Kim is the author of Mindfulness for Warriors. Empowering First Responders to Reduce Stress and Build Resilience, an informative and inspirational book with tools useful to all of us for reducing stress and improving overall health.

From Grief to Compassionate Action

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

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The following is a taste of my conversation with Kim:

Q: So, you’ve finished the book, you send it off to the publisher, and what’s your crazy wildest dream about the impact it would have?

Kim: My crazy wild dream regarding the impact of this book is that first responders, active military, veterans, and others worldwide would stumble upon this book and it would just crack them open to the possibilities of integrating some holistic wellness or holistic healing tools so that they can begin to help themselves because traditionally, stoicism and suffering in silence is the order of the day.

Q: There’s such a stigma associated with admitting to weakness or emotional instability. It’s a stigma at the societal level, but it seems especially so for first responders. Why in your experience is this especially prevalent for this group?

Kim: I think for law enforcement, specifically, their biggest fear is that their employer will deem them unfit for the job if they admit to any mental or emotional difficulties at all.

Q: You write that Brenda, one of the law enforcement officers you interviewed, asked her therapist, , “Am I too broken to be fixed?” How do you think about the role of experiencing flat out brokenness in healing processes?

Kim: This is one message that I hope will be gleaned from this book, and that is, no one is permanently broken. Nobody is too broken to be fixed. You carry wounds and the wounds we carry mentally and emotionally on the inside are not so different from the wounds that we experience externally. And there’s no shame in healing those wounds.

When asked if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Kim says, “Well, my message to everybody, anybody who will listen to me is it is time for us as a society to stop only focusing externally and to begin to turn our awareness to our own internal landscape.”

About Kim:

Kim Colegrove, author of Mindfulness for Warriors, is a 40-year veteran of meditation, the founder of Pause First: Mindfulness for First Responders and the creator of The Pause First Academy – Online Resilience Training for Frontline Workers.

Colegrove is the widow of a first responder who died by suicide. She previously taught mindfulness in corporate settings such as Garmin International, United Way, Department of Veterans Affairs, and The National Court Reporters Association. After her husband’s death, Kim turned her full attention to helping first responders cope with stress and trauma.

By pulling from her own life experience and applying her relatable, mainstream style, Kim developed curriculum first responders could trust. She’s been filling classrooms since 2017 and she now leads a team of instructors, including military veterans, active and retired first responders, and a trauma specialist.

Find Kim on social media:

Website: https://pausefirst.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8rVKWm3MLsQxtks5Zh_EFg?view_as=subscriber

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pausefirstmindfulness/

Kim’s Book:

Mindfulness For Warriors: Empowering First Responders to Reduce Stress and Build Resilience

Book Mentioned in the Interview:

Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon. 

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

 Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:

Interviewer: Kim, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Kim: Thank you for having me.

Interviewer: So I’d like you to begin by telling us a bit about your journey from widow to warrior and what led you to write your book.

Kim: I was teaching mindfulness in corporate settings for several years, until 2014. And in September of 2014, my husband, David, retired from a 30-year law enforcement career. And less than three months later, he took his own life. So it took me several months to sort of get my legs under me and figure out what in the world had happened to my husband and what had just happened to our life. We had so many plans and he seemed ready to retire. He had been working on a new business plan for two years with a business partner in St. Louis and they were ready to roll out that business. He had worked in law enforcement for 30 years, but he had a master’s degree in business management. So he seemed ready to retire. And David’s death led me on a journey of discovery about stress and trauma and specifically how trauma impacts law enforcement and other first responders.

And the more I learned about that, and the more I realized how negatively impactful first responder work is on individuals and their lives, the more I felt compelled to do something to help in some way. So I turned my attention from teaching mindfulness and meditation in corporate settings to trying to figure out how to work with first responders. So that was sort of the journey that led me to working initially with police officers. And then that quickly led to firefighters, EMS, paramedics, EMTs, and also social workers and other mental health professionals. So that was sort of the long and winding road that led me to this work. And once I learned a little bit more about it and started to meet other first responders that had suffered similarly to David, I really wanted to write a book about this because when I decided I was going to teach cops how to meditate, everybody told me that would be a dead end road.

Interviewer: I can only imagine. So, yeah.

Kim: I mean, everybody said, “You will never get cops to meditate.” So I set about trying to figure out how to bring this somewhat new age-y, edgy sort of practice to cops. And so the book just started to formulate. And I thought, “People need to know this. People in this work that are traditionally a little more conservative and maybe wouldn’t be as open to sort of more holistic healing modalities, they need to understand the science behind this.” So my books sort of started to form. I started to take notes. And I realized after I started writing it, I realized it was really going to be about these nine first responders that I interviewed for the book.

Interviewer: So you’ve finished the book, you send it off to the publisher, and what’s your crazy wildest dream about the impact it would have?

Kim: My crazy wild dream regarding the impact of this book is that first responders, active military, veterans, and others worldwide would stumble upon this book and it would just crack them open to the possibilities of integrating some holistic wellness or holistic healing tools so that they can begin to help themselves because traditionally, stoicism and suffering in silence is the order of the day.

Interviewer: Yes, yes. What a wonderful dream. So you’ve listed a number of people or groups for us whom you include in the first responder group. Would you speak a bit about how you think about who qualifies as a first responder?

Kim: Sure. So I guess as my work progressed, I sort of broadened my idea of who my audience really was, and started to think of it more as warriors than just first responders. And sometimes, a warrior mentality can have a bit of a negative connotation, especially in the climate in the world right now. But in the book, I clearly define who I think of as being a warrior. And so that’s how I framed my work. So we actually include a lot more…several more professions than just the traditional first responder professions. So originally, I thought of law enforcement, fire, emergency medical services, those were really the…dispatchers, of course, included in that. I sort of broadened that. So I really think of it more as for warriors, these are people who are on the front lines and really give their life in service of others or devote their professional lives in service of others and do not take very good care of themselves traditionally because they’re so focused on service of others.

Interviewer: Yeah. And this whole season of this podcast is on service. And so that makes your book and your story so central to it. So let’s also clarify a bit so we’re all on the same page about PTSD. It’s a mental health condition. It’s sometimes triggered by experiencing or often witnessing a horrible event. But not everyone with PTSD has been through a dangerous event and not everyone who’s experienced a terrifying event has PTSD. So just to orient us and get us on the same page, would you describe what PTSD means for you and maybe give us an example or two from your book?

Kim: Sure. Well, when I speak to groups, considering the people that I’m talking to, police officers, firefighters, dispatchers, people who have really been down in it, in the work they do, I talk to them about posttraumatic stress as an experience that many, many people have. PTSD is a diagnosis. And for some of them if I only speak about PTSD, they will mentally shut down because they don’t want to be associated with a disorder. Others have been diagnosed with the disorder and they understand it in a different way. So I really talk about PTS or posttraumatic stress and point out to them that a huge part of their career has been being exposed to and impacted by the stress and trauma of others. And so that’s really how I frame it. That’s sort of how I talk about it in the book. And that’s definitely how I approach it in my trainings. I am not a clinician or a therapist, and so I don’t get into PTSD very deeply because I feel like it’s above my paygrade to discuss the diagnosis.

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. And you make a very important distinction between PTS and PTSD. Thank you. So you write a lot about the stigma that’s associated with admitting to weakness or emotional instability. I think it’s a societal…it’s a stigma at the societal level, but it seems especially so for first responders. Why in your experience is this especially prevalent for this group?

Kim: I can speak most specifically to law enforcement because that was my experience with my husband. He was a police officer for eight years and I believe those were the eight years that really negatively impacted him. And he held on to all of the stress and trauma from those eight years in a patrol car on a midnight shift. He held on to all of that and he never worked with it or worked through it or processed it. And so, I believe he then carried that throughout the rest of his life and the entire rest of his career. When he went on to be a federal investigator he left police work and what was still police work.

Anyway, I think for law enforcement, specifically, their biggest fear is that their employer will deem them unfit for the job if they admit to any mental or emotional difficulties at all. And I’ve had many veteran law enforcement professionals tell me over the years, confide in me that throughout their career when they would encounter a specifically difficult crisis or event on the job, and they would go to their supervisor, they would basically be told, “If you can’t handle this job, there’s the door.” And so they learn to keep it to themselves and literally suffer in silence.

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. And an associated theme is shame. You talk a lot about the first responders you interacted with feeling shame. Would you say more about why and why this is so harmful?

Kim: There are so many layers to this shame that they carry and it also depends on what they’ve encountered in their careers. For my husband, his first year as a police officer, he was 21 years old.

Interviewer: Such a child.

Kim: Oh, my gosh, yes. My son is 25 now and I just have such a hard time imagining him at the age of 21. But my husband was being shot at and got in a full shootout and ended up shooting and killing the person as a 21-year-old police officer in his first year. And he was put on administrative leave and there was an investigation and he was cleared because the individual shot first. There were many witnesses. And it was called suicide by police. So the person was a known problem in the community and had had many altercations and encounters with police.

Anyway, my point about that is that was a very serious trauma that my husband never processed or dealt with. He carried a tremendous amount of shame around the entire incident. And for him personally, I can tell you, he never got over taking a human life, even though he did it in the line of duty using all of the training he had received, and basically did what they trained him to do. And he was in fear of his own life, hunkered down being shot at, but he carried a tremendous, tremendous amount of shame around that. And then he knew over the years that anxiety and depression were issues for him. He struggled. He bounced in and out of the [inaudible 00:13:03]. He would have very good patches where he felt pretty good and was fairly healthy.

And then the anxiety, depression would creep in. And he carried a lot of shame around that too because he felt unwell and that he didn’t want anybody to find out. Of course, his employer, certainly he didn’t want his employer to find out that he dealt with any of that. And that breaks my heart for all of these people because whether they are police officers, emergency medical technicians, firefighters, they’re carrying so much mentally and emotionally, but they’re terrified to be deemed mentally or emotionally unfit for their job. And that just creates an unfortunate cycle of shame and silent suffering.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. And brokenness. You write that Brenda, one of the law enforcement officers you interviewed, asked her therapist, and I just I wrote it out on a sheet of paper as I was reading the book because it’s just such a sad question, “Am I too broken to be fixed?” she asked her therapist. I personally have a very strong belief that it’s in confronting our brokenness that opportunities for healing emerge. In fact, the subtitle of my new book, soon to be released is “A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness.” So my question for you is how do you think about the role of experiencing flat out brokenness in healing processes?

Kim: Well, I got goosebumps hearing you say those words. I heard Brenda say them. I wrote them. I know they’re in the book. But again, when you said those words, I got goosebumps because it makes me so sad. And I can tell you I’ve spoken to many, many, many, I’ve worked with thousands of first responders now, and I’ve spoken personally to so many who feel very, very broken and too broken to be fixed. It’s epidemic level. And this is one message that I hope will be gleaned from this book, and that is, no one is permanently broken. Nobody is too broken to be fixed. You carry wounds and the wounds we carry mentally and emotionally on the inside are not so different from the wounds that we experience externally. And there’s no shame in healing those wounds. But that was so poignant and really such a gut punch…

Interviewer: It is a gut punch exactly.

Kim: …when Brenda shared that with me and I thought, “Gosh, this is something that we need to address. This is something that I want a lot of eyes to read, these statements.”

Interviewer: Yeah. And it seems to me that it is in fact accepting our brokenness that allows us to heal. And so it’s a beautiful thing. The cracks is where the light comes in, right?

Kim: Yes, yes. Yes. And no human being should think they’re invincible or they’re supposed to be invincible.

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. So, Kim, at one point, in your book, you share what a psychologist said to a first responder who was suffering after experiencing trauma and the psychologist said, “You are not addicted to adrenaline. You are addicted to relevance, to knowing you’re making a difference in the world.” One of the issues we’re exploring during this season about service is the potential dark underbelly of what I’m calling a savior complex. It’s service that comes from the best intentions but the savior complex can contaminate the service undertakings in a way that leads to unexpected and negative outcomes. Based on your experience and your research, do you believe there’s a point at which the addiction to relevance gets in the way of what I would say is healthy service?

Kim: In my experience, there are people who are drawn to a purpose-driven or a mission-driven way of living and drawn to work in service of others. I have witnessed and I’ve experienced on my own to a much lesser degree the potential that you can sort of get stuck in the fixed, say, rescue mindset…

Interviewer: Yes, well said.

Kim: …and live therefore in a little bit of denial around the care that you yourself need and so that you… An individual sometimes then will only focus on service of others. And I suppose to your question, you sort of could get addicted to that relevance if it’s only external and you’re not also fixing, rescuing, and saving yourself in the process, taking care of yourself in the process.

Interviewer: Well said. Yes. You’ve written that you believe that the sharing of our stories about suffering, about injustice, if we share in an honest and vulnerable way that you believe it’s the single most important catalyst for change. What do you think makes our stories so powerful?

Kim: I think as human beings we really want to be seen and validated. And when someone shares their story with us and we recognize an element of it or we have experienced similar, we feel that palpable human connection, that, “Ah, me too. Oh, you too? Me too.” And it helps you to feel seen and validated and that is never going to happen unless some of us are willing to be vulnerable enough to tell our honest stories.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. It’s been so interesting to me over the course of this season and talking to people about service how often stories come up as such an important catalyst. Dr. Ira Byock who wrote “Dying Well” spoke with me about the importance of stories at the end of life and in the process of dying and growing and changing in the process of dying and how important stories are in explaining and describing what that is, that there’s no other way for us to really understand that process other than through the stories. And his book is basically a series of stories, not unlike your own.

Kim: I think the telling of stories and the listening to stories are both equally healing.

Interviewer: Good point. Yes. So you make the point over and over and in different ways that our law enforcement officers don’t receive sufficient support in dealing with emotional traumas they face every day. And naturally, this takes me to George Floyd’s death last month at the hands of a police officer. And just to orient our listeners, we’re having this conversation during the first week of July in 2020. Understandably, demonstrations and protests against racism, against police brutality have been held. But, Kim, you must understand better than most of us the stressors and the lack of support that may have contributed to this kind of unacceptable behavior, and without at all condoning the brutality of this horrific event. Would you share with our listeners what you’ve learned about the pressure cooker these first responders are often in and most especially address the lack of support in dealing with it?

Kim: Well, this could be a very long conversation because as we take different slices of society and examine them, so the community that is up in arms right now and the law enforcement slice and the media slice, all these different groups that are sort of pitted against each other, but there’s a commonality amongst all of these groups and that is trauma.

Interviewer: Yes.

Kim: And systemically and it isn’t just law enforcement, but we’re talking about law enforcement, systemically, there has been and continues to be a lack of attention to the mental and emotional well-being of law enforcement professionals. And it is being recognized now and it’s part of the reason why I wanted to do this work and I want to be a part of this national conversation about caring or taking care of the first responders who take care of us in society. So it’s difficult for me in the middle of this to really speak to this because I’m not anti-anything. I’m pro all of these groups. I am for all of these groups that are pitted against each other now.

So I understand what the community is going through and the protesters. I hear their message and I understand them and I don’t disagree with them and I’m not against them and by any means. I also work with a lot of law enforcement and police officers and I don’t want to speak to the system because, again, it’s above my paygrade, clearly there are some improvements that need to be made there, but so many of the police officers that I know personally, that are stellar human beings, they also believe there needs to be some improvements within the system. And my friends, the people I know personally, are also the ones that are ambassadors for and advocating for attention to the mental and emotional well-being of police officers. Because for all of us, for anybody, if you are carrying a tremendous amount of unprocessed trauma, you are not going to make rational and the best decisions in a crisis because of the way trauma impacts our brain and our bodies. So, gosh, it’s just such a big conversation.

Interviewer: It is. Yeah, go ahead.

Kim: In society in general, we have to do a much better job of taking care of the mental and emotional well-being of all of our citizens. Oh, gosh, I don’t know. It is really just such a big conversation. I could talk for two hours, but we don’t have that much time.

Interviewer: Right. Right. Right. And yeah. And you addressed exactly what I was asking about, the conversation is huge. And the slice of it that I wanted you to address is the lack of support that our first responders experience and of course this story is so much bigger than that. But that was the piece that I knew, that you know something about and I wanted you to tell us about it. So you did exactly that. I want to go to what is a painful subject and ask you to share with us some of the warning signs that David’s mental health was unraveling.

Kim: David battled with anxiety and depression off and on over the years. And typically like many, many people do, he would use alcohol to calm the anxiety and to help him de-stress at the end of the day. And I’ve learned in my work that that is prevalent and really causes a lot of problems. I believe what happened as my husband approached retirement of course, in hindsight, I can recognize red flags over the course of the year or so that he was planning for and moving towards retirement. I believe that several traumas from early in his life and early in his career and the eight years in a patrol car, impacted him so severely and he never received the attention that would have helped him process that trauma. So he carried a lot of mental and emotional baggage and a lot of unresolved trauma.

And I believe as he got close to retirement and leaving this job he had done for 30 years, it’s all he knew every day for 30 years, he left the house with a badge and a gun, he was an investigator, he knew that work. I believe the closer he got to stepping out of that and stepping into civilian life, that everything he had pushed down and shoved down over the years began to rush to the surface and he could no longer tamp that down. So he had a lot of nightmares. His nightmares always involved police stations, police cars, shootings, being shot at, being lost, you know, a lot of nightmares. Those began to ramp up towards the end. The anxiety about his new life, I think just got all ramped up and connected in with the totality of all of his anxiety. And he was never going to seek the kind of help that he needed because he didn’t want his employer to think that he was mentally or emotionally unwell. And by the time he retired, it was…it was too late by the time he retired.

Interviewer: Did you have conversations with him about this?

Kim: We had many conversations over the years about him addressing the issues that created the anxiety and the depression and the nightmares. And I think that he felt that he did deal with them as best he could. But we did a little bit of counseling and therapy over the years. We had a counselor that we would see individually and together as a couple to help us have a healthful household and relationship and run our household and our marriage. But what I noticed, and as I reflect back I really know this was the truth, he would accept the therapy and he participated. But if the counseling ever started to get really down into what the load he was carrying down in his heart in terms of past experiences, he would not allow himself to sink down into that. So he would only kind of counsel around the surface stuff. I know he was afraid to get into all of that trauma.

Interviewer: Yeah. Kim, thank you for so vulnerably sharing those pieces of your life. I’m sure that our listeners will benefit from that and so thank you. You write about suicide contagion. What is this and why does it exist?

Kim: Gosh, I didn’t know anything about this until my husband died. It is actually pretty common that when somebody chooses suicide, that others within that individual’s family or friend group or coworkers will then be more apt, more…

Interviewer: Prone to.

Kim: More prone I guess to also choosing suicide as an escape. And so I write in the book, and this is one of the most difficult things to talk about and that is that seven months after my husband died, my nephew took his life in the same way that my husband did. And that’s how I learned about suicide contagion. And so I do try and I speak to a lot of people who I know are silently dealing with this inner…this level of inner turmoil. And I know any group that I’m in front of that has been in the military or has worked as a first responder could potentially have thought about, could be thinking about, or will think about suicide at some point. And so I try to impart this information to them so they understand that if you make that choice, you might be unintentionally sending the message to others that that is an okay way to escape your pain. And it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Interviewer: Yeah, well said. So let’s talk a bit about the tools that you provide in your book and in your work. The tools that you list that people you interviewed used to find healing, were both traditional cognitive therapy and less traditional approaches like mindfulness and meditation. So for some of our listeners, meditation may sound like an Eastern religious cult of some sort. I personally have been a meditator for decades and I do appreciate the benefits. But let’s unpack that a bit for our listeners. Would you describe what you mean by meditation and why you believe it’s so important?

Kim: I would love to. I think one of my strengths or maybe one of my gifts in all of this is my ability over the years to communicate the benefits of meditation and mindfulness to people who would otherwise be skeptical and also to beginners. So I think of meditation as just a few minutes of uninterrupted silence each day. It allows you to sort of rest your brain and your body, allow your brain and body to settle, and it allows the busy analytical mind to settle and rest as well. And I try to remember to tell every group that I speak to and every class that I teach, meditation is not necessarily connected with or in opposition to any religion or spiritual philosophy. It can be but it can also be used as a standalone, sort of a brain training exercise for stress relief, and emotional regulation, and other benefits.

There’s a tremendous amount of research that point to the benefits of meditation as a viable stress reduction tool. There are also physical benefits attributed to meditation. So for people who are fearful about it or believe that it’s just for monks or intertwined with Eastern philosophy, I do like to…I just ask people to set their skepticism aside and allow me to explain to them the evidence-based benefits and how they can use it as just a daily healthy tool to self-regulate and manage stress. I say meditation and mindfulness are very powerful personal practices. Meditation is a daily exercise or a practice that helps cultivate mindfulness. And mindfulness is a state of being or a way of living, more tapped in to the present moment, to the here and now, and more present in your life.

Interviewer: So if the listeners are doing what I’m doing, as I listen to you, I have felt my body relax into my chair and I can feel the soles of my feet on the floor just listening to you speak and I’m hoping that our listeners will have the same experience. What’s the role of the breath in all of this?

Kim: Well, I say the breath is the body’s natural stress reliever. We have this built-in mechanism called the breath that when we use it on purpose, can help us settle and quiet our brain and body, our heart rate begins to slow down, and we feel a bit of a shift, a little bit of a relief from stress and tension when we use the breath. And so in the way that I teach meditation, we use the breath as our tool, our introduction that carries us into the meditation or it carries us into the mindful exercise.

Interviewer: Yes. So without getting too technical about it, can you describe some of the research that’s documented the effects of meditation on brain functioning?

Kim: Sure. I love to learn about this because I think it’s fascinating. There is a Harvard neuroscientist by the name of Lazar, I believe that’s how you pronounce it, L-A-Z-A-R. And some of her research is fascinating. There was a great study in 2005 and another one in 2011. And the synopsis of those is, and how this really applies to first responders and warriors, is there are two primary areas of the brain that I concentrate on in my classes and that is the amygdala which controls the stress response, the amygdala turns on the fight-flight-freeze, the stress response, and another area of the brain that’s very important, which is the prefrontal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functioning. So self-control, decision making. So in warriors and first responders and other frontline workers, the amygdala can become hyperactive and even enlarged over time because the job…

Interviewer: Uses that muscle.

Kim: Yeah, you encounter so many traumas and highly stressful situations and that amygdala just fires. So in these studies, what they found was with meditation and nothing else, with meditation alone, there was decreased activation in the amygdala and increased activation in the prefrontal cortex. And that’s fascinating.

If you think about a simple personal practice like meditation and practicing it on a regular basis, of course, it’s not going to fix your brain if you just do it one time, but it’s fascinating to think that that offers you the opportunity to allow a deactivation in the amygdala so that it’s not hyperactive, so that it wouldn’t turn on so quickly and so readily because what happens is that amygdala starts to fire when there’s not a critical incident or a threat or a traumatic event. Something small, like the kids leaving their shoes in front of the front door begins to cause that amygdala to fire. So some of that work that came out from that Harvard neuroscientist indicated that we can use meditation to sort of balance the brain in that way, deactivate that amygdala and sort of really activate… And they even discovered an increased gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Interesting…I mean it’s fascinating.

Interviewer: It is fascinating. And it’s scientific documentation of something that meditators know, but don’t know how to explain until scientists come in and help us out on that. Yeah. So do you have any thoughts about when traditional cognitive therapies are more beneficial and when meditation is or vice versa?

Kim: Well, I really feel strongly that we all need to enlist a whole host of holistic modalities to keep ourselves healthy and strong and fit. And I don’t think any one thing works well or best for anybody because we’re all so different. Like the nine first responders that I interviewed in my book, they all did use meditation and mindfulness, that was a commonality but they all found different tools that helped them. I have used cognitive therapy, talk therapy and counseling in my life extensively with unbelievable rewards. So I do recommend that. But I have talked to people who said they don’t prefer it or they didn’t feel like it worked for them. So I think it’s a combination.

I would recommend trying counseling and therapy. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a therapist that works for you. And I know that that’s why people give up. But, gosh, the tenacity of hanging in there and finding somebody you click with can really be a life changer. And then to use other tools like meditation and mindfulness and other skills and tools and practices to complement, that complements each other. What we have to stop doing as a society is just living externally focused in this whatever is our version of survival mode. That isn’t working.

Interviewer: Yes. And it’s so wonderful you talk about them as being complementary rather than mutually exclusive as some people may view them on the surface. So that’s great. I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning when you would get reactions like, “You’re going to get cops to meditate?” What were some of the ways that resistance showed up?

Kim: Oh, gosh, oh, well. I begin a lot of my classes standing in front of a roomful of people with their arms crossed, for one thing, because maybe it’s mandatory training in service training, or they’ve been voluntold to show up. There are a lot of preconceptions about meditation being hippie dippie, weirdo, for monks and Buddhists. And so I had to dispel some of that in the beginning. I think when I share my story about David, that cracks a lot of people open because they see themselves in the story. They relate. And they are suffering to some degree and in survival mode. And then I think my approach, I have extensive training…my parents had me trained in transcendental meditation when I was 10 years old in 1976.

Interviewer: Yeah, that’s also the meditation form that I use.

Kim: Yeah, so that’s not really what I practice anymore and it’s not what I teach, but it certainly was the foundation for me that helped me develop a practice, that led me to studying other techniques and then ultimately helped me create the methodologies I ended up using to teach other people but… So I have a lot of experience working with healers and all kinds of things in my personal life. But I teach meditation in a very straightforward, mainstream way using plain language and I think that’s what appeals to this group.

Interviewer: Yeah, and certainly David’s story, I could see how that would be extremely powerful that you’re not just talking about some theoretical idea, that there’s a real story here that they can relate to. Yeah.

Kim: Yes. And I want them to know, “You don’t have to raise your hand or come and talk to me. I know a whole bunch of you in here are struggling. I know you struggle with anxiety and depression and sleepless nights, insomnia, nightmares, guilt, shame. I know this and I want to offer you some tools that you can use to help yourself. And if you could just set your preconceptions aside.” And I think they understand that, they get that, then they appreciate that. Yeah. And it helps them set their skepticism to the side and open up to something new. They’re smart people. It’s just opening up to something new. And honestly, the hecklers are few and far between now. I find this audience just really being open. They want to feel better and they are open to holistic alternatives.

Interviewer: So you’ve seen a change over time in their receptiveness?

Kim: Yes. I’ve been teaching this class since 2017 and in just 3 short years, I’ve seen a big turnaround and some openness in the leadership as well.

Interviewer: That’s great.

Kim: Really wanting to bring mental and emotional healing to their people. Yeah.

Interviewer: We’ve talked about suicide contagion. I’m wondering, is it possible that mindfulness might also be contagious?

Kim: Gosh, you know, it’s what I see with a lot of the people that I work with. I work with another organization locally in Kansas City where I live called The Battle Within. This is a five-day retreat in nature that…for combat veterans, active military, first responders. We’ve had a lot of medical personnel come through. Five days in nature. This program was created by a combat veteran and it is mentored by warriors, first responders, veterans that have been through that program. And my point here is, when they go through the program, they learn meditation and mindfulness. In fact, on day one in the morning, I’m one of the first instructors they encounter. So we welcome them and then we make them sit down and meditate. And a lot of them are hesitant in the beginning.

But the ones who really understand what meditation and mindfulness, what’s available, and they understand the evidence-based benefits and they begin to use it, and they take it home, those people, they really start to make some waves because they step forward as ambassadors of these tools, and they’re not shy and they’re not afraid and they’re not embarrassed and they’re…nothing. They say, “Hey, I started meditating. I thought it was weird too. Now I use it daily. And here’s the benefits I’ve gathered.” And I’m starting to see those types of leaders emerge, and they start to make it okay for the others.

Interviewer: I love this because it’s the mindfulness waves that are crushing up against suicide waves. And it’s not just something you’re doing at an individual level, but that it’s really creating a shift, a very huge mind shift. And I love that.

Kim: Me too.

Interviewer: So, Kim, if there were one last thing that you’d like our listeners to hear, something maybe we haven’t covered, or even if you want to reiterate something we have, what would that be?

Kim: Well, my message to everybody, anybody who will listen to me is it is time for us as a society to stop only focusing externally and to begin to turn our awareness to our own internal landscape. We have so much more power over our own internal landscape than we might realize. And meditation and mindfulness, while they aren’t the end-all, be-all, they are very powerful personal practices that any individual can use to manage their own stress, learn better emotional regulation, and to also learn more about who you really are or allow for who you really are.

Our mental and emotional health have got to begin to matter as much as everything externally that we think is so important. And so I really believe that every person on this planet needs to learn about and practice some kind, some form of meditation or mindfulness each day. And it can be just as simple as a few dedicated minutes where you just sit, breathe and be. This is what I talk to my students about. Learning what it means to be, less thinking, going, doing, becoming familiar with the present moment, becoming more familiar with self, and learning what it means to just be because the evidence-based benefits will occur if you will allow them to occur. And you allow that by learning to be, just be.

Interviewer: Yeah. Sit, breathe, and be. This has been a meaningful conversation. Kim, thank you so much for your time and for your presence.

Kim: Thank you so much. I enjoyed speaking with you today.