Watching Mindfulness Unfold: A Conversation On Mindfulness, Healing, and Film

The idea to create short films about mindfulness came to Julie Bayer Salzman during a meditation session—but the full story goes back to her kitchen table, a cup of hot chocolate, and a conversation with her young son and his friend about the amygdala.

Mindful editor Ava Whitney-Coulter sat down with Julie for a Q&A about using film to showcase the stories of people of all ages who are using mindfulness to navigate anxiety, depression, addiction, and more. 

Ava Whitney-Coulter: Let’s start with you. Can you tell me about your mindfulness journey? How did mindfulness first come into your life?

Julie Bayer Salzman: Probably the earliest was when I was 16 and taking a world religions class in high school, and we learned about meditation. I dabbled all throughout my teens and twenties—I took a walking meditation course in college, practiced yoga, kind of slowly finding my way. In my thirties, I was a long distance runner, and that was my form of meditation, too. I realized that I really enjoy the stillness. I enjoy the quiet. I enjoy shutting everything down and quieting, just getting the brain to turn off a little bit. 

The real turning point for me was when my son was in kindergarten, about 11 years ago. He came home one day with his friend, and they were having hot chocolate, and they were talking about their amygdala and their prefrontal cortex, and what happens when we get angry and how we calm it down. They were learning about this in school, so I contacted the principal, and she directed me to Mindful Schools. I wound up taking the six-week course from Mindful Schools, and I knew that this was what I’d been looking for. I’ve been practicing ever since. 

AWC: Take me from mindfulness coming into your life to making mindful short films. How did you get from one place to the other? 

JBS: Well, it really started with the hot chocolate moment with my kid and his friend. I’d been a filmmaker for a while, and I was making television commercials for a living before I had a child, so my natural inclination was towards film. But it wasn’t until I took the course with Mindful Schools that the fullness of the idea came to me. I was here in my office, meditating as part of the class—and I literally saw the first film. I just saw it in my mind. The next day, I talked to the principal at the school and said, “I have this idea, black and white film, interviewing all the kids, talking about anger in the brain.” And she was like, “I love it. Let’s do it.” So then we made that film. It was called Just Breathe.

Then I started to think about how we continue this education. What can I do to make sure that kids at all stages of life are getting access to this material? How can I make these in such a way that they’re educational for specific groups, but they’re also universal? That’s when I came up with this idea of this whole series of short films for every age group. 

AWC: Can you tell me more about why you feel this content specifically needs to be on film? 

JBS: We live in a very visual world. We live in a world of screens and people wanting to watch things, and oftentimes mindfulness is taught in a classroom with a lot of words.

People don’t always learn by what they hear. There are a lot of people who need to learn by what they see, and, as a documentary filmmaker, I saw it as a way to offer access to people that maybe wasn’t so intimidating. It was an easier way to get the information across faster, and possibly move people enough to want to take it more seriously.

I also felt like it was like a really wonderful way of introducing people to something that is so fundamentally important to our collective survival right now. I was seeing all the problems that were related to people’s emotional instability, emotional immaturity. I was in a time of volatility myself. I saw all these different stages—learning how to deal with anger, with anxiety, with depression, with trauma. And I thought, What can I do that can contribute something positive to this?

AWC: I noticed, in every film, there’s no narration. You give the mic to the person who is at the center of it, and allow them to tell their story in their words. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that choice.

JBS: I want to make films that will have an experiential impact on people. Interviewing experts is important, but that is not what moves people. What move people are genuine emotions. Things feel a lot more real and credible and accessible when there are normal folks talking on the other end of the camera. I think people take it more seriously when they don’t feel somebody has an agenda.

It’s been my approach as a filmmaker to be very sincere about the stories I’m telling, and as a human being to be a sincere human being and not come across as some expert who’s gonna tell you how to do things or who’s got all the answers. Because I don’t. I don’t believe in telling people what the answers are. I believe in letting people find those answers for themselves. And the best way to do that is to see other people living their own answers and not being told what they are and how to do them. 

AWC: That segues nicely into A Good Day, your most recent film about mindfulness in addiction recovery. I would love to hear about how you found Samadhi, the recovery center that’s featured in the film, and the subjects whose stories you tell. 

JBS: The founder of Samadhi, David McNamara, and I were colleagues years ago in the commercial world. We were working together in the early 2000s, and then we parted ways. I went off to do my own films and raise a family. Unbeknownst to me, over the course of those 17 years where I didn’t really see him, he had gone through a mindfulness-based recovery program himself and then started the Samadhi Center several years ago. He reached out to me on Facebook and said, “I’ve been watching the film work that you’re doing. I think it’s beautiful. I don’t know if you know this, but I was struggling with addiction, and I went through my own journey. And I opened up this mindfulness-based recovery center in upstate New York.” We talked about the idea of collaborating at some point in the future. 

I went to visit the center and David just gave me full access. I was looking for people between the ages of 30 and 50, and he put the word out among his people and got a couple of volunteers. So we returned in November of 2022 and we only had three days, because we had a really small budget. People were really open with us from the get go. I felt extremely lucky to have that kind of access and that level of openness.

Honestly, if I had had the time and the resources, I would have stayed there for months and really done a big feature or a series. There’s so much material in there. But working with what we had, I wanted to create a day-in-the-life snapshot. What does mindfulness-based addiction recovery look like, and how does it differ from other approaches?

AWC: I would love to hear you talk about what you’ve learned in this process about  mindfulness and suffering and healing.

JBS: It is a big question, and it’s constantly changing. It’s a work in progress. We are works in progress. The series is a work in progress. I might still go off into catastrophic thinking, but I can catch it more quickly.

Mindfulness has definitely taught me how to be aware of my thoughts and recognize how it’s landing in my body and how to move through it. I think about suffering all the time. It’s impossible to not look at the world right now and see all the suffering. It’s inevitable, but it doesn’t have to prevent us from experiencing the joy that is all around us, and that, I believe, truly believe, is our inherent nature. Mindfulness is constantly peeling off those layers.

Mindfulness just helps you be more compassionate, more aware, a kinder person, because you can recognize the suffering more. It allows you to be with that instead of getting buried by it. 

And that goes into the healing. I think healing is an ongoing process. I don’t think there’s an end to healing, because there’s not an end to suffering, and therefore there’s not an end to your mindfulness practice. These are all three connected. As long as we’re alive, we’re going to be experiencing all of that. We are going to be in a cycle of suffering and then healing through mindfulness.

AWC: What can you tell us about the films that are not yet released? Do you have a timeline? Is there anything you want to say about the themes?

JBS: There’s the one on grief that I’m working on now. Then the one on trauma is next. That might be the one film that I try to go really scientific with, because I think that people are skeptical about mindfulness and trauma until there’s data. My guess is that will happen in 2025. This series will be done at the end of 2025. Then it’s a matter of people finding it, and figuring out how to package them all into one thing and get them all seen.

AWC: Is there anything else that we didn’t touch on that feels important for you to say or share?

JBS: We could talk for hours about this stuff. At the end of the day, as my mom likes to say, we have a lot of work to do as a species. I have hope. The practice gives me hope. If we could get more people to understand this, and practice it themselves, I do believe we could bring the temperature down. I go back to my six-foot sphere of influence: What can I do? What can I do today to make a positive impact on the person next to me? And

hopefully, that’s coming through the screen, too, extending to a virtual six feet, as well.

Julie’s work is one hundred percent crowdfunded and offered to the public for free. If you’d like to be a part of this work, you can donate and spread the word here.