Your Mind is Your Foundation: Why First Responders Need Meditation w/ Josh Grandinetti

Josh Grandinetti, a firefighter and paramedic with 15 years of experience, shares his journey of discovering mindfulness meditation as a solution to the anxiety and post-traumatic stress that developed during his career. His mission is to help first responders take charge of their mental health proactively through his organization Foundation Fortify, offering free meditation resources specifically designed for those in emergency services.

• First responders develop a "feedback loop of the mind" where they're constantly on alert, eventually causing them to self-dispatch to false emergencies in their personal lives
• Mindfulness meditation is the practice of being aware of your moment-to-moment experience without judging it
• Just 5-10 minutes of daily mindfulness practice can provide significant mental health benefits without requiring spiritual commitment
• Self-compassion is crucial for first responders who map their communities through trauma but never see the resolution of these stories
• Western society is only beginning to understand mental health training, similar to how we discovered physical fitness benefits decades ago
• First responders need preventative mental health tools before developing negative coping mechanisms
• Making a difference in your community starts with using your attention more deliberately instead of wasting it on "brain rot"

Visit Foundation Fortify to access free mindfulness meditation resources designed specifically for first responders, or subscribe for expanded content.

https://mindforcepodcast.buzzsprout.com

Chapters

• 0:49 Introduction to Josh Grandinetti
• 2:16 Discovering Meditation After Trauma
• 5:36 Mental Fitness vs. Mental Health
• 20:23 Understanding Mindfulness Meditation
• 28:41 First Steps to Begin Practice
• 35:54 Self-Compassion for First Responders
• 41:20 Mental Challenges Unique to First Responders
• 47:29 Service and Making an Impact
• 50:10 Final Takeaway on Mindful Living

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:22

Hi everyone, I'm Nate Shearer and this is Mindforce. Join me as we explore love, life and learning, because your mind is what matters here. Today we have Josh Grandinetti and today we'll be talking about mindfulness, meditation, first responders and giving back. So, Josh, we'll start with the easy stuff the background, the who, who are you?

Speaker 2: 0:42

What makes you you? Yeah, so you know, born and raised in Arizona, married 14 years and I have two boys. I've been a firefighter for about 15 years and I've been serving as a captain about five years at that time and I've also been a certified paramedic for 12 years of my firefighting career. So I've been up to this career for quite some time and, you know, midway through my fire career I kind of started to develop some anxiety, you know, and some PTS, you know post-traumatic stress, before it became a disorder, you know, and you always hear about coping mechanisms first responders can go and discover before we discover the negative coping mechanisms that come with our jobs, right? Well, one of those that was always teased out there was meditation, mindfulness, but no one. Where do you go? Where do you go to find this, you know? And so I kind of waded through a lot of religious dogmatism and strange practices and different types of you know environments before I could really get some benefits of mindfulness under me and I began to feel that.

Speaker 2: 1:39

So I began writing a curriculum for first responders about six years ago and that kind of you know collected dirt on my shelf for about six years until a recent on-duty knee injury gave me the time and space to become a mindfulness instructor and begin producing a platform for first responders. They can go to Discover Meditation for free, all taught, so that they have a place to go, if it's ever you know something they want to come and find to help cope with something small. You know, mindfulness is kind of a preventative for us and first responders, unfortunately, are a little bit too reactionary about mental health these days. You know we wait until you need a therapist or some medication and mindfulness just offers us a way to, you know, kind of take our mental health into our own hands, like we do our physical health, and try to prevent some of these mental health diseases. So that's what I'm up to at Foundation Fortify.

Speaker 1: 2:29

That's awesome. Yeah, I love that and that was one of the reasons I named the podcast Mental Fitness. I really love the idea and thought that goes into something that you're always doing. I feel like when we say mental health, it's a building, it's an appointment, it's a thing that you go and do and then you never do again, or you go on your worst day ever. For some reason, we wait for it to be rock bottom before we enter, and so I love the idea of mental fitness and the word being like I relate to, like cardio. You know you're hitting the treadmill three times a week. You don't just go and do it once and stop doing it. You do it every week. So I love your thoughts and I love how that aligns with the show. So you kind of touched on who you are and what you're doing. Why are you here today? I'm here today.

Speaker 2: 3:10

I was kind of trying to discover, like podcast hosts, that might be interested in finding someone who's trying to do something in the world for a specific group of people and just kind of promote what I'm up to and try to get the word out there. Everyone knows a first responder, everybody knows a firefighter or a police officer or a paramedic or a dispatcher, and everyone knows the struggles that person has probably had at some point or another in their life trying to be an upstanding citizen doing the work that we do, and so it's just good to be able to get out there and get the message out Because, like I said, I have a completely free program that I just want all first responders to have access to, and, of course, I have a subscriber side that's very inexpensive, but I just want to be able to get mindfulness out to all first responders so they have somewhere that they can go to discover it, regardless of whether or not anyone ever becomes a subscriber. I just believe that this is very beneficial.

Speaker 2: 4:00

It's like you were saying and in a way, we're treating our mental health the same way we used to treat our physical health Back before diet and exercise. We kind of just all ran with our bodies and you were kind of just luck of the draw. You were given what you were given and then we discovered some diet and exercise and how we kind of shape our bodies to avoid certain outcomes. And Western medicine is still very kind of slow. We're still treating mental health like luck of the draw. You're just given the experiences you're given and you're given the mind that you're given and good luck. But the you know the East has had something to say about that for a long time when it comes to training the mind through mindfulness practices of various forms, and so I'm just trying to bring kind of Eastern practice and mindfulness, diluted of all the dogmatism, and produce it for one of society's most important industries.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I love that it's all good stuff because I think it's just so odd to me. I mentioned on the show before and I'm probably repeating so hopefully people don't have to suffer through it for too long but it's just so weird to me. Like the physical body, as you're walking into the gym or something like people will talk oh, I'm doing back and bys, I'm doing, you know, two by 10 and I'm going to do these, and we openly talk about these workouts, we have magazines for it and all these things.

Speaker 1: 5:12

But when you get into the mental health realm, it's like I can't talk about that. It's like why, why not? The brain is another part of your body. And you're talking about, you know, legs. I did leg day yesterday and it's just open and it's out there. But it's like, oh, I sat in the park and, you know, had some mindfulness for myself. Like, ooh, can't do, like it's just really bizarre to me and I'm glad that we're finally. You know, transition. I'm super glad you're here and the last question I had for you was where in the world are you calling from?

Speaker 1: 5:38

You already said Arizona, so we checked all those. But I'm excited to get into this because I think meditation is super important and it's one of those things I think often you know commonly, you know misknown or things like that, like oh, I got to sit this certain way, I have to do this thing. You know, kind of a hippie type thing, so super excited to get into it. But before we do, a few warm-up questions for you. Josh, how did you first I think you touched on it a little bit, but how did you first get introduced into mindfulness meditation?

Speaker 2: 6:05

Oh man that's a funny question I would say, my first introduction into meditation. I remember being in this record store with my father and I keep meaning to look up the band name. I think it's Rage Against the Machine. I think I grabbed this disc I was looking at and I'm showing my age here because it was a CD I'm looking at it, it and there's this man sitting and he's half engulfed in fire and he's just sitting in a meditation pose. And I just remember, you know, not being intimidated by the image but not being able to look away from the image as well.

Speaker 2: 6:37

You know, a couple years after that, I discovered what that image was. It was a vietnamese um monk that was protesting the war and he self-immolated in order to send a message. Long and short of it. I have no interest in self-immolating or nothing, but the practice of mindfulness just really spoke to me. You know, like that was a very interesting like. How could that be something somebody finds worthwhile doing, you know? So I was introduced to mindfulness just through the air, just like many of us are. You know, we think about mindfulness meditation. We see the orange suits, the bald heads, we see the mountaintops and all the strangeness, you know, and we don't know how to relate to it. But when I got in the first response, I noticed my anxiety was just starting to be discharged onto my wife a little bit unfairly, and onto my children a little bit unfairly. I would start to.

Speaker 2: 7:25

I call it the responder feedback loop of the mind. You know, when you announce you want to be a first responder, regardless of the discipline I happen to be a firefighter, slash paramedic, but there's, you know, police officers, correctional officers, dispatchers as well, who are all part of the network. Well, when you announce you want to do something like this, you begin training your mind to respond. By definition, you have to be able to respond to the needs of others over an empty stomach or something so trivial as that, in order to affect change for people, right? So you just begin dispatching and responding to problems and responding to problems, and we can do this fairly well for the first couple years. We can, you know, kind of separate the two worlds. But after training your mind to respond to harm and to problems over the course of a decade, you begin to your mind invents problems for you to respond to.

Speaker 2: 8:11

Now. Now you're self-dispatching to false emergencies within your mind and within your personal life. You start discharging all this stress onto your family, and this is just the consequence of having a responding mind, and mindfulness is just a place where we can go to not respond to the false dispatches of our minds. That is the practice. The practice is learning how to get off the ride, learning what's real to respond to and what's just made up storytelling in the mind. You know this is part of what can help first responders with their putting down the job and just living a life that is actually in front of them. So that's it's all very interesting what you're saying there. Have you ever tried mindfulness meditation?

Speaker 1: 8:50

I have not. No, it's something I really want to get into because I've had multiple guests, um, but it's one of those things. I just don't know how to bridge the gap between not doing it and doing it. I know I've asked the question to some people and I think the response usually just start with something, and I think that's what I need to just do is it's one minute, you know five minutes or whatever, like you don't have to do 30 minutes the first time, or you know sit a certain way, or all these different things. So, yeah, I think this will be interesting for me to really learn and hopefully I can take some things from this. The next question I had for you you know, based on daily things and things you do, what's a daily habit that you have that keeps you grounded?

Speaker 2: 9:26

Well, I'd have to just offer mindfulness practice, right? I mean, I sit for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour a day. That's personally. You know, I'm somebody who has taken on meditation as something that I want to teach and promote to other people. I want to write about meditation, so I say all that to say no one needs to spend more than five, ten minutes a day sitting in mindfulness practice in order to get some of these benefits that I'm talking about here.

Speaker 2: 9:52

Obviously, there are some very deep and meaningful spiritual experiences that people can have during meditation, which is why so many people who get the mindfulness meditation bug or whatever, will spend more and more time doing it, to a point where some will just give their entire lives over to it. Now, no one's saying you have to do that to get some of these simple benefits of just noticing the difference between your anxiety taking control of your afternoon versus just noticing the arising anxiety in the mind and being able to put it down and spend time with your family playing a game. These are the benefits most of us would like to have, and we don't need to sacrifice hours and a sore back and, like a, you know, three month retreats in order to get these benefits. You know, five to ten minutes on a daily-ish behavior can really have astounding benefits for us, and so many of us spend so much more time preparing diets and meals and exercising and trying to maintain our physical health. It takes so much more effort to maintain your physical health. Getting the Western world to just sit down and practice mindfulness for 10 minutes a day would really be a huge benefit to everyone in society. I really believe so.

Speaker 2: 11:00

It's just hard, for whatever reason, to get us Americans to realize that we can't control everything in our lives.

Speaker 2: 11:06

You know, and that's why mindfulness and meditation doesn't speak well to us as Americans, I think, is because in our culture you either pick yourself up by your bootstraps and produce the all-American made individual, or you're lazy and didn't do it, or you're not good enough, or you're not strong enough.

Speaker 2: 11:23

And it's because of this overall cultural attitude that I think makes mindfulness and meditation just not something we really take on board. But you know, it is something that I think is beginning to turn the tide. There's more and more research coming out about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation and it's just getting harder to ignore. It's becoming just as overwhelming as doing 20 minutes of cardio three times a week for cardiovascular health. That's almost tattooed on all of our brains now since we were kids. Right, mindfulness meditation is probably another two or three decades behind before it would really be a very common practice, I think, for most people. So we were just kind of getting to this point now, to where individuals like me who have been practicing are now being empowered with more research and education to be able to go and promote mindfulness meditation in different disciplines to start to get a little bit more traction in the practice.

Speaker 1: 12:10

Yeah, I mean it's really awesome.

Speaker 1: 12:11

I think, you know, being on the edge and has an increase is really good stuff.

Speaker 1: 12:16

I think the thing I would add or I maybe just, you know, reiterate what you said it has this weird thing in American or Western culture that it's cool to be busy, overburdened, stressed out, like it almost seems like if you slow down what you said, it's almost a negative.

Speaker 1: 12:33

You're lazy, you're slow, and so hopefully you know, through these conversations like that's why I love having the show I hope some of these stories you know resonate with somebody and then they start, you know, changing some of the things based on what they hear, because you know this is good and helpful stuff for people, but for the longest time it's just ingrained to be faster and faster. I mean, we're just so inundated with all these things. We have fast food where you can get food in a second, you can Google an answer for anything in the world in a matter of seconds and something that resides in your pocket, all thing in the world in a matter of seconds and something that resides in your pocket. Of all these things it's like better, faster, stronger, now, now, and so I think there's a lot of goodness from the slowing down right I think it's.

Speaker 2: 13:12

I think it's getting to a point in western society where it's just like, okay, I obviously have more resources than probably my great-grandparents did. I obviously have more, a nicer vehicle and a nicer house, and I, I got this cell phone, but I'm still not happy. Now, why is that, if all these promises are coming true and now all I'm worried about is a digital number on my bank account? You know, I don't even touch money anymore. I mean, when was the last time we you know what I mean Like, why are we all so unhappy? And we're just, we're all like the Solomon story of the Bible and we're all like the Solomon story of the Bible where we all have so many resources? I mean, just a thousand years ago, people didn't have clean running water, right? I mean, if you would have given people a thousand years ago clean running water, they would have thought their problems were solved. Like everything is solved for human history now, right, but we're still not happy. And that's because our brain has two primary jobs it's to keep you safe and to keep you inherently dissatisfied with your experience. And in some moods, this is what we call motivation. I'm motivated to change my life because I want these things is what keeps us so all unhappy with our experience, because we can't find that satisfaction.

Speaker 2: 14:28

When is going to be the moment where you have the spouse of your dreams and you have the career and the money of your dreams and you're at that vacation that you've always wanted to take? And here you are, you're standing on top of the peak. What is the difference between that moment and this conversation we're having right here? Why wait for the world to arrange itself in a way where I can be happy? I can be happy now if I choose to just recognize how inherently pleasurable it is to be in this moment. And that just takes a little bit of training and time.

Speaker 2: 14:57

But mindfulness meditation can slowly get us to a point where we can detect the way our mind pulls this rug over our eyes, every single moment of experience, to then achieve the next thing that'll satisfy that itch or that thirst or that the temperature in the room isn't so good. You know we're always ethically judging our experience in a very strange way. You know how can a cup of coffee be good or bad on some level? You know, honestly, it's just a cup of coffee and you're the one that applies an ethical judgment to this thing, and mindfulness meditation can help you detect that in your life. Does any of that make sense, am I?

Speaker 1: 15:32

Yeah, yeah, that completely makes sense. Yeah, I mean, you choose how you react. I think that's come up in a lot of different conversations I've had is like you're the one that makes the choice. Like back to the coffee the coffee is just what it is. You're the one that makes the choice on if it's good or not. Well, I wanted to ask you, josh, do you have a question for me before we jump into your three main pillars?

Speaker 2: 15:52

in the human mind? I mean, what brought you to your interest in kind of discovering how you can understand this thing that we're all dealing with more and more, because it seems like you've had various people that are interested in awareness and consciousness and the human mind. So what is it that brought you to this domain?

Speaker 1: 16:08

I honestly don't know. I've just always been really interested. I went through my bachelor's degree and I kind of checked the box just because I needed to get a degree to do what I was doing. So I got one in contract management, but it wasn't really all that exciting. It just happened to be where I was residing at the time at work. But when I went back for my master's I was really excited. I got one in industrial and organizational psychology.

Speaker 1: 16:28

I've always just been so interested on how we interact. You know, I kind of would have liked to have gone down like the criminal psychology one, but I didn't want to get too much into like criminal justice and stuff like that. And so since I'm in a leadership role at work, I figured that would help like in the leadership standpoint. But yeah, I've always just been really interested in like how we interact and I think it's just because I love people I mean it's cheesy and as cliche as it is, I want everyone to be happy and get along and you know all those things so being able to understand like how we come together and, uh, you know how that all comes together. So yeah, I think that's pretty much. It Just always been really fascinated and just want to help people. I would love for you know people to write and say, hey, that story that Josh told or something that you said helped me along the way. You know all the time and effort we put into the shows and the editing and all those things Like it's all worth it if you know help somebody along the way.

Speaker 1: 17:18

So I'm just a big walking cliche but I love, love helping people and always been just super fascinated by the brain. I think it goes back to, you know, not talking about it as much Like it almost has like a lure mystery to it that I don't know finds really interesting. I've always been reading, you know the crime novels and things. Growing up I was reading Alex Cross like way younger than I should have. I was watching the show that's now on Amazon Prime. I don't think I should have been reading these books as a kid because some of that stuff is pretty graphic. But him being a cop and a psychologist was awesome. I love that yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:52

You know, to touch on your point about some of the strangeness of why we don't relate to the mind very well, it's just because, you know I thought about this earlier when you mentioned the same thing it's like if somebody's running a marathon and they begin to have a chest pain, you know, we can easily detect a heart attack, right. It's like we can point to it and say that's your problem. But the mind operates on three or four different types of cells and is organized in a very complex patterning and they communicate with only six to eight neurochemicals. And so the way we, you know, we can surgically remove, right, and we can surgically intervene areas in just the heart or just the kidneys or just the bones, you know.

Speaker 2: 18:34

But to be able to go into the mind and understand how this network and wiring and on very few differentiating factors, right, we just have regions really, and the more we study those regions, the more we understand that those regions are all encompassing of other regions as well, you know. So it's like to be able to get into the mind and be able to actively affect change and understand how it operates is just much more slow going than it was dissecting the human body and saying okay, that pumps blood, that filters blood, and we could discover that really quickly. Our brain science is just far behind our physical science, and so we're kind of in that place in human history where they were just beginning to open up the body and discovering what all this did. Scientists are just navigating the point where they can start to turn the wheels of the mind and understand it on a more complex level. So I think that kind of gets to why we're still so far behind in our mental health, but we're so far advanced in our physical health.

Speaker 1: 19:33

Oh yeah, that makes sense. I do love kind of the unknown, and so I guess that lines up that makes sense. I'd love kind of the unknown, and so I guess that lines up that makes sense. I love to learn a little bit more. Your first pillar is mindfulness meditation. So if you were passing someone on the street or jumping in an elevator or something, how would you describe mindful meditation to someone in the three minute elevator speed?

Speaker 2: 19:52

Absolutely so. Mindfulness meditation is basically kind of a phrase. Right, there is mindfulness and then there's meditation. Okay, mindfulness is just a skill. It's just that the best definition of mindfulness I've ever heard is by a man named Zen Kabat, and his mindfulness is the ability to be aware of your moment-to-moment experience without judging. That's it. Just being aware of your moment-to-moment experience prior to judging it. That is what the mindfulness skill is. That's it Just being aware of your moments of experience prior to judging it. That is what the mindfulness skill is. It's like I was saying earlier we always ethically judge our experience. Do I want more of this experience or less of this experience? Do I want to have more coffee? Do I want to have more sex or do I want to have less frustration and less pain? Right, like we're always trying to pick what we want in our lives and what we don't want in our lives. But there's a in mindfulness practice you can just be with your experience without grasping to it and without and when you can pull that skill into your real life. That is the benefit of mindfulness practice.

Speaker 2: 20:51

Now, meditation is more or less like the gym it's where you go to practice your mindfulness. Does that make sense, we all go to the gym to exercise, but the real benefits are taking the physical benefits of exercise into our real lives so that we can, you know, get off the couch easier. We're not developing diseases and cardiovascular issues, right? This is what physical exercise does for us. Well, with mindfulness practice, we're kind of doing the same thing where meditation is where we go to just practice our skill of mindfulness, and then pulling mindfulness into our everyday lives is the trick. I mean, you can practice meditation for three hours a day and still be an app to everybody, right, there's no problem there. But being able to take these skills into your actual life is what we're trying to do with our mindfulness skill.

Speaker 1: 21:37

So that would be my take, that is. That's a perfect rundown, I think. If you don't understand it after that, I don't know. That's about as good as you can get. I wanted to touch on something that we talked about earlier, and I think this is a core thing. Many people, including myself, struggle with slowing down right. What advice do you have to give someone starting out this mindfulness journey?

Speaker 2: 21:56

Just that you know you're going to sit down from the moment you can remember being aware, right? You're always telling yourself a story of something you need to do or something that is required of you to be doing, and you're always telling yourself this story, right? And we fail to recognize just how little of our lives we actually control. Okay, I mean, the average person in America now probably relies on over a thousand people a day just to have a normal day. You know, we all rely on the water guy to make sure that the pH levels and the bacteria are good, we all rely on the construction worker to make sure our roads are working and we all rely on our teachers to make sure our kids are safe and educated while we're hard at work. And then we're just part of this huge network of distributed responsibility for our lives. But we tell ourselves this story that we're either the victim of oppression within our community and we have to overcome it, or we're the hero over that oppression and we are the ones that are responsible for our own success. But we failed to recognize that you didn't choose your parents and you didn't choose the country or the time that you were born. You didn't choose the talents that you were given and you didn't choose the mistakes or the pitfalls of the life that you were given right. And we're all just adapting and we're all just changing and we're all just responding to our experience and you can either let the billboard balls of life kind of ding you around mentally or you can kind of take the reins of your own picture of your reality by sitting down observing how your mind is painting it and in time you can begin to use your attention in the direction that you want to, because you've trained your attention.

Speaker 2: 23:34

You know, we all know what it's like these days. You know, on a societal level, we're all training our attention about 10 seconds at a time through video reels. You know I don't know if anybody's noticed that the biggest societal issue we have these days is an impoverishment of our attention. I mean, if we're honest about the screen time notifications on Saturday or our phones, you know. If you're honest about that or day, or our phones, you know if you're honest about that, you're spending four hours a day on your phone. Where is your attention being paid? You are the product now and none of us are realizing that the price we're paying, but it's on view for all of us.

Speaker 2: 24:06

Everybody's outraged by everything, everyone. There's no community out there anymore. Everyone feels isolated and alone. Everybody just numbs themselves with visual outputs from their phone, and this is all because we're just nobody's training their attention anymore. Nobody is diligently focusing and it's been stolen from us. It's been stolen from us because we are not training it anymore and it's just getting harder and harder for us to all have a common, shared story about what's going on in our world, who we are as people, where we're going, and I think a lot of this just needs to kind of be recognized in our society if we're going to come back together and push human civilization forward or destroy ourselves in the meantime. So that's something I would say to that a little bit.

Speaker 1: 24:50

Yeah, it's wild that we're more connected with you know electrons and things through the internet than ever before, but I don't know if we feel more connected than we do than ever before. I feel like there's a lot of isolation and a lot of problems. So I'm curious, like someone is listening. That sounds great. I'd love to start. You know where it's Thursday right now. We're rolling into Friday. Like, hey, I'm going to start Monday. Like what is the very first day? What's the shift from not doing this to the first day? What does that look like as you transition? Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 25:20

So you know it's not going to be a whole lot different than any time you've ever done anything uncomfortable. You know the oddest thing about mindfulness meditation is just starting. Okay, when you're waiting at a doctor's office, how long do you wait before you grab your phone or grab a magazine to distract yourself?

Speaker 2: 25:38

You know not very long, not very long. Somebody, sam Harris. He's a philosopher and he has a mindfulness app as well. Something he said once that really stuck with me was you know, in prisons, when somebody misbehaves in prison, what do we do with this person? We put them in isolation, right, and this is considered like the worst possible form of punishment for this individual, so much so that we have very deep regulations on how long you can keep somebody in isolation, right. But if you were to put a Buddhist monk in this same room, he'd be fine for days. And now, what is the difference between these two men? One person has learned to master their mind. That is it. That's the end of story.

Speaker 2: 26:13

So when you're at that doctor's office or you're waiting in line and we're constantly seeking something to, it's because you don't want to be alone with your own mind. Going up there and being alone is boring. It's like being you know, it's like being stolen by the world's most boring individual and told the same story over and over and over again. And you know distressing yourself over your own failures and embarrassing moments from when you were six years old and you did something stupid that no one else noticed that you did, but you know you'll be sitting there and you'll remember this memory from when you were like eight and you did something embarrassing and like Sally saw you and the last time you saw Sally was in seventh grade Like, why are you even worried about what she saw? She hasn't thought about it since that day, right, but here you are, like face palming because of something you did when you were six. It's ridiculous. In there and sitting there in mindfulness is just having the courage to get up there and say, okay, I'm going to untangle all of the ways in which my mind has tried to tell itself and its own story of its existence and I'm just going to get in there and kind of see what, what, observe it. If you want to understand your own mind, you just have to sit down and observe it. So that's a very round way of answering your question, but the first step would just be that to just sit down.

Speaker 2: 27:24

It helps to have a good mindfulness instructor. It helps to have some guided meditations at the very first at least, to get underground of what you're trying to do. You know, at Foundation Fortified I start from first principles for first responders Anybody can go to Foundation Fortified and pick up mindfulness. You know, if you aren't a first responder and you want to understand mindfulness, you can go to my free side there and you can just start.

Speaker 2: 27:45

You'll hear a lot of first responder themes. You know you hear a lot of things, that first responder language. So in mindfulness they'll say something like, you know, bring your awareness to the breath. You'll hear me a fire cat in talking to police officers, say something like bring your situational awareness to the breath, because a first responder is taught very early on to have something called situational awareness and that's something we say to each other when one of us gets a feeling that something's not right or high alert here or hey, we're in a dangerous environment. Situational awareness, guys, we all know what that means. So to be able to sit down in your meditation practice and have an instructor who's familiar enough with your own mind to say bring your situation this is immediately, you know, relatable for first responders. So you'll get some language like that under my program.

Speaker 2: 28:30

But you know, just finding a good meditation instructor who can start at first principles and walk you through kind of a basic, you know platform of what you're trying to cultivate at first is a good place to start, but it really is just like that. It's like having the courage to start. You know, some of the people in the gym that really bring me full of inspiration are the individuals who are clearly overweight, clearly lost in the gym and clearly just trying to get through this workout. And those are the individuals that are most inspiring, because you know they're confused, you know they can be seen and they just want to make that change. That's what it feels like to go into a meditation hall the first time and not know where to sit and not know how to act, and just want you know what I mean. You just have to start, like anything else, but you really have to have the courage to start with yourself. It's that Michael Jackson song.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Everybody says they do work on themselves. Everybody says you know, oh, I'm working on myself, I'm working on myself, but we're not. You can't possibly work with yourself if you aren't starting with the very tool that creates who you are, that creates the reality in which you live in, that tells itself a story of why you are and who you are. You can't possibly work on yourself until you know yourself. Mindfulness practice is really the best place to go to start that, and the type of disciplines and the type of all of the religious. You know, one of the things I tell first, if you don't mind, one of the things I tell first responders all the time is you know, imagine if the nunnery, the Catholic nunnery, discovered bodybuilding.

Speaker 2: 29:55

You know, back in like the 1700s, right, like they just started picking up rocks and building synagogues, and you know finding huge muscles. You know they might literally attribute all of those gains to sacrificing labor to the Lord. And you know, discovering chants and making songs about body. We might still avoid weightlifting, like it might be so covered in strangeness that, like Western society never picked it up. And this is where we find mindfulness practice these days. It was discovered in the East, captured by religion and completely dogmatized for well over 4,000 years. And we're just in this place right now where some Western scientists have gone back East, brought to university, studied the practice, divorced it of any of the dogmatism that isn't needed and captured what's valuable about the practice. And now we're starting to bring it into a place where it's now more taught as a mental health and a positive way of living your life rather than a religious practice. Now it's starting to gain traction as like a daily practicable habit like physical exercise.

Speaker 1: 30:57

That's good stuff. It sounds like it can really benefit anyone, doesn't matter first responder or not. It sounds like you got a lot of good stuff. I wanted to ask you are a first responder and so you got those high stress situations. I was curious is there a specific mindfulness technique that's been especially helpful for you in those high stress situations?

Speaker 2: 31:16

that's been especially helpful for you in those high stress situations. You know that's a really good question, but there's, I would have to say I'm going to go with self-compassion. I'm going to go with self-compassion and I say that it feels like chewing on foil. You know what I mean. Like I know what that sounds like to most people when they say that you know self-compassion, mindfulness, loving, kindness, practice Like that's a mouthful right and I totally am. You know, I was born and raised in Chandler, arizona, and I became a firefighter and a Republican father and was. You know what I mean? And I discovered mindfulness, meditation.

Speaker 2: 31:50

And now I'm here talking about self-compassion and the reason for that is because someone once heard someone say you should never leave the house without your best friend. But you happen to be the one they mean when they say that. You know we all live with this person who's the meanest individual to us all the time I'll go to Starbucks and I'll order a vinty coffee and I'll beat myself up the rest of the day for not saying venti. I'll be humiliated, I'll call myself an idiot and I'll just destroy myself over this little thing. But if your buddy did that, you'd be like vinti you give him a laugh and then it'd be the end of it right. And if you happen to see your friend was bothered by something, you would have compassion for your friend. You know you broke it over. But to ourselves, we demoralize ourselves, we humiliate ourselves, we're constantly talking down to ourselves, we're constantly trying to fix our vanity because we can't look good enough for other people. So a well-developed self-compassion practice is a place where you can go to understand that you aren't perfect and nobody's perfect. And all of your insecurities might be flavored slightly different than other people's insecurities, but their insecurities are there as well.

Speaker 2: 33:02

Whether or not you're insecurity about you know you're tall and skinny, or you're short and fat, or you're insecure about the fact that you aren't as beautiful as you wish you were, or you aren't as. Whatever your insecurity, we all have them and it's just working through the component of the minds and security where mindfulness practice is beneficial. Security is just insecurity. The flavoring of it doesn't matter. Within the mind, we all have them. And when you begin to understand that about yourself, you do start to apply it to other people. And now all of a sudden you're just a kinder, nicer person to be around. You might hold that door open. You might notice somebody needs help with something and you'll just go over and help them because you've needed help too.

Speaker 2: 33:40

It's really odd how a good self-compassion practice will start to help. You just see others. We all just live our lives in our phones and we're all always surrounded by people. We don't see people anymore. Firefighters and first responders still see people. We're responsible for responding to these people at their worst days, so we still see people. We see people so well that we punish ourselves and we can't help people. You know, and a good self-compassion practice will just help you see people, see yourself. So I would.

Speaker 1: 34:07

I would definitely say that is probably the the best form of my practice and it's funny too, because it's like things that we know we just don't do. Like we say, put yourself in someone else's shoes, walk a mile, and someone should like all these different phrases and whatnot. But it's like things that we know we just don't do. Like we say, put yourself in someone else's shoes, walk a mile in someone's shoes, like all these different phrases and whatnot. But it's like one thing to say it and whatnot, but to actually do it like, actually think about that connect and empathy. You know, I think a lot of times we get caught up in sympathy like oh, poor you. But really like thinking when was a time you were low or you know, at that spot that other person was. That's that real connection and that empathy versus the sympathy. Well, Josh, the next pillar you have is first responders and mental wellness. Someone to ask what unique challenges do first responders specifically face in mental health and resilience?

Speaker 2: 34:50

Real, quick as a sidebar, we're going to have to edit this out. I'm sorry. My garage door broke last night, and so my garage door guy is going to be here soon and I might have to go open. Show him real quick.

Speaker 1: 35:02

I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2: 35:03

No, you're good, so ask me your question again. I'm sorry, he just. He just texted me.

Speaker 1: 35:07

Oh, you're all good. What unique challenges do first responders face when it comes to mental health and resilience?

Speaker 2: 35:27

no-transcript have discovered this new form of suffering that humans haven't ever had to contend with before. You know a normal human affair. You know mindfulness practice will show you how suffering works within the mind and within the course of human life. Now something awful happens within your life. You lose somebody that's irreplaceable to you in your life and you're immediately put on this course of grief, right, and we all know the five stages of grief and how that model has been changed over the years and all that. And there's still a model there and we all know what that is. And then you have community. Whether you have large community support or only a couple close ones come to you at your aid and you begin to clean out, eventually, the deceased's things and you go through this entire process that is, although painful, is very, very human, and it's why losing somebody that we care about is such an awful but important part of our lives.

Speaker 2: 36:19

Right Now, first responders watch the suffering of a community from a third-party narrative. Right, we never get to know whether or not Sally found a foster family after her parents were lost on this car accident. You know, we just get to wonder whatever happened to Sally, and then where that car accident is, is forever Sally to us, because we can't ever know what happened to Sally. So instead we just remember how Sally's life changed forever that day, and then we always wonder, and after we do this for a certain amount of time, our community becomes a distributed map of harm and suffering that we never get to really cope or finish any of these stories, and so that is a very strange place for the human mind to try to dwell in and then continue to respond and live in that community. So I would say that's one very intimate way in which first responders have just kind of due to the nature of our work, discovered this new way to turn a human mind into a knot.

Speaker 2: 37:18

And in order to protect your physical health, exercise here's how to diet. We're going to do that an hour a day. Here's how to exercise we're going to do that an hour a day. I think the key that we're missing is hey, we're going to protect that mind of yours. Here's how to be mindful 10 minutes a day, and you're going to do it throughout your academy. We're have certain physical requirements that we have to meet, but by and large, you can be as healthy or unhealthy as you want within a certain you know frame, and that can be true for your mental health as well.

Speaker 2: 38:01

But we should be training the skills to our recruits. We should be giving this as a skill, not because we can't give you a therapist when you're not, we're not going to give you a doctor when you're unhealthy, but we're going to give you a skill that we can demonstrably prove now in the lab, scientifically. That is a skill that can prevent these mental health diseases that we know you are at a higher risk for that. We know so many of our first responders are struggling with the likelihood that you're going to have PTSD or anxiety or develop a negative coping mechanism or substance abuses are much higher than the average population. We're going to give you a skill to help us with that. Mindfulness is the key and that's why I'm trying to build, I'm trying to change the culture. If I want to go talk to fire chiefs and police chiefs, I want to change the culture of first response, to deploy this skill into our recruits so that we can prevent these issues going forward.

Speaker 1: 38:51

That's some powerful stuff, Josh. Thank you for your service and all the other first responders. Man, I can't imagine my mind. I feel like it's too active already, so I'd be really wondering what's going on. And just having to have the memory of that location being negative, that's really rough. The next question I had for you are there any misconceptions about mental wellness in high stakes professions that you'd like to address?

Speaker 2: 39:16

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of them. A lot of people think, unfortunately, that mental fortitude is the key. My business is called Foundation Fortified because your mind is your foundation and you should practice to fortify it. But a lot of our veterans just believe you need to buck up buckaroo and you need to stuff that down.

Speaker 2: 39:37

You know, these days, those of us that are talking about mental health, we're creating the problem. We didn't have these problems. Why do you younger men start to have these problems right? Meanwhile they'll grab their alcohol and they'll, you know, struggle with their divorces and they'll, you know, struggle with what we've all unfortunately begun to see our leadership struggle with in first response, and it's not getting any better. It's not getting easier to be a police officer if we haven't noticed. It's not getting easier to be a firefighter if we haven't noticed. You know it's not getting easier to be an ambulance paramedic. You know it's not getting easier to be a dispatcher.

Speaker 2: 40:08

These are all forms of the job that are only getting harder as societies scale.

Speaker 2: 40:13

More population increases, there's more ways in which humans are finding.

Speaker 2: 40:17

You know ways to hurt or kill ourselves as we interact with chemicals and cars at high speeds, and you know more and more mental health issues are leading to more and more societal chaos, with school shootings and things like that. It's not getting easier to be a first responder, and so we've got to be doing something to help first responders cope mentally, and I believe the simple skill of mindfulness is one of these things that we can deploy in our industry. It isn't going to solve all of our problems, but if it can reduce our overhead of mental health issue by 50%, I mean if we had a magic pill that we could just give first responders the day they were hired, just say here, take, this has very low side effects, right, you might notice a little bit of headache, might be sweating, but after that you'll be fine and it's going to avoid mental health We'd give it to her. It'd be illegal for us not to give it to them, right, and this is just a skill that we should be giving to our recruits.

Speaker 1: 41:11

So it's just wild. For the longest time you were supposed to be strong and not have any feelings and bottle and all these things. I'm so glad you know I have the show and there's other shows and we're trying to have these conversations and I hope with every conversation you know, people feel more comfortable on getting the help and sitting and meditating and you know, fill in the blank like take care of yourself, take care of your mind. These are super important things. The last pillar you have is giving back and making an impact. What role does service play in your life and why is it important to you?

Speaker 2: 41:42

You know be useful has always just kind of been like a simple phrase for me. You know, just be useful. You know, my dad and I started business when I was a kid and I started working with him when I was probably nine. You know, and my dad's only. That's going to be my garage guy. Can I take a quick five minutes? Yep, you're good.

Speaker 1: 41:59

Oh, I'm so sorry. You're good. Oh, it just starts again. Okay, josh, can you share a moment when giving back made a lasting impact to me?

Speaker 2: 42:06

My father and I started a carpet cleaning and tile cleaning business back when I was a kid. I think I mentioned a little bit of that earlier. Part of a component of that business was flood restoration. I attribute flood restoration for some of what brought me into the fire service as well. People's homes were destroyed through water and we went in there to try to fix it right. No different than a fire a fire attacked your home today, right?

Speaker 2: 42:34

Um well, I was on this flood job and these individuals had just come, moved to arizona very common back when I was a kid. Everybody moves to phoenix, arizona um well, the dishwasher guy had come out and not hooked up the water correctly and they went for a walk and in 15 minutes their house was three inches underwater. And so we, we go to this flood job and I'm in the closet sucking out water with our machine, right, and I see this box that says photos and there had been water that was wicked up halfway up this box, right, and I just remember grabbing the box and just, you know I'm like 12, you know I'm just doing everything I can to get this. But it's tearing here and it's tearing there and my dad sees what I'm doing and my dad's like what are you doing, oh my God.

Speaker 2: 43:22

And at this point he was forced to help me get the pictures out of the area because I had made such a mess. But by the time we got the box where it was safe, we had saved so much of the box after we had taken it all out and the family was just looking at old photos by the time we were leaving the job three hours later and they were laughing at some of these memories and I just remember thinking if I would have not done it, water would have just continued to destroy that box and my dad was even not like at first seeing the importance and I thought I'd made a mistake, even right. And then I just remember the worst day of their lives was now, you know, a memory for this family on looking over some old photos. So that was probably the first time that was probably the first time.

Speaker 1: 43:57

That's a good one. I'm going to make that a snippet for sure that one's going on TikTok. What's one way someone can start making a difference in their community today?

Speaker 2: 44:05

You know, as silly as it sounds, just being a better being, a more diligent operator of your own attention, you know being taking the reins of your own attention and better using it, using the most valuable thing you have in your life to better use. You know so much of us spend so much time wasting. You know, I can't I think it was the UK. The UK came out with this term that I can't get out of my mind. It's called brain rot and you know it was the term of the year for them. Right, brain rot. And it's just these video reels that we spend because, you know, something goofy happened at a restaurant. This person captured it on the camera and we'll watch it for three minutes to see how this person was eventually ex, you know, excused out of the mcdonald's like, and that's how we spent three minutes. And then let's go to the next one and the next one, and it's just this brain rot. And and we wonder why, you know, but everybody, everybody also simultaneously believes that they can be their own doctor and that they can be their own financial advisor. And you can be your own, you know, health expert as well, but you're spending your day, four hours, engulfed in tiktok, I promise you, the doctor, despite his mistakes, spent hours studying diagnoses and health problems, and the water guy at the water facility went to college to understand.

Speaker 2: 45:21

We all have to trust others at some point and, at the end of the day, until you're using your attention in a more useful way not only for your happiness in your life, but for the citizens around you you aren't part of what's going on. You're more of a parasite than you are a contributor. We all are contributors through our job. Like I said, I have to rely on the construction worker. I have to rely on the cop and the firefighter to show up. I have to rely. But what else are you doing in your life to contribute? Who are you going to be? Are you going to have that funeral where your family and friends show up and talk about how important you were, or are you going to be the person that fills a football stadium full of people demonstrating how important you were? There's something you got to be doing in your society that's bigger than you are. If you want to know why you're unhappy, it's because you're spending your life trying to gratify your own impulses. The real satisfaction.

Speaker 2: 46:15

People wonder why kids are so valuable to us. Kids are the most selfish way of getting that feeling of a bigger impact in this world. It's so easy being a father of two boys. They fill me with so much importance in my life. Right, I got to buy them shoes and I got to cook them lunch and I got to clean them. I'm so important. If I wasn't around they'd be dead, but that's like the easiest way to get that.

Speaker 2: 46:38

But leaving them on their birthday to go and respond to a community and to not be there on Christmas. You know that's what I'm doing and that's what first responders are doing in our society. They aren't there because they're protecting you on your birthday. They're ensuring that the traffic is flowing and they're ensuring that the burglaries aren't happening and they're ensuring that the hazardous chemicals are staying in the containers they need to stay in so that your house, two and a half miles away, isn't being off gas while you're cooking your burgers at night.

Speaker 2: 47:08

You know this is what first responders are up to in the world in the background, and we notice when they make mistakes and we notice when they inconvenience our days, but we don't notice all the ways in which first responders clean up the dead without us ever knowing they clean up our streets. They do so much in the background for us so that we can just live our lives, and so, if you want to be a contributor, being a first responder is a great way another selfish way, I would say because at least you're getting paid, you're providing. That's another. You know what are you doing in society. That's bigger than you. That's the biggest way to not only find more happiness in your life, but to actually be part of a community once again.

Speaker 1: 47:48

Yeah, that makes sense. Do the best that you can at your job and you know it fits into the larger picture. That's good stuff, josh. I want to bring it all together. If you could give one piece of advice to someone who wants to live a more mindful and service-driven life, what would be your final takeaway?

Speaker 2: 48:03

I would just submit that most people that are listening to this conversation, most people, are living a life that is more or less dedicated to one single task and that's gratifying your next impulse and avoiding the next thing that makes you feel uncomfortable. That is the way you're probably spending most of your life. Mindfulness is a way where you can kind of stop living that constant moment to moment. What do I want, what do I don't want? And it's a way to be able to say there's got to be something else here. There's got to be something in this moment to be glad for.

Speaker 2: 48:35

Now I might reach for something that I enjoy, like my wife's hand when we're watching a movie, but if I never touch my wife's hand again, that is going to be like the worst day of my life if something ever happens to my wife. But there's still a moment in this moment to find happiness. There's still something worth having here. You can live a life where you're dedicated to just constantly getting what you want and avoiding what you don't, or you can live a life that's open to whatever is given to you and you find happiness within that, and then anything life gives you is a moment to be happy, and that's what I would submit about mindfulness practice.

Speaker 1: 49:11

Just an added bonus. Everything else will be good. Well, that was some awesome stuff on mindful meditation. Check out the website. I'll try to get it in the links when it's posted, but, josh, thank you for coming out. I'd like to ask everyone out there for your feedback. The feedback makes this podcast even better. Drop your thoughts or questions on Instagram, facebook, TikTok, youtube, buzzsprout all those fun social media platforms that we're on and thank you for being a part of the Mindforce journey. I love you all. See ya, thank you.