An interview with Reverend Tim Burnett
Rev. Tim Burnett is Executive Director, Founder, and guiding teacher at Mindfulness Northwest.
Jennifer Ghahari: Thanks for joining us today. I'm Dr. Jennifer Ghahari, research director at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. I'd like to welcome with us, Reverend Tim Burnett, executive director, founder, and guiding teacher at Mindfulness Northwest. Tim has been a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction since 2010 and a mediator since 1986. Before we get started, can you let us know a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in mindfulness?
Tim Burnett: Sure. Yeah. I stumbled into Buddhist meditation as a young man, and I found it helpful. I didn't really have language for it. I was a bit shy about it. I didn't really tell my friends. I was going quietly off to the Zen center early in the morning on my way to college classes and so on. And then, I relocated and just by happenstance ended up helping to form a group that became a Buddhist center. And meanwhile... The practice of it, somehow it met some need that I couldn't meet any other way, stabilizing, soothing, provided some sense of purpose and meaning that I needed. But I always saw it as specialized unusual thing and a little weird that not that many people would be into this kind of thing. But I was. So, okay, what the heck? In the meantime, my career was just going left and right and center and not really landing anywhere. I was a field scientist for a while. I became an elementary school teacher. I worked in technology. And nothing was really quite landing.
And then I started in about... I don't know... 2007 or 2008 to notice mindfulness starting to show up on the media more. And of course, now, it's a lot more than then. And a friend of mine was involved in a project at the Seattle VA Hospital to bring mindfulness-based stress reduction training to veterans with PTSD, Gulf War Syndrome and some pretty serious conditions. And I somehow got involved in that for a little while and started teaching these classes and found a lot of resonance with what I had personally been experiencing in Zen Buddhism, but delivered in contemporary language, really accessible to people who probably would never walk through the doors of the Zen Center.
And, I was amazed just how much it seemed to help people and starting with this group of vets. A few of them were actually Vietnam veterans and suffering from the effects of PTSD and the trauma of the wars for 40, 50 years. And here they were in the second or third class that I was somehow facilitating and reporting lots of shifts and changes and feeling excited, feeling positive, understanding emotions a little differently, and sleeping better. Yeah. So, I was hooked from there. And then I got curious, could I do more than just one project?
So I started an institute like the Paul Simon song says. It was the right place, the right time and the right level of persistence, started getting institutional interests from county government and medical schools and university, and then started offering community classes. And it just unfolded from there. So, now there is 11 people on staff, some of them part-time. And we are about a half a million-dollar organization, non-profit, fee-for-service, with some donor support. And we've been offering these trainings to thousands of people up and down the Puget Sound region, and now, of course, online. So yeah, that's how that came to be.
On a good day, I take a little step back and I'm amazed. Like wow, how could this even be happening? It's such a new field, but it's been increasingly accepted. One thing I've noticed over the years is the people who come have shifted from an earlier attitude, which was like, "Well, this is a little weird. But maybe, okay, I'll try it. Ya know, I'm stressed." Now people are like, "I know I need this. How do you do it? I don't know how to meditate. How do you do this?"
So it's interesting, at least within some segments of American society now, it's just understood in a way it wasn't before that stress is harmful and we can't just push through all the time. We need some other tools, other attitudes, other ways of being. So, yeah, it's been really exciting. Yeah.
Jennifer Ghahari: Great! So, can you explain what the mindfulness space is and how is mindfulness important to one's life?
Tim Burnett: Well, mindfulness is a term that just helps to point at an ordinary thing that we do all the time, but we do it pretty automatically, which is that we're navigating in a really complex, perceptual, biophysical, psychological field all the time, right? And moments are happening. Moment after moment is happening. And somehow, we're selecting which moments to pay attention to, which is attention itself. We're responding to them in certain ways. We're influenced by our history, conditioning and culture in certain ways. But, we're so busy often, and often lost in some conceptual stuff that we add to everything, kind of lost in our heads, that we miss a lot of opportunities to see things a little more clearly, to respond to things a little more creatively, to be more aware of the felt sense of what's happening moment to moment, and whether we're adding to our own stress with habituated patterns or whether we're finding different ways to cope that are more adaptive to the current situation.
Like one quotation we like that describes the space as it was a good question, is a quotation attributed to Viktor Frankl. And the quote is, "Between stimulus and response, there's a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in our choice is our growth and our freedom." So, it's dialing it way down, and we're... Of course, that's where we are. We're always happening now. But our mind is about, "How am I going to deal with it this time? Do I have time to get the kids after work? Oh my God, did I remember that?" Right? So, there's a way that our incredible minds, which can construct past and future, useful, but also, we get lost there, and we lose track of what's happening now. And we live in an autopilot mostly by habit.
And so, yeah, we talk a lot in our mindfulness courses about how all these things are useful; I’m not saying otherwise. We need habits. That's how we assemble a bunch of tasks and do things without thinking about it too much, right? But, when life becomes all habit and becomes all anxiety and depression, what are we missing, and the mindfulness trainings help us feel that space that he's talking about in that quotation. "Oh, maybe it's not, maybe it's this? Oh, wait. Okay. I can do it this way. Wow." And often there's quite a bit of relief from stress, from anxiety, from certain conditions that lead to depression through just being more present. And there's some interesting science around how people when their minds wander less, they tend to be happier. They tend to be more resilient, more engaged.
So, yeah. It's just like putting some more of the focus on the process of living because we have so much training and education in the content and skills and stuff to do, and then all this societal pressure to buy more stuff and do more trainings and get more-busy, right?
Jennifer Ghahari: Right.
Tim Burnett: So, mindfulness involves remembering that there's a brake pedal down there too. And even though the gas pedal gets stuck down, we can tap the brakes and say, "Oh." So that's what we mean by space in mindfulness.
Jennifer Ghahari: You had mentioned that you're trained in Zen Buddhism. And, a few weeks ago, I had a chance to interview the Venerable Thubten Chodron of Sravasti Abbey in Washington state. And we spoke about meditation, anxiety. And, I see that there seems to be some type of connection between Buddhism and stress reduction. And can you explain what that connection is?
Tim Burnett: Sure. And that's great that you got to speak with her. She's a real leader in that world.
Jennifer Ghahari: Yeah. She's great.
Tim Burnett: Yeah, amazing person. Well, what we're now calling mindfulness is a coming together of several different strands. And one of those strands are the understandings from traditional Buddhist meditation about the value of this present-centered awareness and a whole set of tools that help people to park that busy mind and reengage with what's happening now. And so that's modern mindfulness has married that with positive psychology, looked for support for it from neuroscience, sprinkled in some poetry to soften and connect people in the way that great literature and arts can do. Some philosophy. And so, yeah, it's just that Buddhism is one of the deep roots of it.
What's nice is that Buddhism actually is a religion in addition to having all the elements that we're speaking about here. And so, mindfulness is presented in a contemporary non-religious way so you don't have to worry about what you think about Buddhas or bodhisattva or rebirth or anything like that. It's about, yeah, well, there's some support from a deep tradition. People have been trying stuff like this for thousands of years. And we're doing it in a way that we feel is applicable and relevant to modern society. So, yeah, we use language like attention, stress, planning, worrying, returning to the present, just ordinary language for an ordinary thing. But, it's also in a way not ordinary because when we really engage more fully in our lives, we remember in a deep way how amazing it is to be alive.
How amazing that this organism can do all the things it can do. So, Buddhism has that enthusiasm for the incredible potential of human life. But Buddhism expresses it in a certain socio-religious context and we express it in a more everyday context. Like, “Yeah, life can be hard.” We got to really recognize that and feel that, which is really coaching with what Buddhism calls the first noble truth, that condition life has this element of suffering and stress. But then, where we go with that in modern mindfulness is, and we can really feel and understand and experience that it's also wonderful to be alive - even with pain, even with anxiety, or even with depression. There's a joy there that we can access.
So, yeah. I don't know. I feel like they're roommates from different cultures or something like that.
Jennifer Ghahari: Yeah. That's definitely. So, at Mindfulness Northwest, you teach mindfulness-based stress reduction. So, what is that exactly? And how is it practiced?
Tim Burnett: Sure. Yeah. We offer mindfulness-based stress reduction and then a whole suite of classes that are in that same kind of modality. So, mindfulness-based stress reduction and the acronym often gets used MBSR, that pops up a lot, it's an eight-week course on mindful awareness and stress resilience with everyday components like bringing mindfulness to perception, bringing mindfulness to communication, bringing mindfulness to understanding of stress reactivity works, and bringing some of the science of stress reactivity forward in a way that we can use for ourselves. And what mindfulness... Excuse me. There we go. I failed to silence my phone. The first thing I told people to do in mindfulness class. (laughs)
So anyway, that class was actually created by one of the pioneers in this work, a fellow named Jon Kabat-Zinn in the late 1970s, really early. And, it's remained pretty consistent from his original vision. But what I've done and with my colleagues at Mindfulness Northwest is that's a wonderful course we offered multiple times a quarter to the communities... When there's not a pandemic... in communities from Bellingham to Olympia, and also online. But we realized that that's a pretty big commitment. It's an eight-week course. It's a long evening, eight weeks in a row, and there's a Saturday session too. So, we really have a lot of hands-on time to do these practices deeply. And not everyone has time for that. So, we also have a shorter five-week version of that that's oriented towards healthcare professionals called Mindfulness for Healthcare Professionals.
We have two-week introductory workshops. We have two- and four-hour topical workshops. So, we started with that framework and brought out different pieces of it to make it more accessible. And we also offer a second eight-week course called Mindful Self-Compassion, which builds on that sense of the power of present-centered awareness to also cultivate more kindness and more emotional understanding. So that's also a wonderful course. We offer that every quarter as well. So, it's a whole suite of programming and it's... The MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction course is like the granddaddy of the program, but we have gone beyond that.
Jennifer Ghahari: Oh. So, can you tell the audience what's something that they might learn in an MBSR course?
Tim Burnett: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. You might be surprised to learn that even though the things that are happening in life can be stressful, there's all kind of little ways that we can take a stressful thing and make it worse. And that, we can actually notice that with some simple mindfulness tools and switch it and turn that down and respond differently. And actually, here's another area of little bit of Buddhist crossover, I often quote as Buddhist story, which is worth telling, it's pretty brief.
Jennifer Ghahari: Yeah!
Tim Burnett: Yeah, great, which has the Buddha recommended and we do too in mindfulness that life does include inevitably difficulties and trying to pretend it doesn't serve us, right? There's a certain kind of approach orientation we needed to show up in life. And the Buddha told the students that when life hits you with one of those difficult moments, it's like you're hit by a dart or an arrow. And it’s painful, right? Whether you stub your toe or your boss yells at you, or somebody cuts you off, these are painful moments. Or you feel really anxious and worried, these are painful moment.
So the Buddha recommended learning to just really show up and feel and experience those directly. Sometimes, you've experienced them directly and feel them. They just pass on again. They don't always stick in the same way we think they do. But then he said, and here's where I'm getting to the point is, "But then we have an incredible propensity as human beings to then throw a second dart at ourselves." Why did that happen? That shouldn't have happened. Whose fault, is it? Is it my fault? Is it their fault? They should know better. This should be set up differently. This should be organized better.
And what we're doing there is we're taking something that may be difficult, maybe it's a mild difficulty, and we amplify it, and we make it worse. So, we have a way that we generate our own stress. And, it's hard to be aware of that when we're just moving so fast. So, one of the things people experience in the MBSR course is, here's a framework and a lot of community support. We really work together as a group and a support from a teacher to slow down and notice what really happens. What really happens when I get a grouchy email from such and so. If I'm in next minute like “ahhhh!” writing an angry reply, what does that do to me? I already knew it didn't solve the problem with her, but what does it do to me?
And so we learned to take a breath. We learned some body awareness skills that help us to be more in touch with how I'm feeling, which is a little different thing from the story. “She sent me an angry email. She sucks” is different from, “My stomach's tight. My face is scrunched. I'm angry.” And that noticing of the experience below the storyline can be so liberating. It can help us get back into that space that the quotation is talking about. Here's a stimulus. That email I perceive as nasty and here's a moment to notice, "Okay. This got something. (breathes out) How do I respond? And here's my response." And maybe I do it differently this time or maybe they have it patterned so strong, I do it anyway. But at least I know I did it. So, it's that growth of awareness that really is, I think the mediator of the stress reduction of this work. It's just we notice better what we're doing.
Jennifer Ghahari: Right. “Taking a pause,” it sounds like.
Tim Burnett: Right. Exactly. We have a whole suite of ways that we strengthen our natural ability to take a pause that we forget how to do when we're so busy.
Jennifer Ghahari: Great. So, what is mindful self-compassion?
Tim Burnett: Mindful Self-Compassion is another eight-week course, very similar structure, eight evening or afternoon courses, and then a day session to practice the hands-on skills. It was created by a pair of psychologists named Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. It's a more recent thing that created somewhere around 2000 or so. And they were really interested in how do people treat themselves that most of us are conditioned to be very good at serving others, helping others, paying attention to others, kind to others. But if we really tune in using these tools of mindfulness to our own self talk, our own behavior towards ourselves, we're often quite hard on ourselves. And so, they developed psychological measures of self-compassion, and found that it's pretty low. And that, based, again, on a mix of Buddhism and psychology, that they could devise practices, exercises, including psychodynamic and psychoeducational exercises to help us understand our emotions and our pattern that we can just learn to be nicer to ourselves. And that there are a lot of benefits from that. And they aren't just self-focused benefits.
Then, we're actually able to be kind and compassionate to others in a more sustainable way. There's a way that our helping is often exhausting because we're not really that aware of what we're doing. It's also another habituated thing. So yeah, in both classes, the MBSR and MSC, mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness self-compassion, they involve a lot of reflection, a lot of conversations, a lot of exercises, where we're doing something a little differently with their mind. Some of them are rooted in meditation. Some of them are other modes. And they just help us take a fresh look at, “Who am I and how do I work?” And are there areas where I can make some little shifts. And oftentimes, people discover over time a little shift leads to a big change. I'm curious if that's been your experience supporting people with anxiety too?
Jennifer Ghahari: Yeah, definitely. Like you said, just learning different habits and working on them, one habit leads to another. And then, there are vast improvements that happen over time.
Tim Burnett: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Another thing that's neat about these courses is their group interventions. So, they're a little a more affordable, a little more accessible. And as I'm sure you do too, we're trying to provide skills and practices that people can continue well beyond the course, well beyond the intervention so that they really can have this as a lifelong support. And most people that we... We don't do very systematic follow up, but the bits of follow up we've managed to do, most people do continue. Most people, if they find it helpful, they keep doing this stuff and it helps them.
Jennifer Ghahari: You had mentioned about how groups can be helpful. Are there any other benefits to doing this or any pros or cons to doing this type of class in a group as opposed to one-on-one?
Tim Burnett: Well, yeah. The advantage of it and the disadvantage of it is you have to be pretty vulnerable because this work is inherently so personal so you have the wonderful safety when there's a strong therapeutic relationship in a one-on-one intervention. And so, we really work hard and I think do usually pretty well creating a little model learning community in our classes. We talk in the first weeks about ways to be safe together, how to hold confidentiality. We are especially careful about not giving people advice or trying to fix them, that each of us is here on our own journey. And then the incredible advantage there is if you're with a group of people who are able to be vulnerable and open about their situation, then there's so much learning from each other. And yeah, one example I will never forget as I was working with the veterans at the Seattle VA Hospital, and there were several with pretty extreme physical complaints. And so, they were talking about how painful every day was. But they were trying to apply mindfulness and it was helping them.
And four weeks in this, one fellow, but I don't think he really spoken before said, "You know, I've got severe depression. And I've been listening to you guys with all your back pain. I don't have back pain. And you know, if you can really get into this mindfulness thing, and if you can stick with it with all that pain, I can stick with it too with my heart, with my sad, my dark moods and my depression and how upset I am all the time. I can stick with this. And I can feel that it's helping me."
Jennifer Ghahari: Wow.
Tim Burnett: Yeah. So, there's a way people with different challenges and different conditions can offer each other a really genuine kind of modeling and organic support. And sometimes specific really helpful ideas like, "Oh, I'm not giving advice. But I've learned to navigate this aspect of my crazy mind in this way." And someone else say, "Oh! I never thought of that." So, yeah, there's a lot of lateral learning and community learning. But yeah, the challenge and the joy of that is that we have to be pretty open and create an environment where that's safe to do. And usually that works fine. Sometimes people realize it's too much for them and we try to be really graceful and supportive. And from the get-go we say, "This is not for everybody. This is not for everybody."
Many, many people have been benefited from this lots of different ways. And there's good scientific evidence as well. But, a few weeks in you might realize this is too much and that's fine. We give them a refund and some of them on their way with love. And, “Maybe later” right now. So yeah, it has been really a core thing from the beginning that it's not just a group, but also a heterogeneous group, people with lots of different backgrounds and conditions. And I'm happy in Seattle, especially we've got more and more diversity in our classes. So, I think we're also, in some small way, part of the bigger conversation about the tremendous diversity that we need to acknowledge and understand and own in a stratified society.
Jennifer Ghahari: Well, the fact that it's heterogeneous, I think there are differences. But the fact that you feel that you're not suffering alone will help too, right? Like you said, especially for the veterans, they were all suffering in slightly different ways, but all feeling that they had some type of shared community, helps.
Tim Burnett: Exactly. Exactly. That's well said. Yeah. But there's a way when we think, “It's just me” the stress and the fear and the anxiety, or whatever it is for us is so amplified like an echo chamber. And there's an aspect of self-compassion that they called common humanity, which is what you're saying is so powerful, the sense of common humanity. We all, even... And I try to be as straight and vulnerable as I can be. I mean, I'm overall pretty privileged and have had a pretty protected life. I had to work hard and everything. But, I suffer, you suffer, everybody suffers. And so, if we really can feel that in a genuine way where it's not just words, but it's like we're really sharing from the heart, then, yeah, it's such a relief.
And you can watch people in the room, their shoulders drop, their faces relax, they're, "Oh. It's okay to be this way, huh? Wow." Yeah. And you wouldn't think that because we're so programmed to think in terms of problems and solutions, right? That's not a solution exactly. But it changes the whole perception of the problem, which is a solution. So, it's funny.
Jennifer Ghahari: Well, right. Great. So do you have any other advice or recommendations for our listeners or anything else that you'd like to share?
Tim Burnett: Yeah. I mean, if this stuff interests you, I just really want to encourage you to try it. And there's so many different levels of trying it that are available now. There are all the meditation supporting apps out there. You can try there. And nobody has to know. I was so shy and private about this when I started. So, I relate to that, and wouldn't want to show up in a big center or a class until you know what it is. So yeah, you can try a meditation app. And Mindfulness Northwest and other groups, we offer introductory workshops. So, it's less of a commitment. Or maybe something about this just rings your bell and you want to jump in and go for it; we welcome that too. Even our eight-week classes are designed for people who are new to this. We walk you through step-by-step.
So, yeah. If you haven't tried it, it's just a little different way of being in your own skin. And it's still you. It's not like you're taking on some weird thing from somewhere else. But it's a support for... I don't know... remembering who you are in a certain way, pausing and reconnecting, rebooting if a computer metaphor works. So, yeah. I just recommend giving it a try. I always tell people, like I said before, it may not be for you. But how would you know, unless you tried it?
And it's very experiential. That's the other thing. This is not thinking our way out of our problems. It's about doing something different with body and mind, but then, opens up some new possibilities. So, it's, yeah, stuff you have to try. It's like just thinking about a restaurant menu doesn't taste like food, and watching ski videos doesn't make you a great skier, although it might help. You have to actually get out there and do it to find out what it is.
Jennifer Ghahari: This is something that anybody can do, right? I think maybe some people might be hesitant to thinking that, "All right, if I'm Christian or Jewish or Hindu, maybe I shouldn't be doing this?" But it's something that anybody can do, right? Because mean you're prescribing to a certain religion.
Tim Burnett: Yeah. There's no beliefs or anything like that required. Yeah. It's very... The word secular isn't quite right, but it's not hinged on any particular belief system. And it's all about like try this and see for yourself. But, since it's a little different than what we usually do, you need a little support and structure and guidance to actually even try it. So, you got to get in there and try it. But then, yeah. It's available to everybody. When we work with people sometimes who have some pretty challenging internal conditions, like social anxiety disorder or severe depression, they reach out to us and we support them in trying it out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But, I've had people with those kinds of conditions, both find it incredibly helpful, like a whole new life. And also, tried it out and say, "You know what? Too much." That's fine too. Maybe it's just not the right time.
Jennifer Ghahari: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You won't know until you try.
Tim Burnett: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Jennifer Ghahari: Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining us and being part of this project. And we look forward to hopefully speaking with you again in the future. And, thank you again.
Tim Burnett: Thanks a lot, Jennifer. What a pleasure to talk to you about this.
Jennifer Ghahari: Great. Thank you.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.