Mindful Expat Episode 27: Creativity & Other Sources of Resilience for Latino Immigrants & Others Living Abroad (With Guest: Carmen Roman, Ph.D.)

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Today’s Mindful Expat Guest is Dr. Carmen Roman!

Dr. Roman is a licensed psychologist in the state of California. She is originally from Mexico and practiced as a psychologist there for a number of years before moving to the United States in 2007.

Dr. Roman is bilingual in English and Spanish and offers bilingual and bicultural psychotherapy to her clients in the San José region of California, where she lives. She also has a specialty in creative expression and art therapies.

Dr. Roman also has her own podcast, called Emotions in Harmony, which is a bilingual podcast (in English and in Spanish) and which focuses on topics related to emotional wellbeing – so very relevant to things we talk about here on this podcast too, and I highly recommend you check it out!

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• About Dr. Roman’s experience of moving to the United States from Mexico and her journey of becoming a licensed psychologist in the US, specializing in working with Latinos living abroad and navigating this intercultural space.
• Some of the particular stressors that Latino immigrants to the United States face as well as some of the factors and mindsets that may positively impact their immigration experience.
• About the importance of creativity in helping all people (but perhaps especially those living abroad) come back to their core sense of self, develop a new sense of identity, and find community abroad. Read More

Mindful Expat Episode 18: Learning from Our Emotions (Part II): Learning to Listen to Yourself

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What you’ll hear in this episode:

• A continuation of our last discussion about how our emotions can actually give us useful messages about our needs — if only we can learn how to listen and decode the messages they’re sending us!
• Some of the reasons why many people have learned to distrust their emotional signals — and how we can begin to practice listening to them again.
• An exercise for you to practice listening to your own inner voice and begin to tune in to your own needs more effectively. Read More

Mindful Expat Episode 14: Self-Compassion, the Two Arrows, & Learning to Surf

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What you’ll hear in this episode:

• How you can create a pause between your initial experience of an emotion and your reaction to it, and how doing so will allow you to cultivate more self-compassion and feel less out of control in your life.
• About the differences between pain and suffering — and how our responses to our own internal experiences determine the extent to which we suffer.
• The Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows, which illustrates this difference between pain and suffering.
• How all of this might apply to the experience of struggling with adaptation to a new country/culture. Read More

Learning to Listen to Yourself

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woman

You know that nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach? The one that says something’s not right?

Or the ease and comfort you have when you’re with someone you really trust? The feeling that says, “This person is safe. I can let down my guard.”

Or maybe you’ve noticed how energized and excited you feel about certain aspects of your work and how drained you feel by others.

These feelings have important messages to tell us if we only listen. But too often, we don’t tune in enough to hear what they have to say. Or if we do, we don’t trust them.

Maybe we did trust them once upon a time — but we’ve been burned.

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Bird Poop & the Power of Perspective

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pigeonA True Story…

There I was, standing at the corner just across the street from my apartment, waiting for the light to change… when PLOP.

Right on my forehead and across the lens of my glasses.

Bird poop. On my face.

My first, reaction was just to be startled, since it seemed to come out of nowhere. However, as soon as I realized what had happened and it began sliding down my forehead, I felt my mood begin to slide in the same direction. Read More

Befriending Our Emotions

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white-envelop-on-a-fence-1216383Emotions can seem very inconvenient sometimes. They can be distressing and overwhelming, and they often appear to get in our way.

Of course, it feels wonderful to experience happiness or excitement or love – so called, ‘positive’ emotions – but other emotions like sadness, anger, or fear are quite unpleasant. We often think of them as bad or frightening. They seem to cloud our judgment or just make us feel bad. No wonder we often want to run away from them or find ways to make them go away as quickly as possible!

However, what many people don’t realize is that the meaning we assign to our emotions (that they are bad or scary) and the reactions we have to them (trying to resist or escape from them) are actually responsible for much of our distress. We tell ourselves that we can’t handle these feelings or that they will never go away – or that they mean something terrible about us or about other people.

On the other hand, if we try to approach our emotions as helpful, (albeit sometimes unpleasant) messengers giving us important information about our own needs, we can begin to have a different relationship with our own internal experience. Read More