She started to withdraw socially, which led to increased anxiety. After her physician could not find anything wrong with her physically, she decided to seek a resolution other than the one that came from the innards of a prescription bottle.
Cho, who practices law with her husband of six years, says she didn’t want to continue relying on medication to help her cope with her stress. The change, she says, came through mindfulness and meditation.
“I used to be an anxious lawyer. I decided to find a way to get past that. I learned about mindfulness and thought it was an important tool for everyone, not just lawyers,” says Cho.
Cho’s first exposure to meditation was as a student at the University at Buffalo School of Law. She happened to stumble upon the Himalayan Institute of Buffalo, a center of yoga, meditation and wellness. Her experiences there planted a seed that would flower within her years later.
When her doctor could not pinpoint the cause of her increasing anxiety, exacerbated by tasks associated with practicing law, such as speaking on the telephone and public speaking, Cho acknowledged that stress was likely the culprit of her anxiety. In 2011, Cho was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder.
Fortunately, around the same time, she discovered a study at Stanford University for treating social anxiety. At the initial meeting, she learned the University was about to embark on two treatment programs. One was set to focus on cognitive behavior therapy and the second was centered around a mindfulness-based treatment program.
Although she sought to participate in the mindfulness tract, Cho was randomly assigned to the cognitive behavior therapy group. She found the experience enlightening and impactful; her social anxiety had decreased. However, she still wanted to learn more about mindfulness, so she enrolled in a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course at Stanford.
That experience, she says, was “life changing.” Soon, she was meditating and practicing mindfulness on a daily basis. That led her to delve into inner exploration, which taught her to be more present, meaning mindful, throughout her day.
“What I got from the practice of meditation and mindfulness is so much richer and unexpectedly more remarkable than simple stress and anxiety reduction,” Cho wrote in her recently released book, The Anxious Lawyer. The non-fiction work, which she co-authored with another lawyer and mindfulness practitioner, is an eight-week guide to creating a more joyful and satisfying legal career by practicing mindfulness and meditation.
As any lawyer knows, the practice of law is inherently stressful. Clients come to attorneys to discuss problems, opposing counsel can be difficult and argumentative and judges sometimes rule against our clients. But, says Cho, mindfulness allows its practitioners to focus on what is actually happening at that exact moment.
“Mindfulness teaches us to be present to what is happening in the moment,” she says. There is scientific evidence that mindfulness is a positive trait. For example, in a research study released in July 2017 by the journal Obesity, mindfulness training reduced stress and fasting blood sugar levels better than traditional health education courses among its 86 obese or overweight female participants.
In an article from Harvard Medical School, when researchers from John Hopkins University in Baltimore reviewed nearly 19,000 meditation studies, they discovered 47 trials focused on mindfulness that suggested mindful meditation works to lessen psychological stresses, such as anxiety, depression and pain.
Attorneys, as a lot, are cynical. But, that attitude doesn’t deter Cho from asserting that mindfulness can inject positive changes, even in the most hardened of hearts. She urges skeptics to try it for themselves to see how it feels.
“The most important part is to actually do the practice. The most powerful proof is people should try it for themselves,” urges Cho, who has delved deeper into her practice of meditation and mindfulness in 2017. This past March, she participated in a month-long retreat held at a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco. For one month, she lived off-the-grid. No cell phone. No texts. No Internet. In fact, the only verbal communication she had during that time was with her meditation teacher for 15 minutes, every other day.
She says she reveled in the quiet. “I enjoy the stillness. Our world is constantly noisy,” but being away that month allowed her to “really rest.” The time away also helped her deepen her appreciation of self-awareness and self-knowledge. Cho says mindfulness has helped her be a better advocate.
“Lawyers are in the trauma business and mindfulness helps me manage being with people who are in deep crisis and suffering” while not losing myself in their pain. Her mindfulness training has strengthened Cho’s ability to feel deep compassion for her client’s woes while not losing herself in their issues.
According to Cho, mindfulness has instilled in her a sense of “equanimity, which is a middle ground between compassion and detachment.”
Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer. She is also the Chair of the Marketing Committee of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.