Hi everyone,
I wanted to say a quick hello and give you an overview of the Ultra-Bief mindfulness method that's rooted in some research that I've been doing.
First,
My personal discovery process started in 2006 when I began sitting for 10-day silent meditations.
Also my practice of vipassana meditation,
Which was focused on the breathing and body scans,
Those two foundational components kind of laid my path as it's currently been progressing and moving forward.
And at the same time,
I have a history of being a spiritual explorer.
Even in high school I was looking at different types of spirituality,
Exploring different churches.
This is having grown up as a Southern Baptist for most of my childhood.
And then,
I'd say 17 and 18 is when I really branched out and started going to different churches,
Different ethnicities,
Different languages.
Sometimes it wasn't even about understanding what they were saying,
It was about seeing what they were feeling and where they were.
And then in college I explored Native American spirituality,
Zen Buddhism.
So my discovery process has kind of led me in this open way of viewing discovery of my spirit and my soul.
When I started my PhD in 2011,
I was very keen on weaving some type of mindfulness into my studies and into my research,
But I wasn't quite sure how it would work out.
And then in 2017 I started this position at a college in New York City,
And that college gave me a place and a space to start seeing how if I introduced just a little tiny bit of mindfulness into my class,
I would see students,
Their focus would be better,
Their presence with me in classroom would be better.
And I wondered,
Is there a way for me to measure that?
So I developed a measurement and wrote my dissertation around that group of students.
There are about 160 students that I initially did my study with,
And I've continued to do my study now with upwards of 300 students,
Probably closer to 400 now.
And I'm looking back on that research a little bit and I'm thinking about it.
As I worked in the classroom,
I knew that I had to create some type of structure around what the students were experiencing.
And I realized that a lot of the things that I've been working on were based on positioning my body first.
You know,
Everyone always talks about getting yourself situated,
Getting your back straight.
So I developed this position or posture component to the meditation as the opener,
And then went to a place of putting my attention someplace.
Usually it was related to some type of sensation work that I've been doing.
So either a body scan of some kind or simply noticing the breath.
That foundation of my own vipassana work sort of lays the core of the attention or the A.
So the P is the position,
The A is the attention.
And then I realized students needed to come out of that in some way and come back to the world and connect back to the world and be part of the world.
And they had to do that in pretty short order.
So to ask them to kind of all of a sudden step out of this very relaxed,
Focused state of attention to go to an activity or to listen to me offering some information or watching something that we might be talking about in a few minutes.
That was a big ask.
So I developed this zap or zooming technique,
Which is just to bring your attention outside of yourself to something and really notice that thing and spend as much time noticing it with the idea that you can't,
There is no such a thing as looking at something and seeing all of it at once that you could spend a few minutes even just looking at a twig on the ground and looking at the texture and the moss that might be growing and little spots on it and how it veers off in one direction and how another little tiny limb pops off of it and how pieces of bark might be coming loose and what's the color like and is it falling apart in different places.
And you could go around and look at this little tiny twig for some time and notice a lot of different things.
So that P-A-Z or pause as I've learned,
As I've come to call it,
Is the technique at the core of ultra brief mindfulness.
And it has given me then a palette to play with.
So if I want students to be more settled in,
Right,
Let's say they come in very unsettled,
Then I might spend a little more time on the P,
On the position,
On the posture,
Just so that people start to notice the space that they're taking up in the world,
Right,
So really getting them to comprehend that piece.
And then I might add just a little bit of attention,
Which anytime you focus on your breathing it relaxes you,
It reduces stress,
It reduces blood pressure,
It takes you into the present,
Into the moment.
And then the Z,
The zooming or the zapping onto something outside yourself gives you a very laser focused sharp attention,
Increases your abilities to observe and notice things.
So you can fluctuate each of these three things to kind of give you the dose of mindfulness that you need in that moment.
Over the course of recording these different meditations,
I'll take you through different ratios of that.
I'm uploading in just a few minutes a 1 to 2 to 1 ratio of the PAZ.
Oftentimes generally I spend about a 1 to 3 to 1 ratio,
So I tend to spend quite a lot of time on the attention section of the technique.
This is because a lot of people who come in to meet with me have a lot of anxiety or worry about things,
And so getting them to really dose up on that section of the technique helps.
So that's a quick overview of what the PAZ method is and how it's been working for me in the classroom and how it's been working for me with some professionals that I work with in the human resources area.
I look forward to sharing with you lots more about it and talking to you about sort of deep dives into each of those components in future conversations.
Thanks for joining me here.
I'm Shane Snipes,
And this is Alter Brief Mindfulness.
