Dr. Richard Sears is a professor in the Doctor of Psychology
program at Union Institute & University and has been a part of the Union
community since 2006. He comes from an incredibly diverse background, both in
business and in academia. Dr. Sears’s life is characterized by a passion for
understanding and experiencing the world, and also by a strong desire to use
his knowledge to help others. He achieved a Doctorate in Psychology from Wright
State University in 2005, and he has continued to develop his study of the mind
through clinical research inspired by Eastern mental and spiritual traditions.
Dr. Sears’ extensive training in the martial arts—he has a
fifth degree black belt in Ninjutsu—initially introduced him to ideas and
philosophies of Eastern mindfulness practices. The experience of learning and
teaching martial arts has led him to continue to study how these ancient
disciplines are still relevant to us today. As of this February, Dr. Sears
completed his Doctorate of Ministry in Buddhist Studies, from the Buddha Dharma
University in Los Angeles.
Far from a purely theoretical academic, Dr. Sears earned his
M.B.A. degree from Wright State in 2004, in addition to working several years
as a manager for a Fortune 500 company. As a true scholar-practitioner, he says
that he desires to understand the context and organizational systems at work in
different institutions, both from an academic perspective and from a business
perspective.
This business background has not only been helpful to Dr.
Sears in terms of career flexibility and creating a broad professional base
from which he can draw—a strategy he advocates for his students—but it has also
been valuable for him to understand how businesses and universities approach
things like diversity issues within an institutional structure.“My training at Wright State strongly emphasized diversity,”
Dr. Sears said. “That was really important to me. Being a white male, I didn’t
even recognize the privilege I had. I was very naïve to how much injustice
there is in the world. It was really eye-opening to take all these courses and
hear all the experiences of my classmates.”
Diversity issues and promoting equality in the classroom and
in the workplace are two crucial concerns for Dr. Sears, and yet his
experiences have taught him that the best organizational change often happens
gently and subtly. “In therapy, or in working with organizations, or even in
bodyguard work, the change has to be subtle. If not done carefully, you could
end up creating more resistance to the change. How do we turn [awareness] into
action? How do we make real change in the world? And not in an idealistic kind
of way that makes the situation worse. Alan Watts was a philosopher that I
heard this illustration from: ‘Kindly let me help you, or you’ll drown, said
the monkey as he safely put the fish up in a tree.’ We often think we’re
helping, but we don’t really understand. Having that bigger, broader
understanding of context and systems is important."
The discipline or practice of “mindfulness” is one of the
ways that Dr. Sears encourages his students and patients to gain that bigger,
broader understanding of the world. “My mentor, John Rudisill, said one of the
best compliments he ever got as a consultant is, ‘You ask very good questions.’
To me, I like how mindfulness ties in with that. Mindfulness doesn’t tell you
what to do. It’s just about increasing your awareness. If you know more about
what the situation is, then you’ll make better choices, and better understand
the implications. Also, I think the better we are at managing our own emotions,
the better the place we’ll be starting from to make a change, instead of for
the wrong reasons, or in a reactionary kind of way.”
Mindfulness, he said, is “obviously a common word in the
English language, meaning to pay more attention. It has a long history of being
associated with a lot of spiritual and secular traditions, especially in the
East, but it’s a natural human process we all possess. It’s been used in
psychology as an intervention, as a way of strengthening our attention for being
able to work with our own thoughts, emotions, and body sensations in a wiser
way.”
What is so interesting about this emerging trend of
“mindfulness” is that psychologists and other mental health professionals are
witnessing dramatic, concrete results. “It’s a whole lot like exercising our
muscles. We exercise our ability to pay attention to what’s happening. Our
minds tend to just go off on all kinds of thoughts. Mindfulness allows us to be
able to bring it back to what we’re doing, or noticing what we’re feeling in our
bodies, or what emotions or thoughts are here. There’s an area of the brain
called the prefrontal cortex—this area has a lot to do with planning, abstract
thought, and managing our emotions. Brain scans before and after an eight-week
mindfulness course shows that this area becomes thicker—which means there’s been
more growth. The way the brain works, the more you fire certain neural
pathways, the thicker and the stronger they get. Just like, the more you use a
muscle pathway, the bigger it starts to get over time.”
For Dr. Sears, some of the newest research indicates that
not only are mindfulness exercises useful for stressed-out, anxious adults with
busy lives, but it is dramatically beneficial for children as well.“The research team that I’m on at Children’s Hospital [in
Cincinnati] is taking kids through 12 weeks of practicing these mindfulness
exercises, and scanning their brains before and after. This is first time scans
have been done with kids—and we’ve already found changes in their brains, as
well as significant reductions in their anxiety levels from practicing this.
The team is thrilled. The lead researcher is a psychiatrist, and she basically
said any medication that they’ve ever tried not only doesn’t help the
population she works with (kids with a parent with bipolar), but has side
effects that make the kids worse off oftentimes. So she’s just thrilled to find
something that’s helpful with no side effects. It’s an exciting time.”
Dr. Sears stressed that mindfulness practices are not a
cure-all or a silver-bullet replacement for other medical treatments, but it is
a significant, demonstrable aid to a person’s well-being. Dr. Sears said that the core of mindfulness really is about
moving deeper into our every-day experiences.
One of the most rewarding aspects
for him is seeing the people who are benefitting from the workshops he leads.
“It’s fascinating to see the impact of the mindfulness groups that I do--the
ripple effects those seem to have. I get broad varieties of people, with a
broad variety of problems. Sometimes I invite people to come in for free if
they can’t afford it, and I also work with CEOs, physicians, and attorneys. The
other day someone called me up and told me she had learned that she has a terminal
disease, and just how thankful she was that she had taken this course. She can
be more in the moments that she has left, instead of spending the last
remaining moments worrying about what’s going to happen and missing what she
has left. It’s really rewarding to see the transformations in people.”
