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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Violi:                      Hi. I’m Stephen Violi from the Psychology Webinar Group. Today we have a special guest of Elisha Goldstein, who is a psychologist, author and speaker, who has written a few books. His latest one is The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life, Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveller, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, which had a foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, someone that has been a pivotal in bringing the science of mindfulness to the fore. He also has another one scheduled coming up later on – November next year, he tells me – called Breaking the Depression Code, which sounds very interesting. Welcome, Elisha. How are you?

Elisha Goldstein:               I’m very good. Good to be here.

Stephen Violi:                      Likewise. Thank you very much for joining us. Could you explain to us a little more about who you are and what you do?

Elisha Goldstein:               I am a psychologist and I see people in private practice. I was trained years ago as a teacher in mindfulness-based stress reduction. That eventually launched a book that I co-authored with Bob Stahl. That’s what you mentioned, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook. I think my biggest bent, I would say, is how do we help our clients and ourselves use mindfulness and compassion-based work to live a life we want to live, work more skilfully with stress, anxiety, depression, addictive behaviours and trauma. I go around the country and internationally speaking about this to therapists and lay people.

Stephen Violi:                      Did you start off with mindfulness? Or is this something that you came to discover?

Elisha Goldstein:               I think of myself always as someone who was reflective at a young age. I, like many people, came from a family of divorce. That set me at six years old into a very reflective space about what life is, what relationships are all about, and left a bit of a gaping hole inside of me. As a kid, I used to hide under the table because I didn’t really know how to deal with my anger. I’d get really angry and I’d take it out. Anytime we went out to eat with the family, I would resist eating to somehow punish my parents in some way.

Years later, I worked in the corporate world in my 20’s and got heavily involved in drugs and alcohol, and worked hard but played far harder. It wasn’t until a moment that I was sitting in the back of a broken down limousine with a guy that I swore if I ever was seen with this guy, my friends can basically tell me I hit rock bottom. I had a moment of mindfulness. I had a moment of awareness where I recognised that I had a choice here and I didn’t need to throw my life away. I could get out and start a new one.

That’s what I did. I ended up going away to an adult retreat centre, which wasn’t necessarily a place of sobriety but it’s a place to reflect on life and really question everything. That’s when I came more in touch with mindfulness proper, where a guy that was there really introduced me to eating an orange in a particularly different way, which many people who are listening to this call right now are familiar with – this idea of intentionally paying attention to something with more of a beginner’s mind as if for the very first time, helping us put aside our programmed biases of the past. When I did this with an orange, even though I was doubtful of it and judgmental about him even, giving me a practice where I was to be mindful of eating an orange, I had the most delicious orange I’ve ever had in my life and my shoulders completely relaxed after I ate it. I said, “There’s something to this.”

I left that plac