At the Table with Dr. Colainne_ Human Flourishing

This is a podcast episode featuring Dr. Blake Colaney, an assistant research professor at Pennsylvania State University. He discusses his research on how contemplative education supports the social and emotional development of high school and college students. Dr. Colaney teaches mindful-based courses and focuses on cultivating a sense of community and interdependence. The conversation covers topics such as human flourishing, attachment theory for kids, and the movies Inside Out. The stages of human flourishing are explored, including awareness, connection, and wisdom. The importance of slowing down, being aware of emotions, and the mind-body connection is emphasized. Talking about emotions can be challenging, but it has become more prominent in the last decade. Emotions are energy that motivates behavior, and there is still much to learn about them. The movie Inside Out is praised for its portrayal of core emotions. Welcome to At The Table with Sarah and Julie. At The Table is a podcast by two pediatric registered dieticians and moms who love food and wine. We cover a wide range of topics with our goal to provide you with evidence-based insights but also to be a hub of true expert voices in the food and nutrition field. In this episode of At The Table we sat down with Dr. Blake Colaney who is an assistant research professor at the Pennsylvania State University. His research examines how contemplative education supports the social and emotional development of high school and college students. Currently he is developing and implementing system-level programming within kindergarten to 12th grade and university settings. His relational approach to contemplative practices focuses on cultivating a sense of community and interdependence. At Penn State Dr. Colaney teaches various mindful based courses including the art and science of human flourishing. Dr. Colaney completed his PhD at Penn State University and his master's of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's also trained as a relational facilitator through the Courage of Care organization. Prior to graduate school he was a high school science teacher for five years. We are so excited to have him today at the table. We had some great conversations where we talked about his course of human flourishing, attachment theory for kids and we discussed a little bit of the movies Inside Out 1 and 2. Dr. Colaney, thank you for joining us at the table with Sarah and Julie. We're very excited to have you today. Honestly since we met in April I've been very excited about this conversation. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun to see this topic of emotions of human flourishing become on people's radar so it's fun to be here to talk about this. So why don't we start and tell us a little bit of the term human flourishing. Where does that come from? So the phrase human flourishing is a phrase that we've begun to use in the field of contemplative science to describe the work that we've been doing particularly our course that we've developed that I can share more about. The word human flourishing from a scholarly perspective really emerged from the field of positive psychology of this idea of what does it mean to live a flourishing life that really moves the conversation of psychology into this mindset of thinking about what we can help people improve and increase in their lives rather than just always thinking about how do we minimize the bad stuff rather than just talking about how to lessen stress. How do we actually improve well-being? We could really trace this term the whole way back even to Aristotle thinking about the different kinds of happiness but when we think about the donic happiness versus ludimonic happiness so really thinking about what does it mean to live an examined life. So I think this term we really use now in the field of contemplative science but to try to encompass that full exploration that whole journey of how mindfulness and compassion practices can help us explore life. That's fascinating. Are there stages? Can you break down what stages for just for our listeners to understand a little better? How do you really truly get started on this journey? Yeah the examined life can be a little intimidating. It can be a little scary to dive in. We spend so much of our lives on autopilot and we're just sort of moving throughout our days particularly in here in the United States where we've been conditioned to have this mindset where we just we get up we get ready we go to work we then do work we then come home and now there's the dog to take for a walk and there's dinner to make it so we're really just running through on autopilot and really when we're thinking about human flourishing it's this idea of what does it mean to slow down really what does it mean to pull back and say oh wait a second what am I experiencing what am I not experiencing and what are others experiencing as well and really trying to slow that down so I started my career as a high school teacher and then went back to school becoming really interested in how we can embed human flourishing into schools and so when you're asking me about the stages I always think of it as curriculum when you're actually sitting down in a class what would be chapter one what would be chapter two in terms of understanding human flourishing so in our course for undergraduate students the first pillar of human flourishing that we explore is awareness and I know awareness when we first hear it might not sound that complex where we just have to pay attention to what's going on but awareness is actually a more powerful tool than what we may realize when I say awareness I mean really helping people to first slow down and name and get really curious about what's going on in our minds when we are feeling tired or stressed what is going on around us again because we're so often stuck in in that autopilot reactive mind slowing down and learning about how to bring more awareness to our minds and the minds of others I think it's really chapter one step one so we cover that as a foundational pillar and then in our course we then move into another pillar that we call connection so once we've now built awareness around what's going on in our minds we can use some mindfulness practices to support that we move into now exploring our connection with each other in the world so thinking about what it means to have compassion for others to recognize the suffering the stress that's in the world and thinking about what we can do to alleviate that distress but also thinking about our connection with nature with the earth kind of reclaim that sense of connection and all the emotions that can come from reconnecting with the world around us so we explore a connection and then the third pillar is what we call wisdom and that's where we in some ways it sort of combines awareness and connection to now really think about our sense of identity where do we find a sense of meaning and purpose and so what does it mean to really gain a sense of insight to inquire about the mind and the minds of others the world around us so I think there's all sorts of entry points in terms of how to flourish I often say there's so many ways to heal and there's so many ways for people to explore life but that's just a little bit of insight from a academic course perspective from a curricular perspective how we try to break down those pillars of flourishing honestly it's fascinating yeah I feel like so many people could say yes I'm aware but I think the key part is there is slowing down which is so hard nowadays people are busy and really tuning in and I think the way that you broke it down and it's great you can't really find a sense of self in a way if you're not aware of what is really impacting you at the time and I love that you say that there is a lot more power in that awareness stage because I think sometimes I myself feel like I'm maybe not moving beyond to that wind down into those higher-up processes but I feel the awareness piece I'm trying harder to identify and especially with my kids trying to work on identifying emotions with them and sometimes it can be challenging to know whether I'm telling them and the correct things once we've labeled those emotions I think you're correct that there's power in just knowing how your body feels right and that's a first really positive step yeah it's true and two things I'll raise up there that you say that I think are really important one is yes even bringing awareness as a skill I think is something that we're not used to doing because because these kinds of skills haven't been systematically worked into education it's not even something we learn about I think we're definitely on our way there which we can talk about more by just seeing awareness as a skill I think is something that is really important for people to think about because when it's framed as a skill the question then becomes how can I train that skill how can I cultivate that skill and then the other thing you brought up Julie that I think is so important is the body when recognizing this connection between the mind and body and how when we talk about awareness it's not just about staying in the mind and saying what are my thoughts what are my emotions right now but recognizing the interconnection between the mind and body and the body has a lot of wisdom in it and so thinking about well wait what am I feeling and what does it mean to be embodied and that alone can actually be this exploration of being grounded of being aware of our present moment and so yeah again just awakening to these types of explorations I think can be really healing and exciting and it can lead to a lot of curiosity for people for sure so why is talking about emotions so challenging and how do you feel like it has maybe improved in the last decade where it is on our radars I think more why is it still such a challenge yeah emotions are hard emotions we're always experiencing a lot of them at one time we're always trying to think about what they're telling us and I think from a scientific perspective we're still learning about trying to figure out what emotions even are so I think that that's one of the reasons why they're so challenging is because even though we've learned a lot over the last couple of decades we're still trying to explore what these feelings are so when you look at the word emotion you might think of it as emotion it's energy that puts us in motion it's energy that motivates so the idea of emotions is that there is a motivation they are often linked to some sort of behavior that we then will move into and so I think that what we are realizing as we explore emotions is that there really are so many emotions and I think that the first inside-out movie did it such a great job of talking about these core emotions that we see really universally but we also know that there's a cultural component to emotions even from a language perspective different languages have different words for different emotions that we may not have particularly here in the United States where we are thinking about the different languages that we use to describe emotion so I think that it's really complex because emotions themselves are so complex and I think thinking about how to learn about them and explore them is something that we're figuring out but it's something that we're finding people are really interested in. Yeah it's true because I speak two languages I speak Spanish and English and there's often when my husband will ask me hey what are you expressing I'll be like I don't know there's a word for that and it's very interesting to know that there's different languages that have words for certain feelings that we're not able to have in other languages and so how do we communicating and connect to that with other people. Yeah and it's true language connects us and so it's like when you have an emotion first there's the feeling of it and then there's the language piece to it you know we're now trying to put a word or words to the experience because that helps us to talk about them in a way and so yeah I mean just as we see in movies like inside-out are so popular and I think part of it is because I think we are still figuring out how to talk about them people want to and they're really curious to learn more about themselves the emotions of others. Yeah and kind of touching on inside-out I think you said before we're often pretty basic about our emotions can you elaborate on this and the language we should be looking at? There's an emotion researcher Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her work has been particularly helpful for myself and a lot of other templative researchers who are thinking about how to talk about emotions in a framework of mindfulness and compassion and really trying to get more granular. This is a term that Lisa Feldman Barrett often uses it's this emotional granularity. How can we start to talk about our emotions more specifically? We know that our bodies are always making predictions for us and our bodies are our minds and bodies in some ways they're always a millisecond ahead of us and so when our bodies are making predictions for us if we think that right now we are angry well we have learned and our body will move energy toward the behavior of anger but if we get a little bit more granular and we realize that oh I think I'm angry but actually what's underneath that is let's say grief or I'm feeling actually grief and sadness and it might be coming out as anger right now in the way that I'm communicating with someone but that there's actually some more granularity underneath that. That's what we're talking about when we are thinking about that autopilot mind it's just easier to be like oh I'm angry well I'm tired I'm stressed but really helping ourselves and others go into the roots of those emotions a little bit more we find can actually be really helpful so that's why when we have tools like an emotion wheel which is something that there's all sorts of emotion wheels online that you can find and there's even some apps now that can help you to get more emotionally granular that again just help you to take these service level emotions be more specific because the science behind this is that whenever we make better predictions our body is now able to move our energy and to motivate actions behaviors that might then be more conducive to that emotion so again going back to that example what we might think we should do when we're angry could actually be very different than what we would do if we actually know that we're grieving and so more specific emotions could lead to actions and behaviors that are more supportive of our well-being. That's really interesting so translating that a little bit to some of the younger population say you have a toddler who is visually upset and you can tell they're angry is there any tips that you have for helping them a little bit more granular obviously age-appropriate but any sort of techniques you have for that age group? Yeah I think one of the things that we can think about with creating space for children to feel emotions I think is really important what we know is that as you get older and this is oftentimes because of societal conditions of the systems that we're in we actually end up starting to feel really constricted like we're actually not allowed to feel a lot and so I think it's really important for children included to first giving space for emotion and not shutting them down and saying let's feel this and I think that there are ways depending on what age they are to even help them get curious about where are you feeling that emotion and not just what are you feeling but where are you feeling it and is it in your stomach that you're feeling it is it in your head and helping young people to actually be more embodied I think can be a really important exploration to help them experience the emotion and where it may be and then I also think another tip that I think adults and caregivers can do is just being granular about your own emotion. Parents recognize the modeling that happens even young children they are paying attention to us. That's for sure. When we are more granular I think they start to learn more emotion work that go beyond just like happy, sad, stressed, tired and I think that they'll pick up on that and I often say thinking about our societal conditions there's some gender differences here as well so when I'm working with parents I oftentimes particularly encourage men to talk about your emotions because we really do see this in young men especially in adolescence you start to pick up on the socialized gender norms that oh I don't think I'm supposed to feel emotion I'm not supposed to cry and we have these really interesting messages about masculinity so I think talking about our emotions is very important and again may even be particularly important when we think about these gender norms and to help break out of these norms that we're in so that everyone has a level of emotional granularity and we know that adolescence is I often say that when we think about social-emotional learning adolescence is actually arguably the most social and emotional time of life. Our social spheres really burst open and also our emotional experiences our brain is doing a lot of development throughout adolescence thinking about how teaching SEL to children can just even help in that next stage of adolescence or whenever you enter middle school and high school that being able to be more aware of your emotions having some tools for that awareness I think can do wonders for not just our social development but even for our success in school academically if I'm more aware of my stress patterns if I'm more aware of what my emotions are not only will I communicate to myself differently but I may communicate to others differently which may help me find levels of support that I might need in a particular moment and then sure yes when we're then become adults suddenly we see a lot in even the corporate space of like compassionate leadership mindful leadership and one of the tenants of that is often emotional awareness it's often like how good are we at naming emotions we're experiencing that our team might be exploring and experiencing so yes I think this discussion of emotions it can really impact us across the lifespan. It's so cool. Absolutely. Can you talk to us a little bit about the research behind attachment theory with children and how that ties into emotional IQ? Yeah so attachment theory is it's really like a flagship theory for us in developmental psychology. The theory of attachment emerged from experiments that researchers conducted that really examined the relationship between an infant and their caregiver and what researchers were able to find is that we actually could observe that even at a very young age infants are clocking levels of predictability availability and consistency of their caregivers. We might not think that they're clocking it because they seem to be so little but they are absolutely learning how consistent their caregivers are in meeting their needs. When I cried are you picking me up are you feeding me are you providing me with a sense of warmth and love and what we find is that that experience lays the foundation that does impact us throughout our lives. One of the core takeaways of attachment theory is that from a young age we want and need to be seen. We need to feel that we are important that we belong here that you see me that you hear me and I think we forget that we never really lose that. Yeah we're quick to think that it somehow fades but I would argue it doesn't and that although this foundation is laid early on in our lives we're social creatures and we're always social creatures throughout our lifespan and so having a caregiver a friend a teacher a boss not just see us but also see our emotional experiences can help us develop our emotions and feel safe and even talking about our emotions. So again I think we oftentimes forget just how social well-being is health and wellness it's a social sport this isn't just something that we can buy books on and just think that we'll be able to be well on our own we are inherently social and having someone in our lives who sees us who validates us can actually make talking about our emotions easier right I think we've all probably experienced this I'm sure the three of us can think of examples where we've had someone in our lives who has seen us and it's allowed for that emotional granularity to emerge almost naturally where I actually feel safe to tell you that my anger is probably grief and sadness but without that safe relationship I might not even go to that sense of granularity does that make sense this link between attachment and emotions I think is important. Yeah absolutely yeah Julie and I essentially we were colleagues and we met and we both became moms we both had kids at the same age and talking so much about our lives and our kids and our struggles that kind of led to this podcast. We're like we need to tell other people about how they're going through all of those things too. So it's neat that there is actual research to back up what is going on and I think it's fascinating to learn about attachment theory. Yeah I think again we often when it comes to emotions we often want to move it to fix it mode really quickly we want we want to help people's emotions go away almost but really what ends up happening is when we do really feel seen it's actually the validation that is the healing having someone look at you and even just simply say that makes sense. Yeah. Your experience is valid and just affirm that yeah like in your case Sherry just like the the chaos of being a mom and of just having someone witness that experience and say yeah me too I think that there is such power to that it speaks to you how as much as we might think that we can do emotional development all by ourselves we really need each other. So as we talk about human flourishing I know you'd have this course for college students but I think you're also maybe developing or trying to implement this from K to 12. Yeah so the course that we've developed is called art and science of human flourishing and this was a course that was developed by contemplative researchers from Penn State the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and so researchers from those three universities got together and realized that there was all this research that was now emerging around mindfulness and compassion and emotions and as often happens in academia we do all this research and then we don't do a great job of telling people about it. I love things like this podcast because it's like gets the work out there and so there was this realization that well what if we took all of this information and created a course for college students. So we created a three credit 15-week course. We've now done a lot of research on the class. Students who take the course show higher levels of awareness. We are able to improve their sense of awareness and focus also their compassion which is what we just were talking about. We found that students who take the course we are able to improve their sense of what we call shared humanity. So they really start to sense into a sense of interdependence with others, a sense of interconnection, a sense that they are not alone in their experiences and we've even be able to assess that the course has an impact on mental health as well particularly in terms of depression and depressive symptoms. So we've been teaching the course now for a couple of years at all three universities and it is true we really wanted to spend some years piloting it with college students figuring out what works and now we are starting to think about the next step is thinking about high school students and could we now adapt this course for high schoolers and my hope of course is that maybe next will be middle school and then elementary. Keep adapting this course but I think what's important to think about is just as any subject in school. So for example math. We have taken the subject of math. What is the number line and thinking about ways to break down a subject. I think that what we're now starting to see in education is us being able to do that same thing with human flourishing, social-emotional learning, mindfulness, really thinking about developmentally. Okay we have this class for college student but developmentally what makes sense how should we talk about this stuff with different each. So I think this is where the field of human development can really inform our thinking. That's so cool. Very neat. So what are some resources or even courses or online apps maybe that you recommend for families to help broaden their understanding of this type of learning. Yeah it's so tough because there's so much out there on mindfulness that it's hard to sort through it all. Yeah. What works. One of the tips that I would give is actually to perhaps even start within the field of human development. So when you are searching online for books or articles or resources and thinking about mindfulness and attachment theory, mindfulness and emotional development, that we are always looking for resources that are being informed by the field of human development. Of course I'm biased but I do think that one of the things I get a little worried about that we are sort of pulling this field of self-help self-care and we aren't thinking about it in a way that thinking about it developmentally for young people. I also encourage people if you're interested in mindfulness and meditation don't think that you need to just be able to close your eyes for 20 minutes and meditate and that you should be able to just do that right away. Finding books, finding podcasts, finding different entry points, anything that you can do to learn more about your mind and your brain and your emotions can actually be a good first step before you help the people in your lives. We often say it about putting the oxygen mask on you or putting it on someone else and so I work a lot with teachers and teachers are so quick to jump right to the student and I often times have to really help and encourage teachers to say well let's just start with you and what does it mean to uncover that your mind a little bit can be a good first step before we jump to helping others. Great advice. I think this conversation is fascinating and I could go on with so many questions but the last thing I want to talk about which I think a lot of our listeners will be intrigued to hear your thoughts as Inside Out 2 just came out. I know anxiety was really the center of it and I think it was pretty awesomely depicted. I've heard a lot of good feedback from people, from friends, I've seen some things on social media. So what are your thoughts? Well I'll start by saying that I loved it and I think that Pixar definitely reached out to emotion researchers and neuroscientists. I really appreciate that they were very intentional and I actually think the movie was about human flourishing. So a couple of takeaways for me. I actually don't think it's helpful to talk about emotions as positive or negative. I think that creates this dichotomy that ends up anger is not necessarily a negative emotion. It can be really informative. So I think the movie does a great job of not labeling emotions as positive and negative but instead labeling them as how much do we bring them into the driver's seat of our mind. How can we stay in the driver's seat and just bring these emotions into the passenger seat whenever we need them. There was a quote early on in the movie that was quick but I almost think it was a sense of foreshadowing. Joy gets in an elevator with sadness because sadness wants to join joy and joy says to sadness where you go I go. And it was a really quick line in the movie that people might not even have caught but I think it was a really brilliant line because it speaks to what we talked about in flourishing how this is actually not just about happiness. Flourishing is not being happy all the time. We're actually really careful not to use that term a lot. But I really loved that moment and really the whole movie of thinking about how we need all of our emotions and they all and yes it can be tough if one really takes over our mind but how can we seek this sense of balance where we're not trying to get rid of emotions but instead really listening to the wisdom that they have. So I think that that's really interesting the science of the emotions that the movie offers. And the last thing I'll say is that the field of social emotional learning politically is actually under a lot of heat right now. People are very worried and paranoid about what this is looking like in schools and yet we have this movie about emotions that is shattering records. People are actually fascinated to learn about this and again just think if we were able to take a movie like Inside Out and turn it into a curriculum how interesting it could be. So I think that it's just a reminder to me so many people want to learn more about their mind. They want to examine their lives a little bit more deeply and it's great that Pixar can help us do that. Awesome. Love it. So thank you so much Dr. Colaini. This was such a wonderful conversation. Thanks for being at the table with us for your great insight. I know we would love to have you back again. Well thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks so much. Bye. Thank you so much for joining us at the table. Be sure to follow us on Instagram as well as on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. We are Sarah and Julie. Talk to you next time at the table.