Jeff Warren
Happy to be here. Sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. I’ll just put it out there.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. We’re gonna consciously bring whatever comes, and how that unfolds is just fine.

Diane Dempster
Well, I’m always cracking up because when you say, “Oh, we have somebody who’s into mindfulness and meditation,” they always feel like, “Oh wow, it’s gonna be the zen kind of human that, like, transcends all things.” And one of the things I love about you, Jeff, is just how human, honest, and vulnerable—and just in it—you are.

Jeff Warren
Flawed and screwed up and neurotic and overwhelmed.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Freeze on your shirt. So there’s balance.

Jeff Warren
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I’m here to normalize that for everybody. Beautiful.

Diane Dempster
Maybe back us up a little bit and tell us about how you got into doing what you’re doing in the world.

Jeff Warren
Sure. I’m very happy to be here, particularly because I’m an overwhelmed parent of two young, complicated kiddos. I’ve benefited from listening to what you two do, and I’ve read many books trying to understand my differently wired kid. One of my kids is 5 and one is 3—maybe we’ll talk more about that later. In terms of how I got to the world of meditation teaching, it was a very indirect route—nothing I would ever in a million years have guessed I’d get into, cuz I was allergic to what I imagined it looked like to be a meditation or spiritual teacher before I knew anything about it. I was a writer; I was a journalist. I wrote for a radio show in Canada called The Current, which is a kind of marine current affairs show. I had a specific focus on big ideas and science, and I was very interested in the whole riddle of consciousness and the latest neurobiology. I have a brother who’s a neuroscientist, and I wrote a book about subjective experience—how consciousness changes over 24 hours, sleep and dreaming, and the underlying neurobiology.

For that book, I had a chapter on meditation. I felt like I needed to, because when I was going to these conferences on consciousness—this is like 25 years ago—the superstars and excitement at those conferences were around this new generation of findings about mindfulness and the brain, and getting monks to come in fitted with electrodes and report on what was going on in their brain. It was very exciting. If you’re interested in consciousness, this was the cutting edge. So I thought, OK, I better go to one of these retreats myself and see what this is all about. That was quite a while ago now—about 25 years. The moment I got to that retreat—actually in Scotland, of all places—I thought I had been going purely for intellectual reasons cuz I was curious about the modality. But when I got there, I realized I’m a pretty screwed-up, neurotic, anxious person, and this journalism work is kind of feeding that. After 7 days on retreat, I could really see the basic truth: if you’re able to disembed from your thoughts and what feels so urgent and gripping in your experience, you can find more space and more perspective—and, guess what, fewer thoughts, fewer problems.

And that was just the beginning. It became a whole path for me to try to understand what I was experiencing and what I was learning. Because I was a journalist, I took notes, still never thinking I would teach it. But I had a particular teacher who really encouraged me at a certain point. He said that since I had a facility for talking about it, why don’t I just share it. He had a very chilled-out way of thinking about that. So I started a group in Toronto that was really not a vertical, no hierarchy. It was very much peer-to-peer. Let’s call it the Consciousness Explorers Club. Let’s get together, try these practices out, share what we’re noticing, and what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. Through that, it just grew. Eventually Dan Harris, this guy who wrote a book called 10% Happier, before he wrote it, found out about me and we became friends. When he wrote this big book, he invited me to write his sequel. Then I got on the apps—10% Happier and Calm—and then it just went out. All of a sudden, here I am in this bizarre position of being a neurotic writer who’s also a meditation teacher. And I love it. It’s so fun for a million reasons. It’s incredible to learn about people’s unique inner experiences, which I never get tired of. So varied and strange and magical and interesting. And I get to do it with the interest of helping and supporting people. It gives a purpose to a lot of my own struggles, and I feel like it’s a good use of my abilities in this lifetime thus far. Now that I’m a parent, I’m drawing on it and realizing where the practice may be less supportive than it could be. You have to get real pretty fast when you’re a parent. That’s my high-speed bio—maybe not high-speed enough, but there you go.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love it. It feels not just relatable. I don’t know if Diane shared with you when y’all spoke earlier: my background before becoming a coach was a yoga teacher. Oh, cool. Interesting. And for the same reason that I was this neurotic, stressed-out mom and I wasn’t coping well enough. So I did this more intensive training—long before becoming a yoga teacher was a “thing.” I studied with a guy named Char, and I did this whole thing. When I found coaching, it felt like the verbalization of yoga because it was all about presence. What I’m hearing you say is that whatever variation of it, it’s slowing down and becoming aware of what your brain is telling you and how it’s engaging in the world.

Jeff Warren
Absolutely. If you did a yoga teacher training, you know it gets very profound. Yoga was my first main practice before I ever started meditating. I did yoga for many years, and that introduced me into this space. The idea of being present—being in presence—not only is it the essence of co-regulation and what every parent needs as a horizon line to move toward, being present with their kids will regulate them. The more genuinely present you are in your life, the more you see that being present itself is on a continuum. There’s being present, then being more present, then being more present again. You can always drop your awareness down to include another subtle layer of experience until, in a way, you’re no longer taken by surprise by anything upwelling internally or externally.

And that presence expands to include a feeling of intimacy with a kind of spiritual feelings, I suppose, which I see very much not through an esoteric lens. I see it as the nature of real embodiment. It has that spiritual component—a sense of being connected to your life, your body, the world around you. And that’s just deep medicine.

Diane Dempster
I’m gonna take us back up out of the esoteric for a minute. One of the things you said that I think is a really great synopsis is fewer thoughts equals fewer problems. Yes, being present for our kids and downregulating and all that stuff—we can talk about that in a minute—but we all want to have fewer problems; we all want an easier life. As parents, how does the thought stuff play into this?

Jeff Warren
Oh my God.

Diane Dempster
Got an hour, three or five?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That’s great. Intuitive, right?

Jeff Warren
It’s a great question and utterly fundamental. It’s crazy how profound it is, and you can’t really know it until you have the experience of coming into, say, a retreat—or even a meditation sit—and, oh my God, you’ve got all these issues. They feel urgent; they have to be dealt with now, and your mind is telling you that story. Then you get settled, and that quiets down. There’s no more urgency. And guess what? They turn out not to be that much of a problem anyway. Nine outta 10 of them sort themselves out on their own. You were keeping them going in a state of frenetic anxiety in your own head. You don’t even realize—although even then, often we’re walking around with that without full awareness that it’s happening.

Jeff Warren
Almost more pervasive is what’s underneath: I think of it like the sound of the fridge in the kitchen. You’re hanging out and the fridge is humming away; you don’t even notice it. Then it goes off and the silence is shocking and dramatic. It makes you realize there had been this background hum. That’s what a lot of our minds are like. Even when we think we’re not working on a big problem, in the background there’s a hum of agitated pushing, pulling, planning, working out, not sure. I’ve had many experiences on retreats and through sitting where that cuts out and you realize there’s no problem. Truly, in the moment, there’s no problem. That is the refreshment of practice. It isn’t to say there aren’t problems in life—of course there are—but being able to reset your nervous system so it can have the experience of there not being a problem in the moment is so necessary. The longer you can do that, the more capacity you have when you come back into those problems.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
You’re not saying there are no problems. I want to be clear: what I’m hearing you saying is that when you can slow your brain down and yourself down to be present—to not have any problems in that moment—that nourishes your brain, your nervous system, your body, yourself, and your being, so that you’re better able to tolerate whatever else is happening in the outside world.

Jeff Warren
Absolutely better able to tolerate it—and better able to respond intelligently to it, as opposed to responding from inside your freakout, in which case you’re just going to create waves of reactivity in every direction. I call it the no problem—it is an experience of the moment of knowing you’re safe, you belong, you’re connected, and things are OK as they are. That creates the reset. Eventually—this is paradoxical—you can, through practice, begin to carry that sense with you into more and more of the world’s problems. You don’t have to retreat to a cave to have that experience. You’re able to be in a rather intense, problematic situation and keep a sense of self-possession or poise in the middle of it. That comes from grounded presence. It’s the same thing—the no problem bubble you start to carry with you inside the problems.

Diane Dempster
No, it makes huge sense. And I wanna take a stab at the brain science because if we’re stressed, overwhelmed, or agitated, our brain and our body see that as something that has to get fixed. This is a problem. This is an emergency—the red light is going off.

Jeff Warren
Cortisol sloshing through the system. Exactly.

Diane Dempster
And if we can notice that and figure out how to downregulate, the situation might still be a problem to be resolved, but we’re going to approach it from a very different place of consciousness because it’s not an emergency—a challenge to be addressed, but not an emergency. Is that—

Jeff Warren
Exactly. That’s exactly right. And not only are you more capable of coming up with a grounded, reasonable solution based on the actual evidence of your senses—versus the disaster scenario in your brain—there’s also a recognition that, one moment at a time, the mind thinks it needs to solve all the problems all the way down the line—problem A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all the way to Z—and it imagines the chess moves necessary to do that. But you can’t really know more than one or two steps down what’s going to happen, so it’s not a good use of your energy to try to game reality in that way. A quality of energy efficiency starts to come in: OK, one step at a time, one breath at a time, one moment at a time—this is the next thing to do. From this place of being more grounded and present, you can see how, from that orientation, all things become more manageable.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Um, yeah. Yeah, so many things are coming up, and what I wanna do, if we can, is take a quick break, and then we’ll come back and let you guide us through practicing this a little bit, because—to what Diane was calling out, what I was hearing you saying—there’s a lot of what we do in the world of neuro-informed coaching, this coach-approach, that parallels another vehicle for helping parents find the presence you’re describing. And when you can map over a two-minute moment that you’re going to bring to us in a few minutes back into this way of being in the world that’s about looking for being in the process of it instead of trying to fix it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
The impact of that is profound. Our guest is Jeff Warren, and we are talking about mindfulness—this mindfulness meditation. We’re talking about what happens when we give ourselves permission and a vehicle to calm down our nervous systems, and what’s available for us in our lives and for our families when we do that. Really. So, Jeff, you offered to take us through a little exercise. We’re gonna take you up on that.

Jeff Warren
Sure. I kind of specialize in trying to make meditation maximally accessible. For that, the important thing is: when you’ve got problems, you think you need solutions and you’re gonna go on the quest of learning more information about the things that you need. What I’m going to offer is the opposite of that—it’s simplicity. The first thing you need to do, even in a two-minute grounding or settling practice, is you’ve gotta disarm the mind. Don’t make this into a big deal. My invitation is: we’re really about to do nothing here. Truly, it’s nothing. You can do nothing with your eyes open or closed, and you can take a few slow, deliberate breaths.

The framing I want to offer is: you’re not entering some special meditative state, and you don’t need to focus on the breath or any of that. Imagine instead you just found yourself in a little eddy of free time—like you came home early from work and you’re on your front porch, or your fire escape, or a park bench—and there’s a little window of a few minutes where you don’t need to be anywhere else and you don’t want to be anywhere else. You’re just sitting and being human, and you’re breathing. You’re sensing the body sitting (or standing, if that’s the case). If you’re driving a car, obviously be aware of your environment—don’t lose touch with that—but you’re letting yourself be here, unadorned. You don’t need to get anything right or problem-solve anything; it’s about just sitting here being.

The mind will go, “I don’t know how to sit and be,” or, “Oh wait, this is it,” or, “I’ve gotta do this, this, and this.” That’s OK. Smile and let that be part of the experience because the mind has momentum. Then go back to being—you can’t not be. You already won this one.

It’s like you check that off: existence. You exist. You’re gonna fall outta existence if you don’t secure yourself with the right strategy here? It’s already a done deal. Just this pause. There’s something moving about this: you’re allowed to sit here and be as you are, without having to prove yourself—even to your meditation teacher or to yourself—as breathing. I’ll encourage people: hit pause on this podcast if you want to stay here for another few minutes, because it’s medicine—this little bit of downregulating. And of course, for some people there will still be lots of chatter, and it’s about noticing that and being OK with that, but finding a place to drop this into your day—2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes here and there. For me it’s indispensable. Welcome back to your life, to your existence. You didn’t go anywhere, but here we’re still.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
As I was listening, let me share real quickly. I remember a moment when I walked into my family room and my kids were all sitting there, and I was looking around for something they needed to be doing. This was when the kids were really young. There was this moment of “they should be doing something,” and then I went, “Wait a minute. They’re just hanging out with each other, and that’s OK.”

Jeff Warren
“Unstructured being,” they call it—and I forget who; I think it was Winnicott or someone—saying how important it was for kids to have time when there’s no demand on their system to be doing. It’s no different for adults. We just don’t give ourselves any time.

Diane Dempster
And there are two practical challenges with that. One is that our mind’s not going to let us do that, right? Of course there’s always something that we need—that would be practical challenge number one.

Jeff Warren
For our kids, too.

Diane Dempster
And then the other piece of it is that there is a practical aspect to this, right? We don’t want to pretend you aren’t busy parents with kids who are maybe tugging at your sleeve—feels like 24/7. Sometimes it’s about going, “OK, wait, I’m in the bathroom, the door is closed. If I take two minutes instead of four minutes, what can I do?” Or, “If I’m cooking dinner and they’re watching whatever they’re watching…” It’s about being here, and it’s what you’re describing: really dropping in under the thoughts. It’s such a woo-woo phrase, but it’s noticing that there’s something there besides just your brain spinning. I didn’t say this earlier, but one of the things I noticed for myself is I tried to do some walking mindfulness and awareness as I walk the street with my dog. There is a song—and it’s not always the same song—that constantly plays in the back of my head, mostly when I’m walking. Just that awareness that it’s going to be there—it’s like, “Oh wait, what’s the song today? Is there some secret code in the lyrics I need to pay attention to, or is it just a pretty cool tune I want to walk to today?” It’s that awareness that we aren’t our thoughts, and we can separate ourselves from that.

Jeff Warren
Exactly. And if you can notice the thought, then you’re not totally embedded in it. Over time, the more you do this in these little two-minute bits—or four minutes, or whenever you have a bit of time—the more you’re building the habit of space in your system, and you stop taking that urgency so seriously. But it’s true: it’s practically very hard when you’re a parent, so you have to do it in little bits here and there where you can. I know I often do it with my kids—not guiding them, but I’ll just do a little practice with them around. Once in a while I’m able to be seated and quiet; I have a kind of memory that’s in my system, so I’ll remember that and I’ll just… what I like to do is imagine I’m a place, like I don’t have an agenda. I’m this welcoming, safe space. I imagine I’m a place. It’s the same vibe; it has the same quality: I just sit and I just be. As soon as I do that, I notice my kids start to downregulate. It’s so underwhelming-sounding—the biggest challenge with meditation is the cognitive mind thinks it already knows it all and is totally unimpressed. This has nothing to do with that; it has to do with the simplest little shift, valuing that little shift, and learning to notice it more and more. It builds out from there, but it’ll never compete with the flashy ideas of the mind. That’s why the practice part of it is so indispensable.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I want to check in with both of you—and check in on your time, Jeff—because there are a couple more things we really wanted to talk about, and I think we might be able to extend this or do it in two episodes. If you’ve got maybe 15 more minutes?

Jeff Warren
Yeah, I’ve got 15 more minutes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK, because it’s not a surprise that it took 25 minutes to get here—because we needed the pause and the space to come into this space to be able to have some of the more intellectual part of the conversation that I think is also important. One of the things you said before we started talking, Diane, that you wanted to talk about was the connection between emotion and shame and some of this work around mindfulness—the presence—and I want to bring that in here because it’s… well, I think it’s so important for our community.

Diane Dempster
We haven’t— it’s the underbelly, right? We’re overwhelmed; we’re frustrated; and there’s an emotion in there that’s causing the agitation, which is making our mind spin—or whatever order of operations you believe for those two things. A big part of what goes on with the mind is attached to emotion. I know shame is one; fear is one. We talk about catastrophizing a lot in our community. Parents are worried about our kids and their future and everything else. So maybe talk a little about the role that emotion plays in this cycle, Jeff.

Jeff Warren
I mean, it’s huge. It’s an amplifier. The framing in Buddhism that I really like—many people may have heard of it—is called the “second arrow.” You have the initial challenge or insult—maybe a body discomfort or a thing that happened; there was a disconnect in some way—and then there’s the wave of secondary thoughts and ideas about it, which then trigger emotions. For example, shame: you’re with your kid, you get mad at your kid cuz they do something and you don’t catch it fast enough, and you say that thing, and then afterward there’s this wave of shame—“What a terrible parent you are.” Long after the situation’s over, that story is still going on in your brain. There’s literally a feedback loop between the feeling of “Oh my God, this happened,” and then the emotion of shame, and then the memories of things that happened in the past that trigger more and more feelings. And so it just triggers this cascade—it goes on and on and on—and it makes everything much more challenging. And now you’re much more quickly to get to a state of overwhelm or be in a state of reactivity from that place.

So there are different ways to address that dynamic. I know you two talk a lot about it in your various offerings. The classic meditation, the classic mindfulness ways to interrupt that chain: by just noticing it happen and paying attention to one part. I had a teacher who used to say, when you’re in a state of overwhelm or freakout like that, or a big, intense emotional intensity, what happens is you may have an inner visual of what’s going on; you have your inner talk (you have the thoughts); you have the emotional feeling of it—and they’re all amplifying. It’s like 10, 10, 10. It’s like 10 times 10 times 10. They’re all in this giant, huge load—whatever, 10 × 10 × 10 is 1,000. But if you can just zoom in—kind of divide-and-conquer—and, in those moments, just pay attention to one small part of this (just the inner talk that you’re giving to yourself, or just one part of the sensation in your body)…

Then you may have the same 10, 10, 10, but now it’s 10 + 10 + 10. They don’t amplify together. I’m talking about subjective experience here—inside subjective experience. When they all start amplifying together, that’s when we get to those states of total disaster situations. But if we can just focus on one part, we find out that actually we may be 10 outta 10 in our emotions, but that’s manageable—one breath at a time. And then, even from there, the more we do that, the more it begins to downregulate, the more space we can have. And, of course, the move there is not—you’re not trying to quash it. And when I say “get space,” I don’t mean push it over here (there are techniques for that). I mean more: you let it be here; you have compassion that you’re having this response—the self-compassion piece. You recognize it’s a normal thing that happens to every human being. You breathe; you feel the emotion. And just from that place, that whole cascade can start to— you basically interrupt the cycle. But you have to have the wherewithal to do it—and if not in the exact moment, then as soon as you can downstream. Sometimes I lose it, I missed it—then it’s recover faster; I can do this for myself later. Does that make sense?

Diane Dempster
It does. And I think the last thing you said is key for me, which is: this stuff isn’t easy. It’s not like you should magically go, “Oh wait, I’m having an emotion, let me downregulate.” Right. But the practice you gave earlier—where you’re just paying attention to what’s going on in your brain and your body—makes it easier for when those moments hit and you get heightened to either catch it before it happens, or catch it pretty quickly after it happens, to go, “Oh wait, I’m in that place again.”

Jeff Warren
Exactly. And you get sensitized to it through practice. You start to notice earlier and earlier kind of early-warning signals. You start to notice what the beginnings of feeling overwhelmed are like, or the beginnings of getting really—you know what your hotspots are—so you have much more awareness around that, so you can back off as needed. And, as you say, I’m providing an ideal overview. Real life is messy, but these tools are indispensable. I mean, everyone’s doing this anyway—it’s like you’re doing your best to do this anyway, and mostly just screwing it up (or at least I am). This is just about making it more conscious so you can apply it with more deliberateness.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
What we like to say very often, especially when we’re talking about emotional dysregulation or emotionality, is the goal is to reduce the intensity and the frequency. It’s not about eliminating it, because we’re humans having emotions. The goal is to minimize the ways in which they make us feel like they’re impossible, and to make them feel more possible to be with.

Jeff Warren
It’s so hard, because when you’re a busy parent, you’re a busy parent. But if you’re only ever trying to apply it in the moment when things are absolutely out of control, it’s gonna be really, really, really hard to do. That’s why if you can find enduring times that aren’t emergencies—you can find 10 minutes to do a seated practice. I started getting up at 6:30 before my kids wake up, before everyone else wakes up, just so I can do 20 minutes sitting, and I can connect to that kind of grounded sanity and presence. And then, because I’ve done that, it’s so much easier for me to find that in the day. Versus deciding, “Oh, I need to be able to find my inner Buddha while my kid is throwing yogurt at my face.” Right. Which happens almost every.

“Unstructured being,” they call it—I think it was Winnicott—saying how important it was for kids to have time when there’s no demand on their system to be doing. It’s no different for adults. We just don’t give ourselves any time.

Diane Dempster
And there are two practical challenges with that. One is that our mind’s not going to let us do that; there’s always something we need—that’s practical challenge number one.

Jeff Warren
For our kids, too.

Diane Dempster
And then there’s the practical aspect: we don’t want to pretend you aren’t busy parents with kids tugging at your sleeve—feels like 24/7. Sometimes it’s about, “OK, wait, I’m in the bathroom; the door is closed. If I take two minutes instead of four minutes, what can I do?” Or, “If I’m cooking dinner and they’re watching whatever they’re watching…” It’s about being here. And it’s what you’re describing: dropping in under the thoughts. It’s a woo-woo phrase, but it’s noticing there’s something there besides just your brain spinning. I didn’t say this earlier, but when I do walking mindfulness with my dog, there is a song— not always the same song—constantly playing in the back of my head, mostly when I’m walking. Just that awareness that it’s going to be there—“Oh wait, what’s the song today? Is there some secret code in the lyrics I need to pay attention to, or is it just a pretty cool tune I want to walk to today?” It’s that awareness that we aren’t our thoughts and we can separate ourselves from that.

Jeff Warren
Exactly. And if you can notice the thought, then you’re not totally embedded in it. Over time, the more you do this in little two-minute bits—or four minutes, or whenever you have a bit of time—the more you’re building the habit of space in your system, and you stop taking that urgency so seriously. But it’s true: it’s practically very hard when you’re a parent, so you have to do it in little bits where you can. I often do it with my kids—not guiding them, but with them around. Once in a while I’m able to be seated and quiet; I have a kind of memory that’s in my system, so I’ll remember that and I’ll just… what I like to do is imagine I’m a place, like I don’t have an agenda. I’m this welcoming, safe space. I imagine I’m a place. It’s the same vibe: I just sit and I just be. As soon as I do that, I notice my kids start to downregulate. It’s so underwhelming-sounding—the biggest challenge with meditation is the cognitive mind thinks it already knows it all and is totally unimpressed. This has nothing to do with that; it has to do with the simplest little shift, valuing that little shift, and learning to notice it more and more. It builds from there, but it’ll never compete with the flashy ideas of the mind. That’s why the practice is indispensable.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I want to check in with both of you—and check in on your time, Jeff—because there are a couple more things we really wanted to talk about, and I think we might be able to extend this or do it in two episodes if you’ve got maybe 15 more minutes.

Jeff Warren
Yeah, I’ve got 15 more minutes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK, because it’s not a surprise that it took 25 minutes to get here—we needed the pause and the space to come into this space to be able to have some of the more intellectual part of the conversation that I think is also important. One of the things you said before we started talking, Diane, that you wanted to talk about was the connection between emotion and shame and some of this work around mindfulness—the presence—and I want to bring that in here because it’s so important for our community.

Diane Dempster
It’s the underbelly, right? We’re overwhelmed; we’re frustrated; and there’s an emotion in there that’s causing the agitation, which is making our mind spin—whatever order of operations you believe for those two things. A big part of what goes on with the mind is attached to emotion. Shame is one; fear is one. We talk about catastrophizing a lot in our community—parents are worried about our kids and their future and everything else. So maybe talk a little about the role that emotion plays in this cycle, Jeff.

Jeff Warren
I mean, it’s huge. It’s an amplifier. The framing in Buddhism that I really like—many may have heard of it—is called the second arrow. You have the initial challenge or insult—maybe a body discomfort or a thing that happened; there was a disconnect in some way—and then there’s the wave of secondary thoughts and ideas about it, which then trigger emotions. For example, shame: you’re with your kid, you get mad at your kid cuz they do something and you don’t catch it fast enough, and you say that thing, and then afterward there’s this wave of shame—what a terrible parent you are. Long after the situation’s over, that story is still going on in your brain. There’s a feedback loop between the feeling of “Oh my God, this happened,” and the emotion of shame, and then the memories of things that happened in the past that trigger more and more feelings. It just triggers this cascade—it goes on and on—and it makes everything much more challenging. You’re much more quickly in overwhelm or reactivity from that place.

There are different ways to address that dynamic. The classic mindfulness ways interrupt that chain by just noticing it happen and paying attention to one part. I had a teacher who used to say: when you’re in overwhelm or freakout—or big, intense emotional intensity—you may have an inner visual of what’s going on; you have your inner talk (the thoughts); you have the emotional feeling of it—and they’re all amplifying. It’s like 10, 10, 10. Ten × 10 × 10 is 1,000. But if you can zoom in—divide-and-conquer—and in those moments pay attention to one small part of this (just the inner talk you’re giving yourself, or just one part of the sensation in your body)…

Then you may have the same 10, 10, 10, but now it’s 10 + 10 + 10. They don’t amplify together. I’m talking about subjective experience—inside subjective experience. When they all amplify together, that’s when we get to those states of total disaster. But if we focus on one part, we find out that we may be 10 outta 10 in our emotions, but that’s manageable—one breath at a time. From there, the more we do that, the more it begins to downregulate; the more space we can have. And the move there isn’t to quash it. When I say “get space,” I don’t mean push it over here. I mean: let it be here; have compassion that you’re having this response—the self-compassion piece. Recognize it’s normal. Breathe; feel the emotion. From that place, you interrupt the cycle. But you have to have the wherewithal to do it—and if not in the exact moment, then as soon as you can downstream. Sometimes I lose it; I missed it—then it’s recover faster. I can do this for myself later. Does that make sense?

Diane Dempster
It does. And the last thing you said is key for me: this stuff isn’t easy. It’s not like you magically go, “Oh wait, I’m having an emotion—let me downregulate.” But the practice you gave earlier—paying attention to what’s going on in your brain and your body—makes it easier when those moments hit and you get heightened to either catch it before it happens, or catch it pretty quickly after it happens: “Oh wait, I’m in that place again.”

Jeff Warren
Exactly. You get sensitized through practice. You start to notice earlier and earlier warning signals. You start to notice what the beginnings of feeling overwhelmed are like, or the beginnings of getting really— you know what your hotspots are—so you have more awareness and can back off as needed. I’m providing an ideal overview. Real life is messy, but these tools are indispensable. Everyone’s doing this anyway—doing your best and mostly screwing it up (at least I am). This is about making it more conscious so you can apply it with more deliberateness.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
What we like to say, especially when we’re talking about emotional dysregulation or emotionality, is the goal is to reduce the intensity and the frequency. It’s not about eliminating it, because we’re humans having emotions. The goal is to minimize the ways they make us feel like they’re impossible, and to make them feel more possible to be with.

Jeff Warren
It’s so hard, because when you’re a busy parent, you’re a busy parent. But if you’re only ever trying to apply it in the moment when things are absolutely out of control, it’s going to be really, really hard to do. That’s why, if you can find times that aren’t emergencies—you can find 10 minutes to do a seated practice. I started getting up at 6:30 before my kids wake up, before everyone else wakes up, just so I can do 20 minutes sitting and connect to that grounded sanity and presence. Because I’ve done that, it’s so much easier to find in the day. Versus deciding, “I need to find my inner Buddha while my kid is throwing yogurt at my face.” Right—which happens almost every.

Diane Dempster
That’s a great segue, cuz the other thing I want to talk about for a minute, Jeff, is our kids—and teaching some of these practices and modeling them for our kids. A lot of you listening have kids with big, giant emotions, and that’s really your challenge. We talk a lot about helping your kids with big emotions in our programming. A key part is knowing what tools for what time. If you’ve got a kid in a full-on meltdown, you’re going to handle it very— you aren’t going to tell ’em to take a few deep breaths because they might throw their yogurt at you. The question is: how do we begin to model this, practice this, integrate this in our family life so we can with complex kids… kids, kids?

Jeff Warren
Well, I know the two of you know a lot more about this than I do, but I’ll say what I do. When my elder kid—6—is having a big blowout, I stay right there: “I know you’re so mad; I get mad too.” Then we’ll go down and I’ll start beating the ground—boom, boom, boom—or I’ll… I normalize that these feelings are happening. I get him to talk about it. He can scream and rant, but I show him that I have this too, and I’m going to act it out. We also get a book of drawings and start to draw our feelings: “I’m feeling so mad,” and I’ll go rah around in a circle, and he’ll start scribbling his thing—just to let it come out in a more cathartic way. Nine out of 10 times, some version of that works. He’s allowed his blowout, and the momentum of the other activity catches it. He sees that I’m doing it too, and I say, “When I feel like this, I do this,” and I describe noticing how I’m feeling and what I’m doing to express the energy of that. Almost always, after a bit, he comes down. Then I can sit in front of him, look him in the eye: “Oh boy, that was a lot.” From a more regulated place, I regulate him. When I’m too triggered to do that, I trade off with my partner and then I come back in. I have a very intense nervous system myself, so sometimes I just need to check out for a couple minutes—or even 30 seconds—like, “OK…”

And it’s amazing. I get away for 30 seconds and it’s totally different. When I was right there with him, whatever he was feeling, I was feeling. Then I got 30 seconds away and I’m like, “Oh, what was that about?” I got caught up in this 5-year-old hurricane.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
What you’re describing is this sponge-like quality we have in our relationships, right? You feel them; they feel us. It doesn’t even always have to be verbal. If we are dysregulated, they feel that; and if they’re dysregulated, we feel it.

Diane Dempster
Absolutely. And you used the phrase “caught up in.” They’re dysregulated; they may be on the attack—attacking us and calling us names or being physical—and then we take it personally and escalate, and we end up in the hot mess. It’s like you notice your kid’s having a meltdown: “Oh.” It’s no different—like I have a new grandbaby and it’s, “Oh, they need a diaper change.” “Oh, my kid’s having a meltdown.” Same matter-of-fact energy.

Jeff Warren
And if you’re having a big reaction to it, it’s useful to go, “OK, why am I so outraged by this?” He’s freaking out—what in me is freaking out right now? He’s so angry—what in me is angry right now? It’s almost always reflecting: he’s reflecting me; I’m reflecting him. However intolerable he’s being on the outside, I feel that way on the inside. So I turn it around: “Hey, what’s angry in me right now?” And it’s like, “Oh yeah, there is this”—and it was there before he got angry. Or there’s irritability, or forcing, or strictness, or judginess, or harshness—something I had inside me that I didn’t even know I had, that he’s responding to. Direct it inward, have more awareness yourself, see it—then you’re no longer in the grip of it. And then he’s no longer in the grip of it—or at least as much. The answer is very much awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. What else would it be?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. We could talk for hours, and I’m gonna have to call the conversation, which makes me very sad because I have so many other thoughts—and maybe we can convince you to come back and continue, ’cause I have lots of other things I’d like to talk about. I’m sure you would too, Diane. But before we close the conversation: those of you who are listening may want to find out more about how you can learn from Jeff, follow Jeff. You can find him at Home Base with Jeff on Substack (homebasewithjeff.com); you can find him at JeffWarren.org; and his podcast is mindbodpod.com. So all of that will be in the show notes—plenty of ways to access him, find more, learn more, and be more with this beautiful presence of this human being that we’re enjoying so much. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Before we wrap, is there something we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure we address or highlight or hit, or is there something you have mentioned that you want to click on before we close?

Jeff Warren
Maybe I’ll just say: different practices—different strokes—work for different folks, and I’m a big believer in practice literacy. That’s my podcast, the Mind Bod Adventure Pod I do with Tasha—it’s all about taking different kinds of practices for a ride and taking the listeners with us to see what’s going to work for what kinds of people and what kinds of situations. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, particularly when you’re dealing with neurodivergent folks (of which I’m one) and neurodivergent kids. So: get curious. My motto at a retreat is “Being human takes practice.” And when I say takes practice, I don’t mean it in a worky, “eat your vegetables” way. I mean there’s a fun exploration in life of figuring out what works. There’s a huge amount of plasticity in how we are, and certain practices can support us, heal us, change us.

Jeff Warren
We get to explore that. Be open to different therapeutic modalities, different styles of meditation, different movement things—figure out what clicks for you. And I guarantee there are already things you know that click for you. There are things you do to regulate that are already practices, but you don’t really honor them as that. You think, “Oh, I gotta go take a bath,” or “I gotta have a nap”—it’s this guilty thing I do. I would say: back up from that, existentially underline it, protect it, call it a practice, honor it for what it is as one of your go-to ways of getting through this thing. To me, practice is really the answer. You don’t get to be born and just coast—there’s an element of learning to be deliberate about how to take care of ourselves and others that can be very joyful if you approach it with the right attitude. There’s some work—but, you know.

Diane Dempster
Oh, I like the idea of being able to label my Saturday afternoon nap a practice. I think that might be… oh yeah. So Jeff, before we close, is there a favorite quote or a motto that you’d like to share with our audience?

Jeff Warren
“Being human takes practice” is one. I have the Do Nothing Project I do on Sunday night—it’s about the medicine of doing nothing. Wherever you can find ways to do nothing, do less, even do nothing—see if you can enjoy the defiance, the juvenile defiance, in choosing to do nothing with a moment here and there. Those would be my mottos.

Diane Dempster
I love that. I love that. Yeah. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Jeff Warren
Awesome to be here. Thanks, Diane. Thanks, Elaine.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It has been a true pleasure. To those of you listening: take a moment and ask yourself, what’s your insight from today? What are you taking away from this conversation that you want to bring forward with you into your life? Very often we latch onto what we’ve heard in the last moments—so being human takes practice—maybe that’s what it is. But think about, in this whole conversation as we were talking about the essence of co-regulation and how our thoughts play in and the no problem—what are you taking away from today that you want to really bring forward with you into your life?

Diane Dempster
And, as always, thank you for what you’re doing for yourself and for your kids. At the end of the day, you make a difference.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Take care, everybody. Have a great week.