Goerling’s career in law enforcement has spanned two decades, but his journey toward mindfulness goes back just about 10 years, when he returned to the Hillsboro PD after a post-9/11 stint in the Coast Guard. The two-year break gave him a fresh perspective on the job, and when he put the badge back on in 2003, he started “realizing the toxic drip that is the police culture, even in Happyville Hillsboro, which, frankly, doesn’t have a real crime problem.”

He’s right. The town boasts the type of stats that landed it on CNN’s “best small city to live” list in 2011: Only 9 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while unemployment hovers around 4 percent, thanks in part to the arrival of tech companies like Intel and Yahoo!, whose massive campuses sit awkwardly among the open fields of this once-rural community. Though Hillsboro is urbanizing quickly — it’s now Oregon’s fifth-biggest city, with about 100,000 people — the violent crime rate for 2011 was still about half the national average, low even for Oregon. “The reality of policing today is crime is down,” says Mike Rouches, Hillsboro PD’s public affairs officer, “so our job has become much more social work-ish.”

Officers here, like elsewhere around the country, spend less time getting to be “badasses” (in Goerling’s words) who chase down murderers and thieves. Instead they spend their time confronting domestic abusers, freeing mangled bodies from the wreckage of vehicles, corralling mentally ill people, cleaning up after drug overdoses and delivering death notices. It’s work that’s sensitive and emotionally taxing, and both the training and the organizational culture are just starting to catch up.

In Hillsboro, the seeds of the mindfulness program were planted about a decade ago when a yoga teacher named Brant Rogers, whose studio is just a few blocks from the police headquarters, decided to offer a free class to first responders. “Nobody showed up,” recalls Rogers. But a week later, he got a voicemail from Goerling. “I was like, Damn, what’d I do?” Rogers recalls. He called back. Goerling wanted to talk about yoga.

Rogers started stopping by the department, introducing himself to officers and teaching bits of meditation in between active-shooter trainings. There was enough of an interest to get a handful of officers to enroll (on their own dime) in Rogers’s eight-week course for a technique called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts as a secular form of meditation, with a well-documented history of improving mental-health outcomes. In turn, the officers offered feedback to Rogers on what he could do to make the trainings more relevant to law-enforcement professionals. “They’re not highly verbal about stuff,” says Rogers, noting that the officers didn’t feel that comfortable talking about their feelings with co-workers. “They just want to get to it, so we made it that way.”

Goerling and Rogers say that officers who did the first program experienced benefits like reduced stress and improved sleep. Goerling saw promise in proactively providing support for cops, as opposed to the kind of reactive, lecture-based trainings seen by many officers as either a punishment or a waste of time. “They do it ’cause they have to,” Rouches says of the typical sensitivity or diversity training. “The cops sit in some class, but they don’t really own it, and we end up in a bad situation.”

But Goerling was unable to sell the program to Hillsboro’s police leadership until the town faced a “bad situation” of its own. On January 20, 2013, Hillsboro’s dispatchers received a call for backup from the nearby town of Forest Grove. Armed with an assault rifle, a Hillsboro cop named Timothy Cannon — who had a history of drinking, absenteeism and problems with his supervisors — was holding his wife and daughter hostage. “He was a close friend of mine; I knew his family well,” says Stephen Slade, an officer on Hillsboro’s SWAT team, who was sent to the scene to help talk Cannon down. Cannon yelled to Slade that the team would have to kill him, then started shooting at Slade and other officers through the walls of his home, even switching to armor-piercing bullets. He surrendered after 81 minutes of mayhem, as The Oregonian reported. “You can’t put words to it,” Slade says, remembering the trauma. “It’s like, your good friend today and then tonight you’re trying to kill me. How would you deal with that?”

The incident sent police morale into a free-fall. The department had already been dealing with labor complaints by the police union, a lawsuit from an officer and claims of abuse of power by a sergeant, whom Cannon had reported on for pouring maple syrup over public benches to discourage loitering. “To me, it seems, the upper administration at HPD is a fraternity and somehow I have become one of their many projects of destruction,” Cannon wrote in a letter of formal complaint a few weeks before the shootout.

“Part of resilience is to pay attention. Notice when you get amped up, but what does it feel like to let go of that? Can you practice letting go?”

After Cannon’s violent breakdown, the department needed to do something quickly. They turned to Goerling, who had spent the past decade talking about many of the problems the Cannon incident epitomized. “The police chief that was in charge said, ‘Rich, do whatever you want to do,’ remembers Rogers, and he and Goerling partnered with Michael Christopher, a psychologist researching mindfulness at the local Pacific University, to put together a curriculum customized for first responders. The department agreed to spend 18,000 dollars to enroll 54 employees in an eight-week, 20-hour training at Rogers’s studio.

Everyone from SWAT guys to administrators began learning to sit through short meditations and body-scan techniques for deep relaxation. The program reacted to what officers said they needed, taking a suggestion from a training officer to incorporate normal industry sounds into meditation practice. At the beginning of a session they’d alert students, “There’s gonna be some disruption that may show up during this body-scan practice,” Rogers recalls. Then, while officers were told to send their awareness to an elbow or knee, a siren would go off or a call for an active-duty shooting would come in. “Just notice what happens, feel what happens to your body… your breathing, your heart rate, so they get familiar with like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens to my body when there’s an urgent call,’” Rogers would tell the cops. “Part of resilience is to pay attention. Notice when you get amped up, but what does it feel like to let go of that? Can you practice letting go?”

“Initially I was very standoffish, I was skeptical,” says Slade, whom Goerling asked to be in the first training cohort as he grappled with the trauma of the Cannon shooting. “Some of the stuff we found kind of silly, you know, touching each other and chimes and, kind of like, incense.” The more touchy-feely aspects of the curriculum were taken out of future classes. Menawhile, Slade and others reported improvements in sleep, stress, emotional regulation and resilience to Christopher and his team, who published the results in a journal paper.

The results were significant enough for the National Institutes of Health to take the study seriously. In August, Christopher’s team found out that they’ll be able reproduce the study and expand the training to include cops from other local departments, thanks to a 379,500 dollar grant. He’s bolstered by growing support for mindfulness in law enforcement, with cops reaching to talk about starting programs in Wisconsin, Virginia and Rhode Island. In November, he’ll finally gave that TED Talk his presentations seem like an audition for (at a TedX event in New York City). Earlier this month, he kicked off his first multi-day immersive training in Bend, open to cops from around the country.

“If I had a police department, I’ll tell you right now, we’d have all these mindful yoga warriors running around,” Goerling says, “and we’d be a bunch of badass cops that were working with kindness in the field and ready to open the can of whoop-ass.”