Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host Jolene. And with the Legal Learning Center, I help prospective law students graduate in less time with less debt and stress so they can be financially free and live the life theyu always dreamed as an attorney. If you want three free strategies right now, visit legallearningcenter.com/money. And if you’re applying to law school or about to, and you want an accountability partner who knows your schedule and helps you through it, one who can review your personal statement and give you hundreds of thousands of dollars in money saving tips, stay tuned for the release of Financially Free Aspiring Attorneys Accountability Course coming June 1st.
Now today’s guest is Jeff Bunn of The Mindful Law Group. He’s going to share with us how mindfulness and meditation can help us with our studies and career.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I came upon these various kind of practices, personal practices for myself, and began to apply them to our work, to the practice of law and found that while initially I kind of thought it was a right brain left brain, never the twain would meet kind of thing. I’ve come to learn for myself at least that the two circles of the practice of law and, you know, alternative personal practices like mindfulness or meditation really overlap a lot and one can inform and help the other in ways that were not necessarily obvious to me initially, but have grown to become very obvious. And I became interested in more of advocating for that connection.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
So how can mindfulness and meditation help a law student
Speaker 2 (02:05):
That as mindfulness and meditation can help lawyers in their daily practice and also be very useful for law students in terms of managing their own particular stresses or anxieties around the whole law school experience, you know, competing with peers, being you know, sparring with, or being judged by law professors. The whole idea of going through an exam and submitting oneself to the judgment of others is something that we can control. We put it a little bit of perspective around that, and if that helps people perform better, because I think that people who feel better generally do make better decisions and do generally perform more professionally or in the case of a student perform more effectively.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I know that obviously anxieties are very high in law school. I certainly had my first anxiety attack in law school. So practices that help calm the mind and calm the body are definitely needed and beneficial. So what are some techniques that you would recommend for law students to try and explore?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
The first, I draw a distinction in my mind that distinction between mindfulness and meditation, the mindfulness idea is just kind of being fully present and meditation is a means towards that. And so for me I engage in meditation to achieve or encourage myself to be as mindful to be as present as possible. So what does that mean? Meditation can mean so many things to so many people. We need to get past all of the associations and the connotations that we have with meditation, because the practice can be very different for different people. And we don’t all have to meditate like a monk. We can all take little shorter periods of time, learn relaxation techniques, learn basically to create a little bit of distance between ourselves and our thoughts or our emotions and be more effective as a result of that.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
There was a great quote that I loved very much between stimulus and response, there was a space and it’s in that space, we have an opportunity to respond rather than to react blindly react. And it’s in that space that we find our kind of humanity, our ability to deal with thoughts, to deal with emotions. And for me, that the practice of meditation is about kind of finding that space and making it just a little bit longer, a little bit wider so that I can be more skillful in responding to situations. The idea of meditation is what I refer to as a little bit of me time, it’s just time to kind of step back from the immediate pressures that are confronting me at a particular moment in time. Take a couple breaths because we want to, that’s another thing that I used to wrestle with a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
I used to believe that what seemed like complex or complicated issues for me had to be responded to by equally complicated or complex responses or strategies or answers. And I think that’s not the case at all, I think quite to the contrary, what might be very complex or complicated for us we can address or begin to address with some very simple techniques, some things as simple as taking a deep breath, which we all, I mean, that’s conventional wisdom 101, take a deep breath. It’s amazing how that can impact us both physically and emotionally. And it’s a way of intaking that breath, finding that space, and allowing ourselves a moment to kind of reflect, to be a little bit more skillful in our response and being responsive as opposed to reactive.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
What I was visualizing as you were speaking was, I think that’s so helpful for things like when you’re doing moot court, where you are on the spot, you’re being asked questions as if you’re in a trial setting and you want that perfect response you want to do well. And especially again, because that’s verbal versus your exam where it’s written. I mean, you can definitely sit there and take deep breaths before you start writing and that kind of thing to help get you through the question, make sure you’re focused, but I especially envisioned the moot court where you’re just standing there and you’re on show. Being able to take that deep breath before you react will result, I think in a much better answer, or at least sounding better, even if you already have that answer in your head, just sounding better.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
So that makes a big difference. I can remember. That’s funny, that’s, that’s a wonderful example because I was a moot court guy, and I remember my first court exercise, I was so cool. You know the batting order and I was like the last person. And you can see, because you’re sitting at council’s table, you can see whoever’s standing at the podium when the red light goes on and I mean, you gotta, you gotta wrap it up. You got a minute. I was like way cool. I was like, Mr. Laid back. I had it all in the bag until all of a sudden the woman who was right or right in front of me, the red light went on. All of a sudden my tie started shouting on my chest. I was having a panic attack.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I was hyperventilating. It was just crazy. And that was the very first time that for me, I realized I need to anticipate these kinds of situations, they happen. I can’t control them necessarily, but what I can do is arm myself with some strategies. Breathing is like 101, very fundamental strategy. Instead of like locking up, give yourself, give ourselves something to do. It’ll help, may not remedy the situation, this is a very tense moment, no matter what, but it helps. And it, it always helped me.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
At least, I think most of the lawyers or men or women who are trained to be lawyers are a little, have a little bit of, or a lot of, the control freak in them. We need to have something to do. So. I think it’s really important. It’s what wellbeing and mindfulness and meditation do is they give us strategies. The other thing is self-compassion give yourself a break. You need to know, again, getting back to your example of like a moot court, maybe your response, isn’t going to be like, you know, spot on. Maybe it’s not going to be quite as articulate as if we were back in our room you know, writing the answer as opposed to like giving it, as long as we credit ourselves for having done the best we can do in a difficult situation and say, that’s okay, I’m gonna give myself a little break, but I could, could’ve said this. I could have said that I could have used this word or that word, but you know what we did Okay. We did a good job.
And if you don’t give yourself a break, nobody else will, I can tell you that. So learning to give one’s self, a break to show oneself, a little love and smile as opposed to like, you know, hand ringing in the head and body and doing all the other stuff that we were inclined to do, these are all, I think, incidents of a mindfulness and meditation practice. Self-Compassion and then the ability to give oneself a break is something that is so needed.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
And it does come in time. You know, the ROI is not as immediate necessarily as some other things, but the return will come to us. If we kind of stick with it, it’s like a lot like exercise. I think a meditation, whatever that becomes for anyone is their way of like getting a workout in and that, and that’s how you create muscle memory. Again, another kind of nod to the physical fitness thing. And through them muscle memory, we’ve learned to deal with some of the thoughts and emotions that, that plague us and then render us less effective than we normally are.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah. I saw on your website, meditation can help with memory specifically, how does that work?
Speaker 2 (11:54):
So the idea of taking you know, a monk and having him or her meditate and take pictures through MRI and watch what parts of the brain fire and how they respond to certain thoughts or disciplines or pictures or whatever it might be. And it’s as a result of that, becoming a more kind of medically definable and verifiable practice. So the, the idea, again, of just like, you know, if we’re running or pumping iron in the gym, we’re going to see a physical result. There is a mental or emotional result that comes through meditation and it, one of the results is instead of muscles or breath, capacity to run it’s the mental or emotional capacity to process various information or thoughts or emotion in a way that’s more constructive and it gives us a little bit of space again, to think through the things we need to think about.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
As lawyers we’re so stuck in, I need proof. I want to see the evidence and it has to make logical sense to me before I ever use it. So that’s great because if that kind of information is out there with MRIs and just, you know, direct line a little bit more direct, it just helps a few more people maybe start practicing that mindfulness.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I totally agree and the great challenge is that in some respects the ROI is longer. It takes more time to kind of evidence itself than it does in the case of you know, building a better widget that might be obvious and apparent for practices like a mindfulness or meditation. It just takes more time. And the changes are a little bit more subtle. They’re not measurable in the same way, but I think they’re measurable nonetheless. And that matters to lawyers, the National Task Force, which now has a new name. They do a really good job of kind of breaking down the different stakeholder groups, the law students, lawyers, judges, bar associations, the whole thing. And they, they talk about what wellbeing really is. And they do it in a way that for me, really really touches it really resonates because it’s not one thing.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
They define wellbeing in terms of professional, intellectual social, spiritual, emotional, and physical, I think all those are different aspects of everybody’s life. And if we can find some grounding in one or more of those areas, then we’re going to be more or less well. And we’ll be back to my point, we’ll be feeling better about ourselves, about other people. I think that, as I said before, and I say again, I think better people exercise better judgment and give better advice. So that’s a really important thing for us all to know.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
I’ve seen it in the practice of law where definitely some of my opposing counsels, especially could use a little bit of that pausing, the calmness, just that moment. And that would just help all of us be more well, because then we wouldn’t have to react to that anger or aggression and, and the entire practice of law. If people were just a bit calmer.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Quite frankly, that was a contributing factor to my desire to, or decision rather to retire, I just didn’t want to deal with that aggravation, be the change that you want to see in the world. So to your point yeah, wouldn’t it be nice, I said to myself many, many times if opposing counsel wasn’t such a jerk, or the judge wasn’t such a jerk, but, you know, people, we don’t like lawyers in particular, but people in general, don’t like to be lectured to. They don’t like to be told that we’re a jerk. It’s like, that’s going nowhere very fast.
So what you do is just be the change you model that person model the response model, the behavior that you want them to adopt and hope that they will see that. And consciously or unconsciously begin to adopt that themselves, this idea of civility and professionalism, and all really kind of comes down to the same thing and being civil is just learning to disagree without being disagreeable. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a different point of view. Of course we do, but how we express that is really, really, really important. It really is.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
I can definitely testify to that. There are people that I was working with that in my industry, that I was told they were a jerk and I didn’t even realize it because I just didn’t respond. And so they had nothing to continue to, I guess, be a jerk with. So they just calmed down. And so before I even realized that they were supposed to be a jerk, we were, you know, doing just fine.
I had another guy who was screaming and yelling and I just kind of was like, no, come sit down. Let’s just chat, let’s work this out. And he kept yelling and I kept saying the same thing. And finally about three or four times later, he finally just sat down in a heap and just said, it’s so tough. And he was just like letting it all out on me. And it was just hilarious. So I have definitely seen that where if you don’t react, if you just, you know, whether it requires you to take that deep breath or just pause for a minute before you respond, it can make a huge difference in your relationships with opposing counsel, how you manage your cases. And certainly obviously that goes into law school as well.
Now, do you have a meditation example that you could give us today?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Sure, of course. A quick one too which is a favorite of mine and it’s called Metta meditation. It’s basically kindness or loving kindness. Whatever that means. I think for me, what it means is again, kind of see yourself, which then allows me to be more civil with other people. So Metta meditation is I think, a great way of kind of messaging consistently and persistently to ourselves, you know, words or notions that are generally kind that allow us in time to kind of adopt that view or to adopt that mentality.
And hopefully again, hopefully it translates to other people. So if people will first kind of getting physically comfortable, you know, put feet on the floor, rest your hands on your lap or on your knees, and try to sit erect, not stiff, but erect in a way that’ll help facilitate comfortable breathing. And just think if, if you’re comfortable closing your eyes or down to the floor and repeat silently to yourself after me. May I be happy.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I find ease in my life. This is a meditation that we can repeat to ourselves if it’s a kind of meditation. This may I be happy, can be translated into, may you be happy. And I can think of people who I really am fond of and, and mean that sincerely just reflexively. It’s just what I mean. I can think of somebody who, I don’t like, which is a little bit trickier, but extend those same kind of wishes, the extends of yourself, to people who we are kind of naturally attuned with. And then we extend that same wish to somebody that we really don’t like. It’s really kind of an interesting thing. And then we, you know, the practice can go to larger groups like a law firm or a law school or a class, and you know, you can get as big or as little with that as you want, but it’s not something that is scripted.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
It can be stated in lots of different ways, but may I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I find ease in my life. Bears some thought. And for me, it’s very thought provoking at least. And I think over time, again, getting back to the kind of messaging thing, because I used to think that something like that, the Metta meditation was not really my cup of tea. I wasn’t really into that. And when I would hear somebody go through these different thoughts, different phrases, I would reflect what we think to myself, what a bunch of hooey that is. But again, in the context of, for me, this really occurred to me recently in terms of the political race, the idea of messaging, if one hears something consistently, again and again and again, and again, one begins to adopt that or become more comfortable with that message. And this is a way I think meditation is a way of messaging to ourselves and various thoughts that bring out conditions or qualities that make us a little bit more forgiving of ourselves and also make us more effective in our tests. Say, as a result of that, all the things that we have to do, all the interactions that we have with other people begin like dominoes begin to fall.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
I noticed the difference, even just in those 20 seconds that we did the meditation.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I mean, that’s a quickie, that’s a real quickie Jolene. And that, again, back to that the point I made before, about meditating like a monk, well, you don’t have to, if you want to, and you have time to if there’s a day of the week, if it’s a, you know, a weekend, for instance, if we want to do that, then we can extend, but it can the time when, in which we, you know, we meditate, but throughout the course of the day, you know, if it’s a half hour as in one sitting, or if it’s a half hour broken down into 10 different moments where just single statutes it’ll help, it’ll help us all.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That’s great. We’ll be sure to link it all up. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. And let’s just keep banging the drum and take care of ourselves people.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Before we get into my top takeaways, a quick word from our sponsor Juno, if you need to take out student loans, check in with Juno first. Juno can often offer law students 1%-2% lower interest rates than the federal government and with no origination fees and oftentimes cash back as well. Visit advisor.legallearningcenter.comjuno for more information.
My top takeaways from our chat with Jeff. Number one, meditation means many different things. Just learn relaxation, techniques, distance your thoughts and emotions. It’s basically me time. Number two, between stimulus and response. There’s a space. And in that space, we have an opportunity to respond rather than react. So our goal should be, if we are reactive, to try to widen that gap, to lengthen it. Number three self-compassion is important. Give yourself a break. Number four, be the change you want to see model the calm.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
All right, a full transcript is available at legallearningcenter.com/the mindfullawgroup. Show notes are available there as well. Tune in next week we will speak with Marriott Clardy Davis. She left law school in the middle of her second year to work on her mental health. She’s going to share her experience as well as her journey in learning her unique learning style for the bar exam. If you’ve ever had any problems with your mental health or have any learning differences, you need to hear her story. As always, if you learn something today, please like, share, comment, subscribe so that this show is more visible to others and can help those who may need it. Thanks.
