What does wellness mean to you?
You can’t go to the gym once, not lose weight or feel great after, and declare, “gyms don’t work!” Also, you can’t go the gym once, try to lift a 100-pound weight, fail, and declare, “This doesn’t work for me!” If anyone said either of those things to you, you’d laugh at their naiveté.
Yet we make these elementary mistakes all the time when it comes to wellness, therapy, and mental health! We go to a meditation event, a few yoga classes, a few therapy sessions, don’t feel enlightened right away, and declare: “This doesn’t work!” or “This is for people who have problems!”
Wellness to me means the practice of purposefully spending time on our selves and our relationships.
I stress practice because there is no moment or breaking point after which we reach enlightenment. (It’s all relative, just the same way there is no moment or breaking point after which we are “strong.”) I also stress purposefully because, like it or not, we do spend an enormous amount of time on our selves and our relationships – but because we don’t always do it purposefully and intentionally, we end up spending a lot of that time putting out fires, feeling anxious, feeling depressed, and feeling lonely.
What led you to these wellness practices?
A few months into our relationship, my wife suggested that we go to couple’s counseling, as a proactive measure to stay on top of our relationship’s health. We enrolled in a 6-month program; it’s been 6 years since, and we still go once a month, 2 hours at a time, without fail. I always say that deciding to go to counseling was one of the top-3 best decisions I’ve made in life.
Over the past 6 years, I (and we, in our relationship) have learned many, many lessons; but there are 6 or 7 major, transformative, life-changing lessons (epiphanies!) I have learned that I can’t even imagine living without. Everything material thing I have is not worth even one of those lessons.
I always joke that if I was the king of the world, I’d make two things fully free: gyms and therapy. It’s unbelievable how little time we spend, intentionally and on purpose, on our selves, and on our relationships. In all our years of schooling, we never learn the most basic, and important, life skills, like true listening, like true reflection, like true processing of emotions.
Do you have a favorite wellness resource(s) you can recommend?
So many! The amazing thing you realize, when you start thinking about these things, is that there are a ton of resources, science, research, university courses, studies, practices out there! You’re not alone in this journey, at all.
I will suggest 2 books, and 2 practices:
Books
(1) Reinventing Your Life by Dr. Jeffrey Young. This is a fantastic introductory book to get you thinking about unwinding a lot of thoughts that many of us have. For example: “I don’t fit in!”; “I feel like such a failure!”; “Everything is going to fall apart!”; “I can’t really trust anyone!”; “I always do things other people’s way!”, and so on.
(2) Mindsight by Dr. Dan Siegel. This is my all-time favorite book in these topics, but is a harder, more complex read. Dr. Siegel was a medical doctor before he became a psychiatrist, so the first half of this book is about the physics and chemistry of the brain. The second half of the book then shows how wellness topics and practices interplay with the physics and chemistry of the brain. (For example, how we can actually repair neural connections to repair tragic or unpleasant memories.) It roots wellness into brain science in a way that resolves any lingering doubts about the importance of wellness.
There are many other great books, and The Wellness Esquire website has a great list as well!
Practices
(3) Yoga with Adriene on YouTube. Adriene is a global yoga superstar, and she teaches these freely available 30-day classes that are short (20-30 mins), light (on yoga) and deep (on meditation). It’s fantastic for all, including beginners.
(4) Sephora! Struggling with anxiety and depression are my personal struggles, so I’ve had trouble sleeping as long as I can remember. I discovered Sephora last year, around the same time I heard in a wellness webinar that treating sleep like a fun ritual helps with insomnia. Now I have a face-washing, flossing, brushing, hydrating and moisturizing routine before bed; and I look forward to the way I feel after this routine, which has helped immensely with going to be on time and sleeping better!
What is the connection between wellness and career?
At the core, wellness is about feeling more confident and secure in your own being. And that makes you an exponentially better professional (let alone lawyer). When you feel confident and secure, you can move past your own ego to truly think about what’s best for your client, or in a situation. When you make mistakes, you have no problems owning up to them. When you don’t know enough, you have no problems acknowledging it.
If you work at a company, this makes you a genuine member of any team; your colleagues will appreciate you more, involve you more, trust you more, and value your opinion more. You are “one of the team,” not “Ali in legal.”
If you work directly with clients, feeling confident and secure allows you to be a better listener. Genuine listening is another one of those basic, incredibly useful skills that we don’t learn about, in any grade. It requires being less reactive, and more present and attentive. For example, when your client says, “My car got broken into when I was having dinner with my daughter,” you don’t think about your own experiences with car break-ins; you think about how much your client loves her daughter; their relationship; and how they both must have felt in that moment. Even deeper listening requires paying attention to what is not being said. (If your client has also mentioned having a son, does that mean she doesn’t have as close of a relationship with her son?) But all of that requires being present, and being focused. And what is meditation, but practicing being present, and being focused?
Is there anything else you would like to share?
A lot of times, when I share stories like I did today, people tell me things like, “Ali, you’re so open!” or “Ali, you’re so vulnerable!”, as if I am doing something out of the ordinary, or commendable. But what’s more interesting than thinking, and talking, about things like death, love, life, fear, anxiety, fulfilment, or relationships? What’s more real? What’s more fresh? For what more do we have more thirst, more yearning? We all yearn to be seen, to be loved, to be understood… so let’s all talk about those things!
Ali Assareh is an Iranian-American lawyer, political scientist, speaker and author. Ali frequently speaks and writes about issues of constitutional law, business law, human rights and due process, and U.S. and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Middle East Policy, Diplomatic Courier, Los Angeles Times, and The Journal of Law & Commerce, among others, and he has appeared on numerous live and recorded programs and podcasts discussing the same. Ali has dual degrees in International Political Economy, and Philosophy, from UC Berkeley, and a doctorate in law from New York University.