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A Conversation on Catholic Mindfulness

March 24, 2022 24 min read
By Dr. Gregory Bottaro Executive Director, CatholicPsych Institute
Dr. James Link Licensed Psychologist
A cross faces the sunrise

Drs. Gregory Bottaro and James Link, both Catholic clinical psychologists, discuss Dr. Bottaro's work as founder of the CatholicPsych Institute and his work in the area of Catholic mindfulness.


Dr. James Link (JL): It might be helpful for you to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a psychologist because that would be a foundational piece for understanding where you’re at today. Could you speak to some of your fundamental formative and religious experiences?

Dr. Greg Bottaro (GB): My story starts with a lot of pain, both from being a victim of the culture and from my own parents’ divorce when I was 17 years old, which left me wrestling with the feeling that my world was being turned upside-down. I went off to study at Boston College, and I found my way providentially into the classroom of Dr. Peter Kreeft. Through a number of moments with Dr. Kreeft and direction from him, along with reading some of St. John Paul II’s writings, I started to formulate a deep sense of understanding why I was in so much pain. John Paul II helped to reorient me to the truth, especially the truth of love and marriage, in Love and Responsibility. So I had these men as anchor points that gave me a whole new reason for my life, and that inspired me to want to give my entire being to God.

In the midst of my time at Boston College, I discovered St. Francis of Assisi, and I found a lot of resonance with his passionate, extreme, and exuberant gift of self. I started shaving my head and wearing a grey hoodie sweatshirt and sandals around campus for a year, and then I met the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFR) in New York and started to discern with them. I transferred to Franciscan University of Steubenville and went back and forth discerning between religious life and marriage, eventually entering religious life with the CFRs after I graduated. I was with them for three years under the guidance and mentorship of Fr. Benedict Groeschel, who was both a priest and a psychologist. He taught me how to integrate my faith in a psychological way, to feel freedom and uncover the unconscious blocks that were keeping me from hearing God’s will and God’s voice clearly. Through that process, I came to understand how much of my discernment had been influenced by my own wounds, and it was by spending time in that depth and silence of prayer that a lot of those wounds were healed and a lot of clarity came in seeing my own unconscious thoughts come to the conscious mind. That experience guided me to journey more deeply into relationship with God, and I could hear him calling me to the deeper vocation. I have never doubted that I was actually called to be with the friars during that time, but that period of discernment led me to recognize that I am called to be married.

Throughout my discernment and now my vocation as a married family man and a psychologist, I have always looked for ways to continue to share the gift of restoration and reorientation that God has given me. So once I knew that I wasn’t called to be a friar, it became clear that I needed to become a psychologist – that has always been the field in which I knew I could channel God’s grace and help others to experience the same kind of healing that I’ve experienced. With that realization, I started looking for a place to study that would see psychology through the lens of Catholic anthropology, and in particular, in light of the philosophy of St. John Paul II. The only place that fulfilled those criteria for a doctoral program was the Institute of Psychological Sciences (IPS) at Divine Mercy University. It was a new program, and Fr. Benedict Groeschel was friends with Paul Vitz – a professor at IPS – so I had met him while I was a friar. So I ended up studying at IPS. It was a wonderful place to study, and the environment nurtured ongoing conversation and debate that would never happen at a secular institution. At a lot of secular schools, people are fighting over definitions of gender. At IPS, we were fighting over which formulation of Thomistic metaphysics we should keep in a course module. It was dialogue on a deeper level.

After finishing my degree in 2012, I decided that I needed to cast out into the deep with a clearly Catholic practice. I started the CatholicPsych Institute in Manhattan and was immediately flooded with referrals and with priests requesting me to speak at their parishes. There was so much interest in finding ways that we could help to address the gap in the integration of psychology and faith. So few people have access to faithful Catholic psychologists who can help them from a grounded, faithful perspective. We’ve been working at that since 2012, and there’s always more demand than supply.

JL: So your desire to integrate the Catholic faith and understanding of prayer with psychology has been present throughout your studies and work in psychology?

GB: Right. It all goes back to 2000, when I first read Love and Responsibility, and I was struck by how clear of an answer it provided to the marital problems of our culture. I realized that this book could serve as a manual for psychology and for marriage therapy, but no one seemed to be using it for that purpose! So when I read it for the first time, I started formulating what it could look like in marriage therapy. That was a Jubilee Year, and I consider encountering that book as my Jubilee Grace.

JL: Whenever I bring your name up, it seems like people know you as “the Catholic mindfulness guy.” How did you come upon Catholic mindfulness?

GB: I came upon Catholic mindfulness when I was looking for ideas and methods in the secular sciences that resonate with Catholic anthropology. When I was with the friars, Fr. Benedict taught me the spirituality of the practice of the presence of God. That practice healed a lot of what I was experiencing in my heart, so instead of being in my head all the time thinking about problems and solutions, I was able to experience something deeper. I really learned how to go to a place of interior silence where I could hear that still small voice. I have so many memories of Fr. Benedict teaching us at his retreat center on the shores of Long Island, when suddenly he would just stop and say, “Brothers, look at those birds.” He would just watch them, frozen. He was always captured by the moment he was in, where God’s presence was very real and alive. And the present moment is where we can see our own hearts: if I can sit in the present moment and turn inward, I can begin to recognize my fears and my wounds and my unanswered questions. That’s how I came to realize that so much of my own discernment was driven by a fear of having children and putting them through the kind of pain that I had been through. It wasn’t until I sat down in the silence that I could hear that coming from the depths of my own heart.

Years later, when I was working at the Psychiatric Institution of Washington, which is a psychiatry in-patient hospital, I was running dialectical behavioral therapy groups for people with schizophrenia, for people with borderline personality disorders, and for people with eating disorders, we would do mindfulness exercises and discuss turning toward the present moment. And I realized that it all sounded like Fr. Benedict. The practice was being presented as a Buddhist practice, but the more I looked at how mindfulness was being described and discussed, the more I realized, “Wait, this isn’t Buddhist!” I started researching it more, and it’s true that some formulations of mindfulness come from Buddhism, but more importantly, mindfulness in general works scientifically. And if something works, we have to figure out why – either it’s working naturally or it’s working supernaturally, and we need to keep in mind that there could be bad reasons that something is working supernaturally. As I was breaking apart the modules and figuring out what mindfulness is doing in the brain, I realized that I was basically looking at a psychological, manualized approach to practicing the presence of God. I recognized that if I could weave these practices together and show how psychology and the spirituality that Fr. Benedict had taught me, as well as the writings of de Caussade and Brother Lawrence, all went together, it could be really helpful for people.

Bishop James D. Conley

There Will Be Light

Most Rev. James D. Conley, Bishop of Lincoln, joined Dr. James Link to discuss Catholic spirituality and psychology, reflecting on his own struggles with mental illness.

There Will Be Light

A lot of faith-based, spiritual literature overrides or circumvents psychology. We’re living in such a psychologically-attuned culture that it’s important that we know how the spiritual and the psychological relate – in fact, I think doing so allows us to go even deeper in both the spiritual and the psychological.

I eventually organized all of this research into a course on Catholic mindfulness, and I was teaching that course when Matthew Kelly at Dynamic Catholic asked if I had a book I wanted to write. I told him about the course, so we turned it into a book and published it as The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time. So that book was basically written by the time I had the contract for it. Dynamic Catholic is amazing, so they just blasted the book out and it all blew up from there. On top of that, the book also got a lot of publicity from voices that tend to be more limited in the ways they are open to exploring the integration of faith and culture, so my name and the book got a lot of attention as being somehow bad or suspicious! So while that meant that I had to put some time and effort into defending the book and showing how it was orthodox and faithful, it also helped the book to spread. At the end of the day, I was just really happy to have that sort of engagement and to be able to engage more people in conversation.

JL: That all seems like a good segue into the question of what Catholic mindfulness is. How would you distill the notion of mindfulness down for a Christian who has never really encountered it before?

GB: Mindfulness means learning how to tune our minds to the present moment. As we all know, our imaginations can run wild, and we spend a lot of time thinking about the past, about the future, and even about alternative interpretations of the present. That’s all a tremendous freedom that God has built within us, but we also need to learn how to tune our minds into the present moment. The present moment is where we encounter God – it’s like where eternity and our limitations within time and space meet. So we rob ourselves of that opportunity when we let our imaginations bring us into ruminations and fears about the future, regurgitations of all sorts of things we might have done wrong in the past, or thoughts about how everything is going wrong in our lives. We have a responsibility to learn how to gain control over how we focus our minds. It’s part of our stewardship of self that God has entrusted us with.

Mindfulness isn’t spiritual in itself. It’s a psychological exercise that can hugely benefit our spiritual lives. So think of all the times you’ve been praying the rosary and you’re three decades in and you can’t remember which mysteries you’re praying because you started thinking about something else, like what you’re going to make for dinner. Mindfulness strengthens the “muscle” that controls what our mind is focusing on. When we have control over our focus and aren’t constantly letting our minds trail off in different directions, we can focus on what we want to focus on, whether it happens to be the rosary, or the liturgy of the mass, or praying in adoration and focusing on what God is speaking to our hearts. All of these moments are places where we benefit from being able to focus our minds.

JL: I don’t know how much research there is out on this, but it seems that being mindful is becoming more difficult for people as the number of distractions in our lives increases. There’s this fallacy that we’re able to multitask, but in reality we often just shift from one thing to another in a way that I think is actually harmful to people.

GB: When I’m teaching people about mindfulness for the first time, I often ask them to look at the backs of their phones, studying the cracks and scratches and the way the light looks as it bounces off the case. If you think about it, you’ve probably never actually seen your phone. We stare at the screen of the phone all day long, focusing on the thoughts and feelings and words that are coming through the screen. But we don’t actually look at the phone. So who is really deciding what I’m looking at in that case? Am I really in control? It’s not uncommon that I’ll take out my phone to check my email, and the next thing I know I get pinged from Instagram, and then I’m on a website buying a mug that stays warm all day, and then it’s like, “Woah, how did I get here? Who was deciding that I end up here? Was I really in control of my mind and my time?” We’re in this world inundated with all sorts of external forces trying to grasp and gain our control, and now more than ever we have to learn how to retain that control!

JL: One of the things I help patients most frequently in my practice is the idea that just because you’re thinking and feeling something doesn’t make it true and you don’t have to give your attention to every thought and feeling you have. When I explain to people that it is often healthy and appropriate to shift our thinking away from some of our thoughts and feelings to a more positive mindset, they are often surprised. That realization can make a profound difference in people’s lives.

GB: Research has found that an object remains in your cognition for between three to seven seconds. But the amount of time we spend thinking about something is based on how many consequent thoughts we attach to it. So we end up forming thought trains or thought streams: we have an initial thought or feeling, and then we keep thinking about that thing so we keep adding to it, and next thing we know, we’ve been stressing over that first thought or feeling for fifteen minutes. In reality, that entire train is made up of singular cognitive objects that are in our cognition for three-to-seven seconds each, but we’ve attached them to each other. So through mindfulness, we can take a step back and break it all down. So, for example, someone may be feeling depressed. Well, what does that actually mean? Maybe you had a fleeting thought or feeling and you started interpreting it. It could even be something like indigestion! So you had this feeling of a knot in your stomach, and then you tried to interpret it and think about it, and now because it’s a thought it becomes a deeper feeling, and because it’s a deeper feeling you continue interpreting it, and now your morning is ruined because you woke up with a gas bubble in your stomach! Mindfulness helps us to recognize that pattern.

Thumbnail for Rethinking Discernment and Relationship

Rethinking Discernment and Relationship

Christian discernment can only take place once one has experienced the presence of Christ and has begun to receive from the heart of God.

Rethinking Discernment and Relationship

JL: Research has demonstrated the spiritual, psychological, and emotional benefits of mindfulness. But it’s also been found to have physical and medical benefits as well, for everything from chronic pain to cancer! It seems like basically every facet of life can be improved by mindfulness.

GB: There’s so much here, and it all comes from the beauty and complexity with which God created us and our human bodies. We have the survival instinct, which can divert our resources to self-protection and survival. So I think step one of understanding the connection between mindfulness and our bodies is recognizing that we are made in such a way that we can divert all of our energies toward self-protection when needed. Step two is realizing that through our imagination, we can create situations that our bodies respond to. There’s a positive dimension to that, of course, like when we meditate in prayer we can actually be healed of our wounds. There are actually things happening physiologically in our brains when we enter into spiritual meditation. The potentially negative dimension is that we can create physiological realities through our imaginations, concocting dangers and threats that don’t exist. The best example of this is nightmares: when you have a nightmare, your heart rate rises, your blood pressure and cortisol levels increase, and you wake up with sweaty palms thinking that you’re actually in danger. It’s not until you have time to pay attention to the present moment and let your senses tell you that you’re not actually in danger that you settle down. So when we realize that we’re built with such a capacity to respond to dangers and that we can create dangers through our imaginations, the importance of mindfulness becomes clear. The moment we learn to turn our minds away from these imagined dangers, we open up our capacities and become able to live as we are meant to live. Research has shown that so many aspects of our lives are impacted when we learn to step away from survival mode when we’re not actually in danger: creativity, empathy, cognitive expansiveness, thinking outside the box, understanding other people, and even our immune and digestive systems benefit. Mindfulness reconnects us to the present moment in reality, in which we’re usually not in danger of losing our life. It can be like waking up from that nightmare to realize that the house is not on fire. And when you realize that you’re safe, your brain can switch over to a different way of operating. Instead of bringing all of your capacities and resources to survival mode, you now can operate as if you’re safe. All of that explains why mindfulness can bring even physical and medical benefits. Spiritually, we are set free when we live as if the Father loves us.

JL: I think nightmares are a great example, but I’m also thinking back to the sorts of fears you mentioned earlier from your own life. Catastrophic fears and worries are unconscious blocks that prevent us from hearing God’s voice, but so are self-loathing, anxiety, and depressive thoughts, which don’t come from God. But we often believe them and think they are the truth.

GB: Right, and those distractions are often just a matter of misdirected self-protection, which means that there’s still innate goodness somewhere within those different voices. Because we’re often afraid of those voices, we tend to turn away from them. But mindfulness is the opposite of avoidance: we actually want to turn toward those voices. It’s common to hear self-help advice and pop psychology say things like, “If you have negative voices, imposter syndrome, or the inner critic, here are ways to smash them down and cut them out. You’re made for greatness, so you don’t have time for these voices.” Mindfulness takes a different approach: we turn towards those voices and doubts. So there’s a part of yourself that’s saying that you’re no good and that you’re going to fail – let’s sit with that and try to understand it. Where’s that coming from? What’s its purpose? Why is it there?

Mindfulness is an entirely different approach than many people are taught. You basically turn off your fight or flight instinct and open up creative awareness and curiosity, allowing yourself to discover new things. Instead of making rash judgments based on appearances, you’re getting to know different parts of yourself. That opens up all sorts of new possibilities.

JL: Practicing mindfulness is almost like becoming an observer or a non-judgmental scientist, looking at thoughts and feelings and asking where they come from rather than immediately judging. And then in prayer, we can invite Jesus into that observation with us and ask him to bring understanding and healing. Could you speak to how the practice of mindfulness can lead to prayer?

GB: I had mentioned my course on Catholic mindfulness earlier – the course I teach after it is on the discernment of spirits and the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. St. Ignatius’s fundamental principle is that both consolation and desolation are used for God and for good. Both bring us closer to God. So fundamentally, there's always an opportunity for goodness if we know how to see it. When we look at things through that lens with Christ, it's that accompaniment of Christ that provides the safety and security that fundamentally reorients the way we look at things. With Chris, we're looking with confidence. We're looking with security and safety. We're not looking with the outcome hanging in the air. We need to have the confidence and security to know we’ve already won – we already have a Savior. Jesus is already with us.

So now with that security from that platform, we can look now at this time of desolation, or at this distraction, or at this fall or this failure, and we can ask what we can learn from it and how we can grow from it. On the other hand, when we’re in times of consolation we often have the temptation to stop thinking and discerning. But with Jesus, the picture is bigger than just consolation or desolation. When we know Jesus is present, we can ask, “Alright, what do I need from this time of consolation? Just like desolation, it won’t last forever, so what motivation or strength do you want me to gain?”

JL: What would be some pointers or advice you would give to someone who is wondering how to adopt a mindful practice or to begin living more mindfully?

GB: The first thing I would say is that people usually don’t think they need it until it’s too late, and then they’re scrambling and are convinced they can’t get it. The first step is really practical. Go into a quiet room without your phone for five minutes. Set a timer and sit in silence for five minutes and see what happens. People are really surprised by the kinds of distractions that come up and how uncomfortable it might be – there’s a lot that we’re avoiding with noise. That includes internal noise. So when we sit down with internal silence, we have a lot to deal with. Then it becomes a question of how to practice it. The pragmatic answer is that I have a number of free exercises recorded to help people. We have an app called Integrated App, and we have a lot of free exercises there. People can definitely explore what five minutes of mindfulness feels like.

Light Shining on a Dark Road

Being a Christian Counselor in a Secular Environment

Christianity offers the answer to all questions of human existence. For counselors in a secular environment, this demands patience and trust that Christ will bring healing to those who suffer.

Being a Christian Counselor in a Secular Environment

I mentioned the imagination before and said that it presents information to the brain. Well, the imagination is like your sixth sense. You have five senses that are plugged into the present moment. In other words, when you feel something through your sense of touch, data is being communicated to your brain about what’s present here and now – you’re not feeling the floor from 10 minutes ago. You’re feeling what’s happening now. You're not hearing sounds from 10 minutes ago – you’re hearing the sound waves that are vibrating through the air and touching your eardrums now. Your five senses are naturally and immediately plugged into the present moment. But it’s this sixth sense – the imagination – that can equally present data to the brain that’s not connected to the now. The imagination can equally present data to the brain that’s not connected to the now. You can think about a conversation that happened 10 minutes ago or one that might happen 10 minutes in the future. So most of mindfulness is simply learning how to pay attention to what’s coming through your five senses. Another way of describing it is learning what it feels like to let your brain be tuned in to the present moment, hearing the present sounds, feelings the present feelings, and tasting the present tastes. You can bring mindfulness into everything, even walking and eating.

I think most people have the misperception that mindfulness is about emptying the mind. But think about the word mindfulness. It’s not about emptying the mind, but instead filling it with what’s real in the present moment. The entire idea is that you’re letting your brain tune into the present moment and be filled with reality as it is.

JL: I appreciate you making the point that mindfulness isn’t about mind-emptying, because I have a lot of patients who are devout Catholics who find that idea to be a bit weird.

GB: There’s this wound in the spirituality of the Church going back 30 or 40 years around centering prayer and all those practices that can become relativistic and become less about encountering God and more about being in touch with yourself. But at the end of the day, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. So even though there might be some dangers to centering prayer and transcendental meditation, that’s a completely different conversation. Mindfulness has nothing to do with those practices. It’s just about being psychologically healthy, whether you use that for your prayer life or just to stop ruminating and being anxious. The analogy I use is that mindfulness is like eating. It’s a basic process. We can all agree that we need to eat, but whether we should eat candy all day or salads is a different conversation. In other words, once we have the basic structure in place there are a lot of different things we can do with it. Once you’re present in the here and now you have the freedom to decide what you’re going to do with that.

JL: What would you say to mental health professionals who may be just starting out in the road of mindfulness? You mentioned the wonderful resources you provide, and I’m wondering if there are any other resources that you’ve found helpful in your teaching or even in your own life?

GB: The founder of our modern conceptualization of mindfulness is a man named Jon Kabat-Zinn. He was trained in Buddhism, and he noticed the psychological effectiveness of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness with his patient population. He discovered that it was as effective – if not more effective – than morphine as an intervention for chronic pain. In the 1970s, when he was developing this, there wasn’t an openness in the medical community to anything Eastern. When he first published these findings in 1979, it wasn’t culturally acceptable. So from the beginning, he was careful to remove any Buddhism from his work and focus exclusively on physiology. He wanted to understand the brain science, period.

The earlier work of Kabat-Zinn is faithful to that, even though in the past couple of decades he and his students have been a bit more liberal in terms of bringing in Buddhist ideology, so you have to be a bit careful there. The main distinction that I would make for anyone exploring the psychology of mindfulness is that in the Buddhist worldview, any sort of diversity of being is an illusion. For them, the only reality of the universe is unity. In our Catholic worldview, on the other hand, we believe in the unity of the universe and the unity of God, so there is a dimension of unity that is real. But because we believe in the Trinity, there is also diversity of being. It’s because of the mystery of the Trinity that we can hold as Christians that diversity, self, differentiation, and multitude aren’t illusions but are part of the structure of the universe. Now that’s all a bit abstract, so why does it matter? Well, these mindfulness exercises tend to slip into the worldviews that are behind them. You’ll know you’re encountering something from a Buddhist background when the exercise goes from, “Close your eyes and focus on your breathing,” to “And now focus on how you are one with your breath, and how the other person breathing is no different than you.” That is going way past the present moment and deep into a different ideology! So that’s where we have to be careful, but there are a lot of good resources out there to help Catholics navigate that and utilize this practice in a healthy way.

JL: I’m a big believer in the psychological construct of gratitude. Based on your experience, would you say that people who practice mindfulness have higher degrees of gratitude in their life?

GB: I would say that mindfulness provides the opportunity for gratitude. I think it depends on what you do with the practice. Sometimes things get harder before they get easier, and that’s especially true of mindfulness. Once you start paying attention to all the things you’ve been avoiding, you have to make the decision to go through the difficulty or find alternative ways to avoid and distract from the difficulties. At that point gratitude is more available to us – we become aware of our ontological need. The very fact that we exist should be the foundation of all the gratitude we ever need! Our whole life should be a heartbeat and breath of gratitude in every moment, just for the gift of existence. So when we turn into this present moment, all of that becomes clearer to us. There might be hurdles of trauma and wounds that we have to process and wrestle with and resolve before we can get back to that regular road of being grateful to God for our existence, however.

JL: One of the qualities of the saints was the ability to be present to people and make others feel like they were the only person in the room. So I think we can use the lives of the saints to conceptualize mindfulness, as well. Your description of Fr. Benedict Groeschel made me think of that – there’s something really inspiring about those people who are able to be present to their surroundings and the people in their lives.

GB: It’s beautiful. There are so many quotes from the saints on that very topic, so it’s clear that this is the way they lived their lives. And I think when we encounter people who have that sort of profound presence, we can’t help but be affected by it. You get pulled into that orbit and you can’t help but be affected by it. People who are open to the presence of God – and not God as separated from the world, but God as woven into every aspect of Creation – bring a palpable sense of depth that goes far beyond what we get through the senses.

JL: Dr. Bottaro, I think this is a great place to close. I have so many more questions I would like to explore with you, so I hope we can do this again in the future! Thanks for the conversation, I think this will be helpful to a lot of people!

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