Episode 1_ Welcome!

In the first episode of The Balanced Brief, Christine Rudy, an attorney and yoga teacher, discusses the possibility of balancing a legal career with mindfulness and well-being. She shares her own journey of discovering the power of mindfulness on a yoga mat and how it helped her manage stress, make better decisions, and avoid burnout. Christine explains that mindfulness is not just about meditation, but also about managing stress, building resilience, making mindful decisions, and finding focus in chaotic situations. She provides examples and simple mindfulness practices, such as deep breathing, to help professionals incorporate mindfulness into their daily lives. Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of The Balanced Brief. I'm Christine Rudy, an attorney, a yoga teacher, and someone who has spent years navigating the balance between legal briefs and mindful breath. If you're listening, chances are you felt the tension between high-pressure careers and personal well-being. Maybe you're a lawyer constantly on the go, a professional trying to manage stress, or a wellness enthusiast curious about how mindfulness can support a demanding career. Wherever you are on your journey, this podcast is for you. Today, we're going to dive into a question I've been asked time and time again. Can you really balance a career in law with mindfulness and well-being? Spoiler alert, yes, you can, and I'm here to show you how. So let's begin. My story, from the courtroom to the mat. Let me start by sharing a little bit about my own journey. I earned my Juris Doctorate from Western State College of Law and have practiced in law in Texas since 2015. But along the way, I realized something. While I was advocating for others, I wasn't always advocating for myself. Stress, burnout, long hours, sound familiar? It wasn't until I stepped onto a yoga mat that I discovered the power of mindfulness, not just as a stress reliever, but as a tool for focus, resilience, and even better decision-making in my legal practice. Eventually, I became a certified yoga teacher, and now I'm passionate about merging these two worlds, law and mindfulness, to help other professionals find balance, avoid burnout, and perform at their best. So why do lawyers and professionals need mindfulness? Let's talk about why mindfulness isn't just a luxury, it's a necessity. So they show that legal professionals experience high rates of stress, anxiety, and burnout. You can basically find that anywhere on the internet. But mindfulness isn't just about meditating in silence for an hour. It's about A, managing stress before it manages you, B, building resilience for high pressure situations, C, making more mindful decisions in business and law, and D, focusing in on the chaos. I mean focus in the chaos. So let's talk about these for a minute. Managing stress before it manages you. What does that mean? Have you ever had the scenario where all of a sudden you realize that you are being highly reactive and that's not your intention, right? So somebody says something to you and like my instant urge is to get defensive or automatically say something or sometimes blow up and say things I don't really mean and kind of regret saying later. I'm so guilty of that it's not even funny. So one way that managing stress before it manages you is manifested with a mindfulness practice is that you learn non-reactivity. That's a big yoga theme. So non-reactivity is basically the pause in between the action that is making you want to react and the actual response you want to have. So instead of sending that email, sending that text message, getting on that phone call, you are taking a moment to pause, decide how you want to respond, and when you have a mindfulness practice it teaches you that pause because when we get so in our heads, technology and everything like that, there aren't a lot of natural pauses these days. You have to intentionally teach your brain how to stop and clear the mind. So that's one way. The next way is building resilience for high-pressure situations. So if you've ever meditated, you can take about, if you can do a five-minute meditation. It sounds like not that long. Five minutes, you know, cleaning your house flies by. Five minutes meditating is completely different. It's like five minutes of holding a plank. It can be that difficult for people, especially lawyers and people who are hyper-focused on productivity, task lists, billable hours, and things of that nature. So when you teach your brain to, when you can get there, if you can get there, you can get there, but teach your brain to stop and clear the mind. You just completely clear it. You think of the thoughts passing by like clouds. You're able to do that for a chunk of time, a minute even. You are building stamina for your brain to be able to hold that pause. And back to managing the stress before that reactivity, it gives you that pause. So building resilience or stamina for high-pressure situations. So you've practiced your non-reactivity in small situations, micro-situations, and then you practice extending that time so that when you are put in that high-pressure situation, your brain is more likely to revert to the pause than it is to the reactivity because your brain has patterns, right? And so when you create a pattern of reactivity, it wants to respond that way because it's used to it. When you create a pattern of mindfulness, you're more likely to respond in that manner. Making more mindful decisions in business and law. That just goes back to being able to be more intentional in your actions. So you've lessened that reactivity. You've built up your resilience. And now when you have the time to sit down and answer that email or decide what you're going to do next with your business or decide your legal strategy for a particular case, you're going to do so incorporating that pause. So not only are you less reactive in a high-pressure situation, but when the pressure's off, your brain goes, ah, I've got time to sit here and think, and now let's really dive into what we can do. And then finding focus in the chaos. That's that thought of the meditation, right? So if you're able to sit down and meditate, we often talk about, you'll hear it in a lot of different mindfulness practices, and it's because it's great. There are so many analogies you can use, but this one's really common. And when you're meditating, one of the easiest ways to start, and we'll do a little practice here in a second, but one of the easiest ways to start is by essentially closing your eyes, focusing on the point right between the space in between your eyebrows, and then trying to clear your mind. And then when you have a thought, A, there's a couple of ways you can do this, well, there's many ways you can do it, but, and we'll get to the one I originally talked about, I'm a side storyer, I'm sorry. The thought, you can say, this is a thought, so acknowledge it's a thought, and then identify it as a cloud passing in the sky. So imagine you're staring at the sky, and you notice a thought, it can be just a regular thought, I want a piece of toast. Or it can be one of those negative, scary thoughts that everybody gets. They're all clouds in the sky. You can get as creative as you want with it in your brain, or you can just soften it and let it be a soft cloud passing in the sky. And you watch as that cloud drifts away and clears your mind. And what you'll find out is, after that period of time, the sky clears. It's really fascinating. And you can get that to happen within the first minute of a meditation once you get really good at it. And it's hard, it's not easy, you have to keep practicing it, right? It's hard when you're laying in bed at night to clear the mind. What you'll start to notice, though, is your nervous system relax once you hit that moment. And when you haven't been doing it, you get out of practice like everything else. So, I'm going to show you how to practice like everything else. So, all right, let's talk about a simple mindfulness practice. The first and easiest one you can do is just to breathe. It sounds so silly, but how many times are we sitting somewhere and we haven't taken a deep breath all day? So starting your day with a big deep breath and a loud exhale, just kind of let your body go. It releases the nervous system, it gets some like physical movement involved in your body, and whatever you're hyper-focused on, you know, kind of goes away a little bit. You can do that all day long if you want. It sounds kind of like a sigh, but it's not quite like a sigh because it's intentional, right? You're doing the intentional breath. So, another thing we do before we do, so that was your first breath, now let's try another breath. This time let's relax the shoulders down, soften through your belly, kind of open up your jaw and wiggle it around, and then notice your face and kind of what's going on with your face. Can you soften it? Can you let all the muscle tension go? Are you making a face? Let it go. You can remove the tongue away from the roof of your mouth. Oftentimes we do that. You stop clenching your jaw. I do that all the time. I crack teeth. I'm doing it so bad, and that's a, you know, that's a stress response. So, now let's try again. Everything softened down. Feel rooted in the ground of your tailbone, and let's take another deep breath in, and exhale. Let it go. Now, what did you notice about that first breath versus the second? Probably what you noticed, maybe you didn't, but probably what you noticed is that first breath just kind of got the gah away, right? Just the jitters, the like anxiety, the initial like I don't know. That's the sound I think of. The second one really set you into your space, right? You felt more grounded and softened. So, that's just an easy example you can do at your desk. Throughout this podcast, we will do several meditations because I love a guided meditation. I like somebody telling me what to do while I am not supposed to think. It just, it gives your brain a break. It lets somebody else do it, and I like doing it because it helps me think of ways that my brain processes the calm in the space. So, we'll do a lot of that in these podcasts. And then, what's next? So, we talked about we'll do a lot of meditations. Probably not everyone because I do want to bring in, you know, you don't want to just hear me all day long. Maybe you do, but I don't want to hear me all day long, and so we'll bring in some other people when we get there, but we'll start off with several short meditations. I think that's a good start to get you kind of used to the idea of mindfulness, and then we'll start to incorporate, you know, topics of law, the stress of the career, because here's the whole thing. It's the balance brief, but that doesn't mean every day is balanced, right? Balance comes in different forms. I heard somebody describe it as look at like three days in your life and think of like a good day, a bad day, and a neutral day, and if you can balance, you know, if you've had three bad days in a row, how can you find three neutral days in a row or a neutral day and a good day? That's balance. It's not tit for tat. It's not, you know, I have one good thing happen and one bad thing happen. It's not equal like that. It's about balance, so we're going to front load this podcast with a bunch of meditations to get you on that mindfulness track, right, and then we'll reincorporate other people's ideas in how stress, how mindfulness has impacted their career, and how they've been able to soften it with mindfulness, because that's important, but let's get everybody on the same page first so you can experience the impact of it, so you have a basis of understanding, and then, and some tools, and then we'll bring in the other people to kind of chit chat and let you know, so anyways, I'm really excited to get this started. I know this first episode is a little rough. I'm trying to step away from, you know, making everything perfect all the time. Ultimately, I just want to make it super conversational and feel unique and authentic, and, you know, I don't want to sound robotic, not that that really happens for me, but in the event it did, you know, I want this to be very personal for you and I, and to create that relationship, that podcaster-listener relationship, and then we'll get into the legal stuff later down the line and kind of give you some insight into the legal world. I want to do that, too, because I feel like people don't quite understand, and how would you, you know, unless you're a lawyer, so lots of fun things to come on this podcast, and I am so excited you're here, and we'll see you next week.