BRENDA FINGOLD: BOARD MEMBER AND CO-CHAIR, NEW ENGLAND CHAPTER
MINDFUL LEADERS IN THE LAW: An interview with Brenda Fingold
By Christopher J. Lhulier
Welcome to the Holiday 2021 edition of the Mindful Leaders in the Law interview series. This month I had the opportunity to interview MILS advisory board member and New England Chapter Co-Chair, Brenda Fingold. Brenda also happens to be one of my favorite people in the world. She is a friend and a role model. I met Brenda in 2014, when the idea of bringing mindfulness and well-being to law firms was still a radical one. But, she has been teaching mindfulness at law firms for close to twenty years, as if she knew that the day would come when the law industry would be ready to benefit from mindfulness. And she has diligently and patiently continued to teach and be a leader in the well-being in law movement. We hope you enjoy this month’s interview with Brenda.
Q: Can you talk about the health scare that you experienced and how it led to you focusing more on your well-being?
A: During law school and 17 years in my law firm, I was no stranger to stress, overwhelm, and anxiety. Mostly I just pushed through them and ignored as much as possible the physical symptoms that often accompanied them - back aches, shoulders up to my ears, fatigue, and more. I didn’t know how to deal with them and, even if I did, I certainly didn’t think I had time to focus on my health and well-being. Then, at age 40, with a 3-year old child, I was stunned by a colon cancer diagnosis that required major surgery and 7 months of weekly chemotherapy. When I got home from the hospital, I thought to myself, “that didn’t work.” I worked hard through college and law school and got a job that I liked and was succeeding at, but I couldn’t sustain it. I decided at that point that I was going to try to figure out how I/we could thrive in a demanding and busy profession without losing our health and sense of self. Mindfulness became the path to new ways of being in my life.
Q: What was the first mindfulness training program you studied?
A: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) - the program I teach now. Ironically, this is the program that my law firm managing partner identified as potentially being helpful to lawyers dealing with stress. This was in 1997 and long before mindfulness was as commonplace as it is now. I was the partner responsible for training and professional development at my firm, so the managing partner asked me to bring Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR into our law firm. I said no! I was sure my colleagues would roll their eyes and I would lose all credibility for even suggesting it. In fact, unlike now where there are more than 6,000 studies on the benefits of mindfulness, at that time there were only 5 studies. After three weeks of being nudged, I finally relented and brought MBSR into the firm. We offered the program in 1998 and 1999 and approximately 80 lawyers went through the course. It is amazing to me the ways in which our lives and careers can unfold in ways we could never have planned. Who knew that I would wind up teaching the very same MBSR program with the very group that we brought into the firm - Jon Kabat-Zinn and The Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School.
Q: You started teaching mindfulness to lawyers 20+ years ago- long before there was a mainstream movement to bring well-being to the legal profession. Do you see any difference in the attitudes of students (and the organizations they work for) today versus when you first started teaching?
A: Yes! When I first started teaching mindfulness to lawyers, It felt like Sysiphus rolling the boulder up the hill. At one point I actually gave up on the legal profession and turned to businesses and other organizations that seemed to want what I was offering. One day, many years later, I received a surprise call from the Chief Human Resources Officer at a large Boston law firm asking if I was still leading meditation programs. That was the sign I needed that it was time to go back into the legal profession to provide support for health and well-being through mindfulness.
The students who showed up for those early programs were usually brand new to mindfulness and seeking balance and stress relief. These days, most people know about mindfulness and often already have a practice. The business community was more open to mindfulness than was the law, and I love sharing the 2015 Harvard Business Review article called Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain. A few years later, The Report of the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being was published with a description of the research on the benefits of mindfulness practice for lawyers. That has given credibility and a foundation to individual efforts to incorporate mindfulness and well-being strategies more fully into our profession.
Q: I’m going to ask you a tough one. How can it be possible in a profession where many of us need to account to our clients for how we spend every 6 minutes of our (often long) working hours, to live in the present moment on a regular basis?
A: First, I don’t believe anyone can live in the present moment all the time, nor would we want to. We need to reflect and remember and to plan, anticipate and daydream. In addition, we are not making time for formal practice to become expert meditators. What mindfulness does for me is to allow me to be present for whatever it is I am choosing to be present for. If I want to plan a vacation - think about the future - but my mind keeps wandering to my workload and that creates anxiety that interferes with my planning, that isn’t helpful.
In addition, the more I practice mindfulness, the more I see how often I am sleepwalking through my days. I can be quite effective, aware of others and what I am doing, and still not be fully awake. By this I mean that I can be doing my work and living my life, but still be lost in and driven by thoughts and feelings and sensations and not even know that these conscious and unconscious things are driving me. This learning to be awake is truly the practice of a lifetime.
So during a 6-minute time block, if all you can do is take one breath and be aware you are actually breathing, or for one moment you see something and are aware that you are seeing, or smile at something and are aware that you are having a pleasant moment, or notice a twinge in your back and stop to breath and perhaps recognize the vulnerability of being human, or walk down the hall and feel the air moving across your body, that is a miracle and it is enough.
With that said, if I am awake for a few more moments of that 6-minute time block, that means that I am aware of what’s happening as it’s happening and available to all that may be present. With presence comes increased access to a treasure of innate capacities - to be able to see and stop habitual and automatic reactivity, see ourselves, others and information more clearly, understand more fully, and be able to make more skillful choices.
Q: When you are leading a sit, you will often say that when one realizes one’s attention has strayed from the present moment, that awareness is the moment of mindfulness. That “teaching” has stayed with me because it helps me have a better perspective on my mind constantly wandering during practice. Can you talk more about how our wandering mind can actually be a tool in our mindfulness practice?
A: I often talk with people who think that mindfulness means there are no thoughts and the mind is blissful. That is not my experience or understanding at all. We can’t stop thoughts, but we can notice when they arise and choose whether or not to give them our time and attention. Once we accept that thoughts will arise and fall away as a natural part of being human, we can begin to strengthen the muscle of mindfulness by increasing our capacity to notice when we have been pulled away by a thought and to redirect our attention as called for in the moment. The moment of mindfulness is not a quiet mind, rather, mindfulness is about being awake for the moment and as soon as we notice that we have become distracted, we have woken up to how it is in this moment. In other words, once we realize our mind has wandered away from our intended focus, we are already back. The moment to be celebrated is not a quiet mind, but noticing that we have left the present moment.
Building these mindfulness muscles is very much like building physical muscles in the gym. I often refer to the process of noticing and redirecting the mind as the equivalent of bicep curls. If your mind has been busy and you had to return to your focus 100 times, well then that’s like doing 100 bicep curls for the mind. That is a celebration moment, not one to judge as a “not good meditation.” In fact, there are no “not good meditations.” As long as you are awake for how it is in the moment, with an attitude of curiosity and kind acknowledgement, you are practicing mindfulness and that can only be a good thing.
Of course, as we all know, mindfulness is simple but not easy. I have a favorite quote that I offer to students in my courses who want mindfulness practice to always be a relaxing and easy experience. “If you go to the gym and never get out of your comfort zone, will anything happen?” And in this case, getting out of your comfort zone can apply to both the experience of meditating and making the time to practice.
Q: Do you have a go to mindfulness practice for those days when you do not have time to do a formal sitting?
A: Back in the late 1990’s I went to one of the first mindfulness retreats for the legal profession. Judges, law professors, lawyers and law students were present for this weekend of practice and discussion. During the last few minutes of the program, someone asked the teacher how we can bring mindfulness more fully into the legal profession. The teacher smiled and said, “Most of us can’t even brush our teeth mindfully, don’t you think you are putting the cart before the horse.” So how about committing to brushing your teeth mindfully once or twice a day? What this means is being aware that you are standing at the sink (not just standing at the sink), feeling the tube of toothpaste in your hand as you squeeze it, feeling the brush bristles on your teeth and gums, tasting the flavor, rinsing your mouth and feeling the swishing and spitting, and then noticing how it is when you are done. Although I offer this as a simple mindfulness practice that takes no extra time, since you are doing it already, I always chuckle when people return from a week of practice and tell me how much cleaner their teeth are! So, this practice has a nice side benefit!
Q: Do you have a favorite quote or expression that reminds you of why mindfulness, yoga and wellbeing are priorities in your life?
A: Actually, I’ll give you a poem. I don’t often use poems in my classes with lawyers, although the mindfulness community makes great use of poetry. Here is one that I love, especially the lines in bold. I guess I want to remind myself and support others in creating a clearing in the dense forest of our lives, and trusting that there is great wisdom, clarity and compassion waiting for us there.
CLEARING by Martha Postlewaite
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.