Transcription of Barb Schmidt for the show Gratitude in Action #167
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Lisa: Last night, I downloaded a book called The Practice. I spent some time reading it and I really, it was such a gentle and lovely way to end my day and to cause me to think about the way that I live my life and I was excited to meet with Barb Schmidt and today we have Barb in the studio with us. Barb Schmidt is a lecturer and founder of Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life and international best selling author of The Practice. Simple tools for managing stress, finding inner peace and uncovering happiness.
What’s really great is that Barb is actually from Florida and just happens to be in Maine today, so thanks so much for coming in.
Barb: My gosh. My pleasure, it’s an honor to be here.
Lisa: Your book really as I said is just very gentle. Very approachable. You say it in the introduction, simple tools, what you’re suggesting that we have which is a peaceful mind, peaceful life is achievable.
Barb: Definitely.
Lisa: You came to this through lots of hard work.
Barb: I did, really hard work. Yeah.
Lisa: Tell me a little bit about that, tell me about your background and how you came to realize, I need to do something a little bit different.
Barb: Yeah. Lisa, I’d love to. I’ve been practicing for 30 years and what got me on this path of practicing, I grew up very unhappy. Always looking for some way to fit in. Some way to feel like I matter. Some way to feel like I was worth while because I didn’t feel any of those things. It was a difficult home life both my parents were alcoholic. It was hard never really knowing which one is up and just always feeling like I was in the outside looking in in life.
Had this little spark in me that knew that there was a way that things could be better. I just knew that this couldn’t be how it needed to be. Growing up and trying to reconcile those to a feeling like I knew that I had to find another way, but it was difficult to find another way. I ended up becoming bulimic at around 19, 20 years old and that lasted about six or seven years.
Just one day, I woke up, ready to go to work and thought I can’t go to work. I just felt too depleted, too depressed to whatever you want to call it, and I was reading the newspaper and saw an anniversary of Karen Carpenters death who is one of my favorite singers of all time. Then she was talking about her, they were talking about her anorexia and her bulimia and what caused her to die at such a young age.
The next day I jot myself into a treatment center. That just changed my whole life. Being in treatment. Having hit that bottom that they say and having felt so alone and just not okay with my life always searching for happiness, being in treatment I was able to start talking about all the things that were causing me to feel this way from the inside.
I actually felt like someone who’s let out of jail. For the first time of my life, I felt, this is really fabulous. I felt good and in this treatment center, the, their treatment for Bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism all of that was the 12-steps. I felt comfortable and alive and incredible and leaving that treatment center after six weeks.
The 11-step of AA is sought through prayer and meditation to deepen my conscious contact with God as I understand him or her and so I just went on a massive search of knowing that that was what was going to keep me well and keep my happy but also it was really what I knew that I needed to really make something incredible in my life.
I just had that deep knowing. Went on this search and went on retreat after retreat after retreat with all the great teachers of meditation and spirituality and wholeness. 30 years later here I am today at 57 years old. Very happy and people ask me what does happiness mean. It doesn’t mean that I’m wake up just ecstatic every single day, I wake up every day grateful to be alive.
It’s like an under knowing sense of gratitude and knowing how strong and how much I matter. I didn’t care for myself very much as I alluded to but knowing that I do love myself today and I do matter. You can handle anything. You can really get on with your life every single day. Knowing that it’s a great blessing to be alive. That’s hopefully a little in a short little capsule my life path for 57 years and it’s been my blessing to share what I have learned as a result of this 30 years of practice.
Helping people find their own inner strength. It matters greatly that you become your own advocate, you become your own teacher, you become your own best friend. That’s my biggest mission and passion with Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life is helping people see. You’re not at the mercy of the external world and you’re not at the mercy and you don’t need to have another person to be your crutch or to be your lean and you can find guidance and teaching from so many great people.
Ultimately you really need to know your own worth and your own well being and your own sense of greatness by yourself and really because of yourself and know that how great you are. I’m on this massive mission to help people see that.
Lisa: You are the oldest of five children I believe, raised catholic. It seems as though you might have been called upon especially if you had parents with an alcohol issue to really take care of a lot of people from quite an early age.
Barb: Yeah. I did. I did and I think that really there was a blessing being raised. It was a, we were a very strict catholic home. I did go to mass all the time. Even with all the dysfunction of the alcoholism, there was that sense of we do go to mass and we do pray and we do I taught catechism when I was in middle school.
All this dysfunction going on around me I still had that sense, so I think I say on the book, there was a part of me, do I want to be a nun or do I want to be rich and famous, because I would watch TV, that girl, little talks, that it really takes me. I love watching that show and I loved her flying around, running around New York city with her long black hair.
I thought I want to be like that. Then I would go to mass on Sunday and I would teach catechism in the middle school and I think I want to be like that, I want to be a nun. I think my whole life has been a search of how do you bring those two together. One of my very favorite teachers and one of my closest friends who did a beautiful testimony on the book [inaudible 00:46:41] the Buddha’s nun.
She is such a beautiful example of living in a cave that when you spend time with her, she’s just like us and I love her so much. You don’t have to go live in a cage. You don’t have to live the life that you’re in. You just really need to stay grounded within yourself and find that deep strength within yourself to live your life.
You’re living in your cave for a little while in the morning and for a little while a minute here and a minute there during the day, when you go to sleep, you go back to your cave and let the day go, and then go on with your life. I found a way to be in, in my cave so to speak or within, but also be in the world.
We can be in the world and be in ourselves all at the same time. It’s really my greatest passion is to help people see that you just have to get connected with yourself first and then go out and live your life.
Lisa: You suggest that you start the day in meditation and we have more and more started to understand that meditation has tremendous health benefits, emotional benefits. It’s become more mainstream but when you begin this process, I believe it is in the 80s, it wasn’t that mainstream at all, especially I believe you’re living in Florida at that time.
Barb: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Lisa: What was that like to be doing something that people around you and needing to get up at 4:30 in the morning before your daughter got up. What was that like for you?
Barb: It was very private. I have to say. I say now I run on meditation class that I’ve been doing for 16 years now in Florida and when people come today, they say how long have you been here. I said 16 years, they said oh my gosh, where have you been. I said underground. It was, I think today, I feel like it was a great blessing because it wasn’t so mainstream.
Because most people if I would even talk about it, thought I was nuts or I was this eastern crazy person or they would always label me as a Hindu or a Buddhist, I would say no, I’m not really any of those things, I’m just, I love practicing and or studying and learning about all these great religions and truce, but I don’t really practice any of them.
I’m just trying to find my own way. It was difficult because people didn’t get it. I think what I love about how I had to practice was it was very personal and it was very much my own practice. I think it helped shape who I am today. One of the things I say a lot is that we can quietly change the world.
We can be out there and be strong in our own beliefs but we don’t have to be out there trying to shake up the world to do what we think that they need to do. We can do our own thing and now I have so many people, always saying to me, wow, you’re so centered, you’re so calm, you’re so this, you’re so that. I said, it’s been 30 years.
It didn’t happen over night but I think if you stick with your own practice and not have this need to feel like I have to tell everybody what I’m doing. I have to get them to do what I’m doing or I can’t do it unless everybody else agrees with me or believes in me. It really strengthens your own resolve of who you are. I think it help me get grounded in my own self and feel confident that I can be exactly who I am without needing the acceptance and the approval of the external world.
Now meditation is so mainstream, now it’s great. I can talk about it all day long and people are like, oh my gosh can you teach us how to do it a little bit more simply or can you help us understand it better, which is where I am today, helping people understand it better.
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Lisa: Some people still think meditation I can’t, I need to sit on the floor with folded legs and you point out in the book you could sit in the chair. Some people believe you have to go whole hog into a yoga practice and you have to do it five hours a day for the rest of your life. I think in the book you said you know you’re better off to do five minutes of something always and just have that in your practice.
Making it more accessible, I think that is the step that we next need to take on that. If you start the day in meditation, another important thing that you ask people to do or suggest that they might find benefit from is having a mantra.
Barb: Yeah. Definitely. When I studied, when I went on the search. I started studying all the major religions of the world and when I was in my Buddhist phase of studying Buddhism. They, I think what I love the most, they do call it meditation obviously but most Buddhist that you’re with, they call it my sit time. I did my sit today.
I really took that to heart and thought meditation is just sitting with yourself. How can we feel like we can start our day without really being with ourselves. It’s really help me cultivate my own love of myself by spending time with myself. When we do that, we get really grounded within ourselves, we feel comfortable with ourselves with that quiet time of sitting.
Then how do we carry that throughout the rest of the day because when I come out of my meditation, even if I’ve been the whole time sitting there, bringing my mind back because it’s been distracted the whole time. I still feel a sense of connectedness and peace within as I’m walking out of my space.
How do I carry that throughout the day, and it is the repetition of a mantra, if we think about meditation we’re really training ourselves to be in the moment. The mind is going off and going off. We’re training ourselves by bringing it back to the moment, bringing it back to the moment.
To carry that thread of peace that I talk about or that thread of connectedness. We need to look at ways in our lives that we can be more one pointed, not every place because I know that’s really difficult to try to be right here right now with every single thing we’re doing. Find one or two that you can be focused on and then use a mantra to bring your mind back to the moment. If things are crazy. When I get stressed out, I stop.
Lisa: You can also write your mantra and I believe you described an individual being on a plane at a pretty important time. Tell us how that worked out.
Barb: It was so amazing. I love to write my mantra. It’s a very powerful practice to sit and write this sacred word over and over again. It’s really just about the power of prayer when you go into prayer circles or meditation circles. A good friend of mine was on an airplane when 9/11 happened and his plane was diverted to Canada.
They were on the plane for more than 24 hours which all of us know we heard all those stories about people being stranded on airplanes. He had this practice of writing his mantra, he’s got his little notebooks out which I carry one with me everywhere I go and started writing his mantra.
After a while the people on the plane, the craziness and just the share fear of what was going on started asking him “What were you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?” He started teaching people to write the mantra. If you close your eyes and imagine that for a minute, I remember when he’s telling me a story. I started to cry because I thought what a, I felt really grateful that I had this practice.
I thought what an amazing situation to be in, we all know how we all felt during that whole time of 9/11 and to be able to really use the price that I’ve been practicing for all those years, he really was able to call upon it in an emergency really life and death situation. It called him and he said it actually ended up calling in a lot of people in the plane.
It’s a very powerful, I call it tool because it’s sacred and powerful but it really is just a tool. It’s really just a mechanical practice of bringing your mind back from the fear into the present moment where you know you have no control, that was one thing he said to me.
He said “Barb.” He said “Being in a situation really knowing that I had absolutely no control. At first I panicked, I thought woah, we can’t get off this plane. We can’t do anything. I don’t know what’s going on outside this plane. I know it’s bad.” He said “I first panicked and then I thought, nope, no, this is a time to use this tool to practice it for the next over 24 hours.” Powerful.
Lisa: That is often the way that it goes is if we practice something, when we don’t need it, that when we need it, you’re just can pull it up from wherever it is. You can pull out your notebook, you can pull out your time to meditate, that sort of thing. That’s what the practice really does for you.
Barb: It is exact, beautifully said. I couldn’t have said it better. It’s beautiful. It is. That’s why, I chose the word practice, it matters that you practice. Yeah.
Lisa: I encourage people who are listening to pick up a copy of The Practice. Simple tools for managing stress, finding inner peace and uncovering happiness. Also to go to your website which is?
Barb: Barbsmith.com or a Peacefulmindpeacefullife.org.
Lisa: To learn more about the work that you’re doing and it’s really, it’s just, it’s a very gentle and yet very affecting way of approaching things. I appreciate the work that you’ve done over the course of your life and your willingness to share this with us.
Barb: Thank you, Lisa, it’s been a real joy to be here this morning.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Barb Smith. She’s a lecturer and the founder of Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life and international best selling author of The Practice. Enjoy the rest of your time in Maine.
Barb: Thank you. It’s a beautiful, beautiful state. Thank you very much.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio. Show number 167. Gratitude in action. Our guest have included Shawn McLaughlin and Barb Smith. For more information on our guest and extended interviews visit themainemag.com/radio. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you’ve enjoyed our Gratitude in Action show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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