Leaders' Playground

14: Soaking in Mindfulness: Lessons in centering from a Japanese onsen

• Irene Salter, PhD

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Join me, Irene Salter, as I reflect on a serene visit to Arima Onsen, one of Japan's oldest and most charming hot springs. I'll describe how the tranquil waters and peaceful ambiance offered a profound sense of relaxation and inspired a deep dive into mindfulness.

In this episode, I’ll  guide you through a centering meditation, dive into the neuroscience of mindfulness, and offer practical tips on how to bring the peace of a hot spring back to work, a moment of calm amidst life’s chaos. Tune in to explore how soaking in tranquility—whether through a hot spring or mindfulness practice—can renew your mind, body, and soul.

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For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the Leader's Playground. This week we're going to be focused on a practice called centering. It's a form of mindfulness meditation that I just can't wait to introduce you to and, in fact, this week's strategy, I'm going to get to lead you through a centering practice. We're going to be visiting a Japanese onsen and also talking about how to apply what we learn in the hot springs to what we face every day at work. I can't wait to share it with you. Here we go. Hi, thank you for listening to the Leader's Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work to feel more like play. Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy-making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host, and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode. So I recently got back from a trip to Japan, and one of the places we went to in fact, the place we went to on the very last day of our trip was Arima Onsen. It's a little hot springs town up in the mountains behind Osaka and it's one of the oldest onsens in Japan, dating back to 631, when Emperor Jomei took a bath in those hot springs. It was one of these little tiny towns with bathhouses and I just loved it. The town itself was super charming. It had these little winding streets and we rounded a corner. We found this beautiful little shrine. And then we rounded the corner again and there was a temple with those beautiful flying roof lines surrounded by trees. The rain was lightly falling. It was utterly, utterly gorgeous.

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After lunch, Jason and the kids took a gondola up to the top of the mountain while I headed for the bathhouses. The kids not all that into being naked with strangers. Me, on the other hand, I couldn't wait for an afternoon of peace and quiet to myself. At first I headed for the public bathhouse, but it was closed for cleaning. So I went to the fancy hotel down the street called the Arima Grand Hotel and I was able to purchase a day pass where I truly stepped into the super beautiful quiet world.

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It's really hard to capture the feeling of an onsen in words Tranquility, groundedness, peace, deep, soul-satisfying joy, restoration. There's a client of mine who, when I described my experience at the onsen, she shared it's like the last brush of a gentle spring breeze. And, yes, that's exactly what it felt like. When I walked in, there was this reception desk where I figured things out with my few words of Japanese and the staff's few words of English and lots of smiles and hand gestures. And once I entered there was a place where you left your shoes and little lockers. And then you walked inside and there was a changing room with all this beautiful soft lighting and these super sweet, kind-eyed grandmas. After that there was another room with showers and it was piled with wooden buckets and small stools. The courtesy in an onsen is that you shower your body and clean yourself fully before you step in. After my shower, I put my hair up and I found all of these beautiful, delicious hot spring pools.

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Arima, that town, in particular, is known for two kinds of waters. There's this rusty red water called ginseng. It has high levels of iron and salt. They sometimes call it the golden water. Then there was another type of water that comes up out of the ground. It's crystal clear but slightly fizzy. It's called ginseng or silver water. It has naturally carbonated water and very trace-trace amounts of radium non-toxic, but still a little bit.

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There. They had both indoor and outdoor pools. The indoor pools they had one that was the rusty red and the other one the crystal clear. They were these big, wide, lavish places. They had multiple tiers and soft waterfalls in the corners wide, lavish places. They had multiple tiers and soft waterfalls in the corners. The outside pools were on this beautiful long balcony surrounded by bamboo forest, and I tried every single one of the pools in turn. In between I would take a cold shower and then I would go back and try them again. But at the edge of the outdoor pool it had this little peekaboo view of the green mountains beyond, and there I sat for a good 20 minutes in order to do a centering meditation. It was exactly the perfect setting, this place, where I felt so relaxed, so at peace, so grounded.

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Centering is a practice that's found in a lot of Buddhist and martial art traditions. It's a form of mindfulness meditation, and I love the way that Jon Kabat-Zinn describes it. He's an American professor emeritus of medicine. He's also the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine. He is the person who kind of introduced me to a lot of these ideas of centering, and he describes it in this way. He says that mindfulness is a form of meditation that really is the cultivation of intimacy with awareness. One could say no big deal, except that it turns out awareness is a very, very big deal. It gives us new degrees of freedom for dealing with challenges that are facing us as individuals and also as a species. So it's the hardest work in the world. It's also the easiest work in the world, don't you love that? Anyway, mindfulness, meditation and centering as one form of it is a way to focus on the present moment, not focusing on past troubles or regrets, nor worrying about the future and all of our goals. It's all about being right here, right now. No judgment. It's allowing whatever comes and being completely open to it.

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Mindfulness reduces stress. The NIH reports that many potential health benefits, that it reduces the severity of anxiety and depression symptoms, improves sleep, reduces stress and it may even reduce PTSD. All of these experiments and tests are fairly new. Mindfulness meditation has only recently been studied. It's also not a replacement for getting help through very wonderful research-backed practices like cognitive behavior therapy. However, the best thing to do is to try it.

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Alright, take a pause, and this one's going to be a real pause. I'm going to lead you through a centering meditation If you are driving or you're working in the garden or folding laundry or something. I would invite you to wait to listen to this part until you're in a quiet place, somewhere where you're not driving or walking, or working, somewhere where you can be either seated, lying down or perhaps standing nice and tall but not moving. What we're going to do is we're going to learn how to find our center, but to begin, go ahead and simply close your eyes and get comfortable. Notice the position of your body and make any adjustments that you need to get more comfortable. Maybe you want to sit up tall and straight, Maybe you want to slouch and relax and lean back in your chair. Whatever feels good. There's no right or wrong. Next, I want you to breathe. Simply breathe in and out. You don't need to change your breath. You don't need to modify and make it slower or make it deeper. Just breathe and, as you breathe, notice your breath is going in and out.

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Now our attention and awareness can often be really scattered. Our attention and awareness can often be scattered. Our minds will naturally wander. If your mind chooses to go for a little wander, bring it back to my voice and back to your breath. There is no judgment. Mindfulness is about being present, which is right now. It doesn't matter if your mind wanders, it's natural. Just gradually and slowly gather it back. Notice any feelings you're feeling. Notice any feelings you're feeling. Maybe you're feeling a little uncomfortable about doing a mindfulness practice with me. Maybe you're worried about something. Just notice what those feelings are and breathe In and out.

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Next thing I'm going to have you do is to scan your body, looking for something that might be your center. Your center is like the center of gravity. It's the sun around which all the other planets orbit. All those little scattered bits of awareness and attention. They orbit around a physical place in your body, somewhere. If you start at the top of your head and just notice, you might feel a place, somewhere that feels a little extra solid, a little more bright, A part of your body that might feel extra alive. For me, I usually find it just below my belly button, deep in the cup of my pelvis. Other people feel it in their gut, behind their heart, sometimes in their throat, sometimes a clear headness right behind your eyes. Some people find it as a brightness in your spine. Usually it's up and down your core, somewhere. That center of gravity, that feeling of a little greater solidity or a little greater warmth or a little more brightness. Whatever that place is for you, I want you to breathe into it. Simply breathe, and imagine the air going down to touch that spot. To touch that spot Every time you breathe in it might glow brighter, grow more solid, feel more alive.

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Every in-breath brings it more energy. It collects the scattered bits of attention and, like a gravity well, draws it in. All those little scattered bits of attention and self are drawn and flow down to wherever that center is for you. Every in-breath draws those things closer. Every out-breath drains away a little of our stress, drains away our distraction, the scatter and the overwhelm. The out-breath takes things away. The in-breath brings a little more peace, All of it flowing into our center. And breathe. Notice if you feel any different. Did your emotions change? Did your awareness change? It's fun to notice what might be different. And if nothing is different, no judgment. That's part of mindfulness. Go ahead and take a few more deep breaths on your own and when you're ready you can open your eyes. Good job, how was that? Oh, take a moment just to savor being here, present and centered. Hmm, All right, Back to the show.

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In a mindfulness centering practice, our brains begin scattered, and that's especially true in this ever-connected, smartphone-enhanced world. See, as I said in the last episode, Americans and myself we are so addicted to our phones. Americans, on average, pick up their phones 144 times a day. That's once every six or seven waking minutes. It's rarely about answering a phone call, it's just to check and see, and it's pure distraction. What mindfulness meditation does is it teaches our brains to stay in the moment longer. It's Jedi mind training for real humans. It's Jedi mind training for real humans. Just as our exercise muscles will build up stamina for a marathon, we can exercise our attention and awareness muscles using mindfulness meditation to build up stamina for being more present, for having attention that lasts longer, for having some stress, resilience and for that sense of inner peace.

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There was a great Nature Neuroscience Review article that explained the science behind mindfulness meditation and it says that it involves the interaction of three different brain areas and the strengthening of them. When you compare the minds of beginning meditators to experienced meditators, you find that all three of these brain areas are enhanced. They're actually larger. Some of the ones are attention control centers. These are the places in our brain where we activate in order to keep our attention focused on whatever it is in front of us. We engage our norepinephrine pathways that's the pathways that we use for arousal and our striatum. That's the part of our brain that's really focused on getting us to go and do the things that we need to get done, coordinating all of our muscle movements. The other system one of the other two that are involved is emotion regulation, that's, the limbic system. This is how mindfulness can activate the cingulate cortex, the amygdala and all of these other limbic brain areas that are responsible for keeping track of how we're feeling. They monitor our emotions and our inner feeling states. How we're feeling, they monitor our emotions and our inner feeling states, and that emotion regulation system gets enhanced as we practice mindfulness meditation. The last system that is involved is our self-awareness system. It uses what's called the insula, which is a tiny little brain area that's actually tucked deep, deep in a fold on the side of our heads, and it uses also an area called the default mode network, which I know I talked about previously. These brain areas are active when we start thinking about ourselves and reflecting on our past experiences. These are the three brain areas the attention control, emotion regulation and self-awareness that are strengthened, just like exercising a muscle every time that we do our mindfulness practice.

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Well, why is that important? This is an episode and a podcast, after all, about how to make work feel more like play. Well, you see, the day before I went to the onsen, I was meeting with a client. They were in an incredibly stressful situation at work. Namely, they had these really nasty, contentious board meetings that they had to go to. In those board meetings, people were attacking each other, calling each other's names, huge levels of drama and they weren't the ones that were guiding the meeting. They simply had to attend and participate and answer questions. So how can my client prepare themselves for this really stressful situation at?

Speaker 1:

It's all about centering. See, this client needed to find a centered place in order to regain her confidence and be able to be present in that moment. So she's not dwelling on all of the ways that she got in her own way in the past and also not dwelling on the future in terms of all of the things that she's worried about. Instead, she knows she's capable of dealing with what's right in front of her. To be able to be present in that moment, she simply needed the clear headness to stay there. So she likened the feeling of centeredness after a mindfulness meditation, to the state of clear-headed readiness that she felt in sports right before a ball got served to her or right before the kickoff of a game. For her, who really loves that kind of sports analogy, it was that sense of centered readiness of I'm ready and I'm waiting. I'm clear that presence and awareness was exactly the same as that feeling of being centered after a mindfulness meditation. So I had her practice standing as if ready to receive a ball and to channel and to put inside of her that feeling of centeredness that she feels at that moment and the same feeling that she feels after a meditation, and that was what was going to allow her to always be able to touch back to that in those moments of stress during those crazy board meetings.

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There's lots of other places where centering can be extremely useful. I use it before giving a talk. I know many people use it before giving and being at a job interview. Several of my clients use it throughout the day as a brain break. But most most of all, it's so helpful to be able to practice presence. As I said, it's just like a muscle you have to practice and use it in order for it to get stronger. It's this difference between those beginning meditators and the experienced ones. The reason to do centering practices or other mindfulness practices is the practice of it, Because our mind and our attention grows. Our ability to stay focused, our emotion regulation, our self-awareness all of those grow and get stronger the more that we practice. This is a solution to when your mind and your attention feel so scattered or you feel overwhelmed. This is one of those ways that you can train your brain to do something different.

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If I go back to the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, he says that the real meditation practice is 24 hours itself. It's life itself. It's not sitting on a cushion in a cross-legged posture or lying in a yoga pose called the corpse pose or anything like that. That's life itself. It's not sitting on a cushion in a cross-legged posture or lying in a yoga pose called the corpse pose or anything like that. That's all fabulous, but we're cultivating so that we can get more comfortable with living out our moments as if they really mattered and therefore we can be there for them the good ones, the bad ones, the ugly ones, the stressful ones, the difficult ones, the painful ones.

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What John is saying is that all of this mindfulness is practice for just living our lives. It's able to be present in our lives, aware and there and here and now, without all of the judgment and the fear and the worry and the stress that comes along with it. And that was the feeling that I took away from my day at the onsen and it's the feeling that I still carry with me now. After a couple hours at the onsen, my body felt so refreshed, almost trembly-legged, like a brand new baby fawn. My mind was quiet but purposeful. My soul felt refreshed and re-energized. It was just ready and relaxed. We got on the bus home, we walked home and the ability for my mind to stay present in the moment was so much greater after that experience. And I still even feel present now, two weeks later, just recalling that experience, because in my body I can find that centered place and I can return to it always anytime I need to to it always anytime I need to.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so so much for joining me here at the Leaders Playground. I would love to thank my genius sound editor, producer and designer, Tyler Lockamy, for making this whole podcast possible. I'd love to thank Robin Canfield, my web designer and graphic artist. She and I just finished a neuroscience glossary of this Is your Brain on Travel. If you go to my website, you'll be able to download it. And finally, please give a thanks to Tessa Borquez, my chief operating officer, and the guardian angel who watches over my time and energy.

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In the show notes you're going to find a link to a copy of that centering meditation. It's on my website so that you can keep it. Find a link to a copy of that Centering Meditation. It's on my website so that you can keep it whenever you want to hear it and not have to go through the podcast to find the starting point. There's also links to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Nature Neuroscience article and a whole lot more. I often use an app called Buddhify no, they're not sponsoring me, but it's the app that I use day to day to find even more mindfulness meditations than this one that is here today for you.

Speaker 1:

Finally, would you please do me two favors? First, do you know a leader or a friend who's surviving, not thriving? Maybe they need to learn how to find their center? If so, please text them a link to this show how to find their center. If so, please text them a link to this show. And secondly, please click that follow button on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, Because next episode we're going to be looking at the secret life of trees and learning what trees can teach us about being human. What do trees have to do with making work feel like play? Well, you'll just have to join me here next time to find out.

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Irene Salter, PhD

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