Tim Ryan recently announced he’s running for President of the United States. The day before his announcement, Mindful Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce sat down with Ryan to talk about mindfulness and meditation and why Ryan thinks they can play a role in healing our country.
Barry Boyce: How has mindfulness informed your recent experience in Washington? Has your mindfulness practice made a difference during this interesting period?
Rep. Tim Ryan: Oh, it’s been more essential than ever because Washington has been more chaotic than ever, with more frequent bouts of insanity than normal. So, mindfulness practice has really kept me engaged and prevented me from getting burned out and allowed me to still enjoy the work. Not every single part of it, of course, but overall.
BB: We all sense an increase in fear and aggression emanating out of Washington. Have you been triggered by that? Has mindfulness helped you in not getting as triggered as you might by a fear-based approach to politics?
TR: The enemy today in America is division and what feeds the division is fear, and there’s plenty of fear-mongering going on, at the highest levels. It’s very difficult not to react because it’s so obnoxious sometimes, so hurtful, and demeaning to other people that you get angry, but you need to be able to walk yourself back from some of that stuff or let it go and try to focus on what the real issues are, because if you’re caught up in the Washington fear and anxiety, you’re forgetting about the fear and anxiety that your constituents are feeling every day around economic insecurity, healthcare insecurity, and retirement insecurity. And your job is really to focus on their fear and pain, not yours.
The Mindful Politician
BB: In terms of mindfulness as part of your agenda, have you had to defend that with your colleagues and constituents?
TR: We’ve come such a long way in the nearly a decade that I’ve been advocating for mindfulness, contemplative practices, ways to improve our personal health through mind-body practices. I was in a hearing the other day with the Secretary of the V.A and the V.A.’s top medical person, and for the first time I can remember I wasn’t the first person to bring up yoga and mindfulness in a congressional hearing. The Secretary of the V.A. actually brought up how yoga was healing veterans who had post-traumatic stress, and the doctor was talking about how Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction was helping vets deal with depression and isolation, and therefore helping prevent suicides. It’s come a long way. Other leaders in the government are now advocating for it. We also will be launching a new wellbeing program for the House of Representatives in the next month or two that will include four or five certified MBSR teachers serving the thousands of employees who work on Capitol Hill. The Capitol Police is also working with the federal training center that’s doing mindfulness-based training for law enforcement.
BB: It seems, then, that in the five years since you put out A Mindful Nation, which has now been reissued as Healing America, you’ve seen the needle move in terms of it being noticed and being discussed by some folks in Washington. Are there people on both sides of the aisle who see the benefit of mind-body practices?
TR: A Republican member from Kansas did a press conference with me the other day around a program called Post-Traumatic Growth, which includes in
Self-care is not a partisan act.
BB: How about you, do you bring this practice into your work the way some CEO’s are bringing it into their corporate life? Are you incorporating these practices even as busy as you are?
TR: I still have a daily practice that I’ve actually been doing more than normal these days, doubling down on it and trying to do it a couple of times a day now, because my life requires it at this point. It’s still complicated and hard to do when I’m home because of the family and the kids and the morning routine, but I’ve buckled down to make sure I’m getting it done every morning.
It’s not just medicine that I have to force myself to take. It’s a part of who I am, and I think the key is to ask myself: how do I take it off the meditation cushion. How do I take it into my life? If I find myself coming back to where I am, to my breath and my body, and letting go of negative thoughts more easily than normal, then I know that it’s infiltrating into my daily life in a significant way. It’s not just something that’s happening when I’m sitting on a cushion.
Mindfulness in Middle America
BB: You’ve been recently called the “Rustbelt Yogi.” Have you seen people in blue-collar America showing interest in mindfulness, meditation, and yoga— seeing these as worthwhile things?
TR: We have new yoga studios popping up all over, including in Youngstown, Ohio. I do travel a lot too, and I see them in all kinds of places. For example, I was just out in Sioux Falls, Iowa, and there was a yoga studio there. These are practices that—especially with the vets, and because of the vets—that we’re seeing spring up all over the country.
BB: Would you say the association of yoga and mindfulness with certain parts of the country, like the Bay Area or Cambridge, those kind of places, is that starting to erode a little bit?
TR: That’s still the main perception out there, but it’s changed a lot. LeBron James is another Rustbelt Yogi, I guess, being from Akron. Could be a trend.
BB: Given how fractured civil discourse is these days, do you see mindfulness healing the divide and hostility that’s rampant these days?