Erin Sheehan is a professor of mindfulness studies at Drew University and a PhD candidate at Lesley University - working towards a doctoral degree in Educational Studies with a focus on contemplative pedagogy. She works with children, adolescents, teens, and their parents to bring mindfulness practice into the entire family dynamic. She is passionate about continuing to create digital mindfulness applications in today's world so tethered to technology and devices. She brings mindfulness programs and instruction to businesses, schools, and clinical settings. She is a mother, wife, artist, and student of silence.
Erin Sheehan is a professor of mindfulness studies at Drew University and a PhD candidate at Lesley University - working towards a doctoral degree in Educational Studies with a focus on contemplative pedagogy. She works with children, adolescents, teens, and their parents to bring mindfulness practice into the entire family dynamic. She is passionate about continuing to create digital mindfulness applications in today's world so tethered to technology and devices. She brings mindfulness programs and instruction to businesses, schools, and clinical settings. She is a mother, wife, artist, and student of silence.
Intro/Outro Music- Half Moon Island
https://halfmoonisland.bandcamp.com/
Jeff 0:05
Welcome to the Interdisciplinary iInvestigations podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Perrin. And we're recording from the WSca podcast lab here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In our first season of this podcast, we're focusing on the subjective and phenomenological experience of the listening. foundation of our investigation focuses on making sense of the world through the sounds and lack of sounds that we encounter in our daily interactions. How do we hear these sounds? And how do we create meaning from them? How does listening help us understand the world and our place in it? So during this inaugural season, we're joined by educators, artists, musicians, scientists, contemplative practitioners, scholars and activists, who have tracked the importance of careful engaged listening in a world that seems to enable scattered attention, disengagement, and displacement. Their insights reveal great lessons in the stories of sound. Today, we're joined by Erin Sheehan. Erin is a professor of mindfulness studies at Drew University and a PhD candidate at Lesley University, working towards a doctoral degree in Educational Studies with a focus on contemplative pedagogy. She works with children, adolescents, teens and their parents to bring mindfulness practice into the entire family dynamic. She's passionate about continuing to create digital mindfulness applications in today's world that is so tethered to technology and devices. And she brings mindfulness programs and instruction to businesses, schools and clinical settings. She is a mother, a wife, artists and a student of silence. Erin, thanks so much for joining us today.
Erin 1:47
Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to discussing my work.
Jeff 1:50
And Erin's joining us via the phone from her home state of New Jersey. Erin, if you could just start off by telling us a little bit more about you and your background and how you came to this world of contemplative pedagogy.
Erin 2:06
Sure, thank you. This world for me began many years ago with my own diving into mindfulness practice, even when I didn't really know what name to give it many years ago, in my early 20s, I would say, this world of contemplative pedagogy and graduate work really started me in a different way when I became a young mother, and was at an author event actually on vacation in Cape Cod and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to listen to a woman who shared her own practice of silence with all of us. And in her book. And when she described this weekly practice she had with silence is sort of opened up this new understanding of contemplative practice in a very basic, very moving and meaningful way for me. I started getting involved in the world of mindfulness and meditation with children, which led me to a master's degree at Lesley University in mindfulness studies in 2015. From that work, I started my own business after graduation with a colleague of mine. And we started developing mindfulness programs for different populations that we encountered and reached out to. From there, I worked in a clinical setting for a local doctor for about four years, once a week with her patients, directing them in their own mindfulness and meditation practices. At the same time, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to begin working at Drew University in their Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, where I've developed two different courses for those graduate students in contemplative practice, both the theory and practice of silence, and the new program, the new class that I just created and delivered, called the contemplative professional, which takes that look into mindfulness practice, into a new direction and a little bit deeper as these medical humanities students, theology students and education students, really encountering continued challenges in today's world, pre COVID, and post COVID. And really wanting to harness their capacities of mindfulness practice and awareness, and able to bring it into their work settings and share it with others.
Jeff 4:24
Now that you are in a doctoral program at Lesley University, can you tell us a little bit about how silence is actually influencing your graduate work? What is it that you're looking to to investigate in the world of science of silence.
Erin 4:41
Sure, I would say that my graduate work is heavily influenced by this connection with silence and thinking about myself as a student of silence. The research that I'm doing both professionally and personally that I continued to do between the master's degree and now Being a PhD candidate was continuously diving in to these areas in our modern world that exists of people that are researching contemplative practices, and their different ways of being implemented throughout society. So that research sort of kept me on the pathway. And then, with the work that I'm doing at Drew, it became quite clear to me that I wanted to engage with my own research and dissertation, and re joined the Lesley community of scholars, as a PhD candidate. And silence really informs me in so many ways in this research, and I would say the first, and probably the most powerful way that it is linked that work to silence is purely just the results of the classes that I'm teaching at Drew and what my students have been able to share with me. The students are from all different backgrounds and age groups and, and pre Covid, especially different countries, even joining us online in my programs. And what I continue to find is adults of different ages, doing meaningful work in the world, with many different challenges. And when I introduced them to the theory and practice of mindfulness, and connecting them with their own practice, but also the neuroscience that exists and sort of breaking down how this came into modern society, and why there's usually most of the time and immediate visceral change, I would say in the students, and specifically the way that they continue to express how they come to knowing, which was always sort of part of my hope with the courses, they started with this, let's just introduce mindfulness and the pathway and the things that I know when the researchers that are out there and this, this wealth of knowledge and different examples that exist and sort of open those doors to my students. But what I really found was that their own way of coming to knowing what they were they're studying for as graduate students really changed and became affected by it. So it was in that understanding, as the years went on, and I had different students come into the class, that it became quite clear that I wanted to dig deeper into how silence did affect the way that we come in, come to knowing. And then secondly, how that come into knowing in that way, when we feel connected to our inner worlds in a deeper, more authentic way. How that came into knowing affected these professionals in their work that they did, how they were integrating mindfulness practices, not only with the way that they did their work, but the way that they did their work with others. And so that that has become a core component of the doctoral research that I continue to engage with.
Jeff 7:48
And I want to make one note to as I introduce you, I did mention that you are a mother, what I did not mention is that you are a mother of four. And so a mother of four, who is a full time professor at Drew university, and also a doctoral student, as well. And so I'm wondering, you know, how does your life that's so, you know, I would imagine with four children and full time student and full time work? What have you learned about silence in your life personally? Where does it sit in your life? And what have you learned about how it impacts you?
Erin 8:23
Great question. I would say that been a mother of four growing children, two of which are teenagers now, and one of which is eyeing her way into college in about a year, the continued demands of parenting in today's world, are rather large, especially with COVID in the micro, managing different decisions during a very difficult time on the global on the global world as well. I would say the way in which silence, it depends, specifically and personally for me, is that it becomes a conduit of a wellness that's, that's hard to sort of put your finger on except to say that I know when I'm not practicing, and to continue to come back to this practice of silence is informative. And as a parent, especially the onslaught of information and decisions, activities, and stress, and joys and all of those things becomes quite overwhelming. What I find is that my own practice of silence allows me much more clarity and awareness around what actually is, I find that one of the most difficult parts of being a human really exists on a on a greater way for me as a parent, which is this push and pull between the past and the future. I feel that as a parent, I'm constantly questioning myself making sure that I'm making the right decisions. So that looking back at the past with regret and doubt, we're looking forward to the future with anxiety and worry can be quite overwhelming. And it is here that I find that a silence practice really brings me back to the present moment, and helps me to attend to it actually is. So that in that continued daily practice of meditation that I have, I find that ability to become more clear about what is what is real and in front of me, and more aware of how I'm reacting to it. I have found that especially as a parent in in this pandemic, and post pandemic, world, in schools, and just society, the level of reactivity that I feel like exists with all of us, and the way that we react to each other is great and greater than it was before the pandemic. So even just as realizing about reactivity, and being able to slow it down, that's had the most dramatic effect on the way in which my meditation practices come into parenting is really just to be aware of it. And the minute that I say that out loud to people that I that I come into contact with, and just sort of just openly and generously offer this insight that I've had about how reactive we all seem to be, you can almost visually see people change and soften a little bit, just that little bit of awareness can help us understand the way that we're engaging with each other. And that continues to be one of the most important reasons that I find myself in this work is that I just think mindfulness isn't just a personal solve. It's not just a personal, contemplative practice anymore, which can be in it can be a beautiful one. But also, the research that's been shown by others that I engage with too, is just showing its broader capacity at extending our own ability to be compassionate with ourselves and with others. And then also resilient, these beautiful results of meditation that we didn't really know how to research. And now we know how to do that, and a little bit better ways, showing mindfulness, that a byproduct of having a personal mindfulness practices that are more compassionate, and more resilient. And so I think in a world that we know, and we can see continues to be so divisive, where there's this concept of othering, that continues to go on, where we putting each other into different spaces and disconnect, I really see that mindfulness practice continues to be weighted, interconnect and spend more time on the ways in which we're the same and connected.
Jeff 12:38
And we're now starting to see, you know, so much research about the effects of mindfulness. And in we're seeing the application, as you mentioned, in educational settings and business settings, obviously, in our own personal lives, and you've done so much work, both on the research side, and in the application side. I'm wondering, what, what's next? What are you still curious about in regards to contemplative practice? What is it that you want to investigate further?
Erin 13:11
I'm really interested in looking at silence in a very specific way. Like you suggest that there's a lot of wonderful research that exists from all of these different programs that have been able to be implemented in this country and in other countries around the globe, in educational settings, in business settings, and clinical settings. In higher education, especially, and other areas of education. I'm really interested in gathering these sort of firsthand narratives, if you will, this subjective experience with how people who practice silence, personally and then professionally, I really want to begin to understand in a deeper way, what people can share about what that silence feels like for them, and how it exists in their world for them, and how they bring it to others. I think contemplative practices can be very mindfulness, there's many different ways to practice mindfulness. And there's different ways to meditate. And there's different histories and cultural reflections of that. But I'm really interested in just this world, this word, silence and this ability, this innate human ability, we have to connect with our own silences. And I'm especially interested in engaging with those questions with others, because there's so many that I come into contact with in my work, that actually run from or avoid, or are fearful of spending time in their own silence. The level to which they distract themselves away from this inner silence. Is is very different from the ways in which I see contemplative people look to regain that natural ability to sit in our silence It's. So it's very curious to me that in a world where the level of mental wellness and peace and balance seems to be at a decreased level for most populations and agents, and also this increased level of distraction that we are afforded with a world that is very tethered to technology. So that connection becomes very interesting to me. And it's starting to become well established in research as well with researchers like Matt Killingsworth, from Harvard, who did this longitudinal smartphone research study, that one of the results of the data he collected with people was that when they accounted for being happy, they also accounted for not being distracted. So that the more distracted people feel, the less happy they feel. So my own research with those who have been able to bring mindfulness into their own experience, and who look to sit in their own silence with intention and purpose, I want to get those firsthand accounts, I want to get that subjective experience and sort of create a new understanding of silence in that way based on those experiences. And I would love to do longitudinal work on those who bring it into the field. I have some wonderful students in my classes that are in medical humanities. And these are doctors and nurses and practitioners who have lived in those spaces during this very difficult COVID time. Some of them the stress and burnout has caused them to even have to leave their practice. They're regaining their ability to work in the field with mindfulness in new ways and, and to be able to account for their experience with silence, how they bring it to their patients, how they bring it to their personal life, is really just a rich field that I'm then looking forward to diving into more.
Jeff 16:58
Erin, you mentioned this idea that that there's, the world is getting louder, right. And it's seemingly, at least from where I sit. And I think that others probably feel the same way that the the amount and the level of distractions just keeps increasing. As a father of two toddlers and living a professional life where there's constant email, and there seems to be constant noise. And whenever you pick up your phone, there's there's text messages and emails and all sorts of dings and banners. And it seems like everything is working against any sort of movement to facilitate situations of silence, it seems like the machine and the mechanism that which we've created is, is making the barriers to silence even greater and greater. So how do we? How do we, you know, apart from going into a monastery, how do we facilitate situations in which we can bring more silence into our lives?
Erin 17:57
Yeah, this is such an important question and an important question to keep asking ourselves and asking of ourselves. And I think it started to become a greater conversation in the world and in these specific areas of of words and terminology. And an organization's even that talks about things like digital detox and digital balance. And there's even our apple devices have this sort of ability to track our online time. And it's starting to become a more nuanced, but spoken of aspect of the way in which we rely on technology. And I think that at its core with the first part is just the awareness, right? For a long time, many of us and maybe even in our daily life, still, we sort of work as Jon Kabat Zinn would say, on autopilot. And we sort of allow these distractions to continue without our awareness or our awareness of how they affect us. So some of these digital detox tools and practices start to realign our understanding of what we're doing. And by the way, how do we feel why we're doing it? My colleague, Sherry Henderson, and I met in the Masters of mindfulness program at Lesley back in 2015. And we've continued to do a lot of work together, we've collaborated on creating a little business called Map Mindfulness, where we have been able to create different mindfulness programs for different groups. And one of the things that Sherry and I continue to be passionate about and work on is this exact question. We like to call it digital mindfulness, which just means establishing a strong mindfulness practice, and then bringing that spirit of mindfulness and those practices of mindfulness into our digital devices and behaviors. And what we find is, when when you do it in that way, the capacity to create the change that one might be looking for, with their digital devices with the way that They feel tethered is the embodiment. So that in having a silent meditation practice, and finding the breath in the body, day after day, week after week, there's a certain a lot more than to embody the practices in a different way when they come to understanding our digital attachment to it. So that's one way that the question you ask is really going to continue working in our world is when we continue to look at it as our awareness around it, and making choices when I work with teens and children, especially around this question, because they have a different relationship with devices than some of us who weren't born into them. I'd like to just remind teenagers, especially of who's getting their attention. So first, it's important to teach children and teenagers what it feels like to know where their attention is going. So again, that meditation practices embodies their attention, they're able to feel their attention and their awareness and have a stronger and more clear relationship with it. And then being able to make the choice about who they give that attention to. So it's not just this shame and blame area we get into where we get overly attached. And some of us even use the terminology about addicted to our digital devices and, and different apps. But then having this ability to see that in a clearer way, and listen, self compassion and kindness and be able to make decisions to step away from that. And what I'm finding in my research was silence and this engagement with with just pure silence, and bringing that into this, this big, bigger conversation about autonomy and, and digital devices and, and things like that, is this ability to look at silence and the practicing of around silence as part of organic humanity. And that's a term that Sherry and I are talking a lot about these days. Because what we're hoping for is that this choice to spend time in our own silence becomes a stronger conduit to maintain and hold on to our organic humanity. In a time where it, it seems like it might be a good thing to pay attention to, so that the automation and the technology don't take away things from us like our peace, and our well being and our mental health, without our really having a say in it.
Jeff 22:31
Erin as as a teacher, as a practitioner, as a student of silence. What's next, after you finished your doctoral studies at Lesley, working in this area? Where do you see yourself situating in the field of contemplative pedagogy in the field of silence in the field of mindfulness? What do you hope to achieve?
Erin 22:54
That's a great question. And one that probably needs a little bit more of my attention at this point in the doctoral studies. What I hope to achieve and where I see myself is possibly just a continued voice in the field of digital balance in the field of practicing silence, extending this terminology of maintaining organic humanity as sort of a reminder of our choice in the matter. And the question you just asked about how, you know, we continue to find silence in a world that seems to be getting louder and offering more distractions, I think, to continue to talk to people and work with people at the graduate level, to parents elementary schools, with just this ability and idea to regain their, their like, or hopefully love of sitting with their own silence, and see what unfolds in that space. And seeing what it feels like to think about silence as a conduit for organic humanity. And just be able to make those choices. Being able to use our technology when it serves us in good and strong ways and intercommunicating, but also then to choose the word silence when we want to silence our devices, when we want to silence some of those apps that need more of the attention we want to give and sort of regaining our power over that and regaining our love of our own silence. It reminds me of years ago, David Cameron, when he was then the head of the British Parliament, they had worked to start a mindfulness initiative for the parliament. And it's if their government and I was remember this line you said is, as the base for doing that, was that he noticed that the people were far away from themselves. So I think the place that I see myself with my research, and in the field of silence is maybe to just be a voice for silence itself, and to share the research so that people start getting closer to themselves. Because the wonderful part of, of mindfulness and the research that exists in today's divisive world is that when we have a better relationship with ourselves, we certainly come into relationship with others in a stronger, more authentic, more interconnected, more compassionate ways. And we certainly need that more and more. And we're seeing that we still need to serve that disconnect and that divisiveness in new ways. So to be somebody in the field that continues to bring us into stronger relationship with each other, and to solve some of the problems that exist with that is certainly where I hope my work goes.
Jeff 25:41
And we want to thank you so much for joining us here on the Interdisciplinary Investigations podcast. And I'm wondering, its if it might make sense for you to lead us in a small exercise of silence before we let you go with that. How does that sound?
Erin 25:55
Yes, yes, I would love that. When I talk about silence, it's usually very interesting to be able to bring people into their own silence as part of the discussion. So yeah, sure, why don't we just take an opportunity to practice a minute of silence together here. and shift our awareness that is usually on our thinking mostly, and just take our awareness to our body breathing, finding the breath in our body, following the in breath, following the out breath, just doing our best to bring all of our awareness to our body breathing, and also that silence space that exist between the breath and the breath.
Erin 27:25
Now we can bring our awareness back from our breath into the present moment, remembering that as we walk away from Silent practice, remembering that we always have that little silent space between the in breath and the out breath.
Jeff 27:41
Erin, thank you so much for for your time and for your wisdom. And I remember one thing that stuck with me in so many of our conversations and discussions in preparation for this recording was this idea that silence is a tool that we always have that have at our disposal that we can always utilize, no matter where we are, what we're doing or who we're interacting with, we can always use that tool of silence. So thank you so much for your time.
Erin 28:11
Yes, thank you so much for having me, Jeff.
Jeff 28:15
Thank you for listening to the interdisciplinary investigations podcast hosted by me, Jeff Perrin. Thank you to Half Moon island for providing our intro and outro music. Please rate review and check out all of our episodes wherever you stream your podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.