Dr. Elisha Goldstein on Neuroscience and Mindfulness
This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathers voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. Erik's guest for this session is Dr. Elisha Goldstein, who has written "Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion," "The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life," and "A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook." The two of them set out to discuss where happiness actually comes from and how a person builds the kind of resilience that holds up under pressure.
Erik opened by asking Goldstein to describe his own path into this work. Goldstein defined mindfulness plainly first: it's awareness, the act of deliberately paying attention to your own life with fresh eyes. And then he explained that he arrived at it the way many people arrive at psychotherapy, through his own suffering and a feeling of being stuck.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, during the dotcom boom, he was deep in that world. He worked hard. He played a good deal harder. By his own account he was lost. On paper things looked fine. He was a successful sales manager running sales teams, hitting the marks the job asked for. Underneath that, he had no real sense of what he was doing or why, and he kept searching for something he couldn't quite name.
Reading was how it started for him, which he notes is a common entry point for a lot of people. He read about what mindfulness is, and about what compassion in daily life might actually mean. From there he began finding teachers and placing himself among people who were pointed in the same direction. Eventually he pulled himself out of the dotcom life entirely.
He went back to school and earned his doctorate in psychology. As he put it, in some ways he'd already been doing a version of that work with his sales team, trying to make sense of their lives while making sense of his own at the same time.