Faculty Highlights: Dr. Richard Sears

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.”

Faculty Highlights: Prof. Andrea Scarpino

With the start of 2014, I am proud to be serving our students with such outstanding faculty as Professor Andrea Scarpino in the Ph.D. program. Professor Scarpino demonstrates purposeful, intentional commitment to the calling of a scholar-practitioner. She embraces social responsibility in the work she does within the academy and in her service to the community outside the university, and I am honored to feature her for this month’s newsletter. 

Professor Andrea Scarpino has been among the teaching faculty at UI&U since 2008. She is a prolific writer, poet, and presenter, and continues to be a vital leader of the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program. She teaches courses in creative writing in addition to serving on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Studies Committee and on the Admissions Committee. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Creative Inquiry, and serves as a coordinator for the Residency Planning Committee.  

Although Scarpino has published for years and has received many honors and awards for her poetry, this year marks the release of her first, full-length poetry collection, Once, Then.  Red Hen Press is scheduled to release the volume in March of this year. For this book-length publication, Scarpino covers themes of personal and political loss and the tensions between science, myth, and spirituality.  

“My new poetry book, Once, Then, being released March 1 is a collection of elegies built around the deaths of my father and of a young friend named Gracie, as well as poems of witness for larger global atrocities like the American bombing of Hiroshima.” 

By blending and contrasting scientific models with references to classical mythology, Scarpino presents her readers with meditations of how loss shapes us and our understanding of the world. 

She is currently working on two other poetry projects—a book-length poem having to do with water and her father's work in water disinfection and a book-length poem having to do with the body in pain.  

She said of her work, “All of my poetry, really, connects elegy and poetry of witness, and my current scholarship seeks to identify the ways in which elegy and witness connect in writing about the body, particularly in the poetry and prose of Paul Monette and Audre Lorde.”  

See more of what Professor Scarpino is doing at her website! 

Scarpino believes in the value of the scholar-practitioner model and desires to integrate the principle of social responsibility inside and outside of the academy. “At its most basic, I see social responsibility as paying attention to the world around me and trying my best to act in a way that demonstrates my commitment to just and equitable treatment for all,” Scarpino said. “One of my heroes, Carolyn Forche, writes, ‘The time, however, to determine what those politics will be is not the moment of taking pen to paper, but during the whole of one's life. We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shaping of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work.’ Dr. Nancy Boxill instructs, ‘We are the culture keepers.’ And Terry Tempest Williams writes, ‘We cannot do it alone. We do it alone.’” 

Scarpino acknowledged that social responsibility is not only about theory or artistic production. She tries to integrate the principle into her daily decisions: “When I choose a plant-based diet and refuse bottled water, I act out social responsibility. When I spend money on brands that support living wages for their workers and use sustainable materials, I act out social responsibility. When I carbon offset my travel, when I refuse to participate in the inequality of marriage as it is currently constructed, when I pay attention to the many privileges my white skin allows me, I act out social responsibility. Which is not to say I am perfect! But it is to recognize that social responsibility cannot just appear when I sit down to write a poem about war, or when I construct a syllabus. It must be present ‘in the many thousand daily choices’ I make. It must be part of how I live my life each moment of each day.”