative process? Is it in the library? Is it sitting under a tree with your notepad? Is it on the train? Is it in a busy environment?
Is it in a quiet environment? Where is it that you find your writing flow? And, for many really creative people, what I notice in myself also, is that it really helps me to change my environment.
Attention according to generations.
I think for the younger generation their brains are different. The digital natives, their brains are totally different than ours, and I would encourage them to move around and to see what works for them. One school of thought says: fundamentally digital natives, which means people that have grown up in the time pretty much of like the internet and the smartphone, digital natives fundamentally have brain networks – particularly attention networks – that have been shaped and sculpted by the digital environment. And that makes sense, because the brain is highly plastic, the Attention Network particularly is highly plastic, so anything that is working on our attention, or impacting on our attention, it’s highly likely that it’s shaped the brain in a slightly different way.
The pessimists will say things like: “Young people can’t pay attention, they can’t sit still, they can’t consume any media that’s more than 3 minutes it’s long or even like Tik Tok, 15 seconds, they’re constantly being bombarded with information, the processing is superficial…” That’s one complaint, that there’s a kind of very superficial processing of a huge array of data, but not really thinking about it properly.
My more optimistic side says, but perhaps these are brains that are being prepared for the challenges that we don’t yet know about as adults because the world is like this now, and actually maybe it’s our brains that are not adapted to the challenges of creating and sculpting what this new world looks like, where we are interacting with technology.
Attention & Emotions.
With my Clinical Psychology hat on, one of the issues about a kind of floppy attention network is the Attention Network intersects with the emotion regulation, so what I found with working with young people: when we train attention, actually it gives them greater capacity to regulate their emotions which seems to be quite important because, struggles with emotions and mental health is affecting a lot of young people at the moment and there could be some link there.
Finding the words by the body.
The body is important when we struggle to find the words. And I suppose, at the moment for many people it’s hard to find the words, or even the feelings around, what’s happening
in the world, kind of this sense of confusion, and loss, and challenges, and – you know – what are we doing. And, lifting the arms is a movement that I sometimes offer I use it both as an exploration, and also as an invitation to let the Body speak and to let the emotions flow through.
Feeling, to keep control of the story.
Then with all that pain, loss, feelings, confusion and compassion. Then you might just warm up the heart, or just give yourself a little hug. When we join the mind and the body and the movement and the Heart, we feel more agency, even when we feel like we’ve got no control: “where is my power in this world? where I feel so helpless?”. The power is in my choice to open my heart, and be with courage, kindness, compassion and curiosity.
Being aware of our environment.
I might use this exercise to just invite myself to become more aware of what’s around my initial thoughts and my initial Impressions. So, often when I use this movement, if I’ve got a particular problem that I’m working with, or a question that I’m working with, one of the things that often comes is: I get more information about the problem and, very often I discover the place where I was kind of fixated and stuck is not the place at all that I need to be exploring.
Memory of sensations.
We maybe think about screenwriters who are, for example, developing a character and, they may have kind of a particular sort of thought track, and attention track in terms of their development of the character. And this sort of a movement could be used to just say: “but what else is there? what else is there?”, bring that character to mind and body, using the memory, enriching the memory around the character formation.
Cultivate the imagination, under a tree.
There’s some research that shows that spending time in nature and looking around in the natural environment restores and resets the brain’s attention Network. So, if you’re getting your head into the screen and you’re typing and you’re getting a bit tight around things, go for a walk – which many people know is a good idea, but if you can do this as well under a tree really nurturing and nourishing the brain to help your imagination.
Map our imaginary landscapes.
In the brain, that’s the default mode Network, we call it, and it’s got regions kind of in the frontal lobe, what we call the medial frontal lobe and the posterior. There’s a network here, that’s actually all about storytelling, mostly it’s concerned with our own story. But it’s also concerned with things like theory of Mind, thinking about other people’s minds, beliefs, desires and intentions. And, if you want to try and map that landscape, which for a screenwriter is populated with imaginary characters, locations, dilemmas, and challenges. And we could maybe use the body to help us think about, how we might want to do that mental gymnastics, in the story writing process.
Question the characters.
So, let’s say this carpet here is my landscape, my map of my characters and I could become curious about the pacing with which I enter into my imaginative landscape. Give ourselves the opportunity to walk around and see the character from different dimensions, maybe crouching down to look up at the character, how would a child see that character, what would be the movements of the character, zooming in, zooming out, the helicopter view.
We can train our attention Network to do this in a much more intentional way. This is at the heart of many mindfulness and meditation practices, is learning how to, with conscious awareness, adjust that lens.
Playing to unleash creativity.
Using the body and exploring in a really playful way. And I would say playfulness is a kind of secret tip. When we play, the brain is freer to explore. But of course, to play we need to feel safe, so we need to manage our emotions.
An intimate & playful crossing, within the story.
So now with the character looking out at the landscape of the story, what captures our attention? Do I just walk past the flower? Or do I notice the flower? Or can I put myself in the position of the flower and try to understand what are the movements of the flower as it grows, as it connects to the Sun, as it connects to the Earth.
The story as a game of clues.
All that information is there for us all the time to inspire us, and it may be that we think the character is going this way, we think the story is going this way. We can get into that kind of tunnel vision – make it happen, make it happen – but if we work with intentions, we’re here.
Being open to potential.
If we’re really open to the potentiality, which is hard in a modern world where we need to deliver projects and get agreements from Commissioners. But in the real full potentiality is the willingness to say “actually, I thought this was the story, but now I see it’s here, it’s not there” and I think that would be my top tip. Because of the way our human brain is, because of how we are magnetized to our habits, our patterns and our biases.
Letting go of the grip to overcome the brakes of the story.
I would say that maybe something is happening in the default mode Network – particularly in the frontal lobe of the brain – which is the it’s that it’s where we hold The Narrative of “I”. Also included in the default mode network is the hippocampus, the memory areas. So, we have this function which is we have to hold our story, otherwise we’re not integrated, but the task is to hold it lightly rather than gripping it.
And maybe you could even go to the body to experiment, with gripping versus releasing. Why am I afraid to let go? And it’s fear, it’s always fear, it’s pretty much all the time fear. Fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of getting it wrong, fear of losing the amazing idea.
And the brain is kind of clinging on to that for dear life because it doesn’t want to feel afraid. In martial arts we have a lot of exercises where we deliberately create fear. Whether that’s training with a blindfold for example. Fighting with a blindfold it’s really scary – but, again nothing really bad is going to happen to you, because your teacher is there, and your colleagues are there – but you feel fear. It’s practicing feeling fear.
Movement & play to free the story.
I think the piece of kind of research I suppose that most inspired me, the headline is: “brains learn best through movement and play”. Look at a child: how does the child learn? That is how our brains are organized to learn, that’s Nature’s Way for us our brain: movement and play.
And the martial arts is one of those places – a school of movements that is also informing Consciousness and mind and brain – it’s not the only place, but it’s a place with a particularly rich tradition and philosophy. Actually, spiritual aspect to it as well.
But the systems are quite moribund, they’re quite conditioned and they get a bit frightened to really be creative. Even you know asking a group of people, before I give a presentation, I might say “let’s just roll the shoulders everybody, because I know you’ve been at your computer all day, let’s roll the shoulders…”. People are embarrassed to move their bodies. We need to get over that.
I’m really confident: I see that it works, it’s backed by the research, and I really believe we need to do it differently.
© Photos Brigitte Bouillot
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