Mindful Musings

I am a mindfulness teacher, guide… coach… whatever. 

I use mindfulness as a commodity. 

I write to promote and be an example of what mindfulness has provided to my life. 

So what does talking about my divorce, my son’s depression, my desires, being a single mom, my anger, my grief… my blah blah blah boo hoo hoo’s and a few hip hooray’s have to do with mindfulness? Why am I writing about my life like my blog is my diary for you to all understand how mindfulness has supported me, how it works?

Let me start by telling you what mindfulness is NOT. 

Mindfulness is not a singular tool to help fix your problems and make everything sunshiny and rainbows. Mindfulness is nearly the opposite of positive toxicity… Mindfulness and meditation will bring you to your knees if you let it and you should.

People often think if they have thoughts while they meditate that they’re doing it wrong, and I say “no, there’s no wrong way to meditate” but actually maybe there is a wrong way to meditate, and that is if you feel really good after every meditation, that you think it’s making your life “better”, because if this is you, you are dissociating during your meditation and this is not judgment of that, but I also want to be bold in my statement to shock you out of your dissociation. So it’s not “wrong” but it’s also something you need to bring awareness to… mindfulness is to bring awareness to absolutely everything, and also that, forever and forever. 

The claims out there in People & Time Magazine and on the Facebook memes are that mindfulness and meditation help with depression and make you calm, that it helps with Alzheimer's and ADHD, anxiety, that it will quiet the thoughts in your mind. 

But the truth is, that if you are utilizing mindfulness in its original true purpose it will make absolutely everything worse before it makes anything better. Because that is life. You must go through it, you must face it, before anything gets “better”.

And we go through “it” again and again. 

Meditation will make you aware of your shit. What mindfulness and meditation actually do is to help you be with the discomfort of the “through it”. It teaches you to sit with you and your shit when you’re IN your shit. It grows your capacity to be with it. 

And if you don’t have a teacher or someone to model this process for and with you, while you are sitting in the shit, you will grow new coping mechanisms to hide from that shit. That is your nervous system at work behind the scenes doing what it is supposed to do. And this is how meditation can actually work against you if you’re not careful. 

Depression comes from a resistance to pain and sadness. Meditation teaches you to be with it. 

Our mind has so much noise making it hard to focus because it is trying to protect us from perceived external threats that were once very real to our little bodies. Mindfulness lets us face those thoughts with love, inviting compassion to ourselves, softening those thoughts, easing our ability to focus on the task at hand. 

Meditation and mindfulness support us in facing our life so we can live it fully and deeply from the depths of despair to the thrill of ecstatic joy. When we can face our life fully our body doesn’t need to protect itself from preceived threats through illness, autoimmune diseases, and Alzheimer's.

(Please know there is a lot more at work here in regards to illness as well, this is just the tip of the iceberg.)

And it is not just the work of sitting. There are many tools, teachings, and strategies to support the practice. 

It is the work of a lifetime. Neuroplasticity exists, thank god, but it takes an active action on our parts to recognize when we have fallen back into the old wrinkles of our brains, or as my teacher likes to say our “old grooves”. 

Maybe I could do a better job in general of drawing that line between my life experiences I share and mindfulness, but I will trust that, at least so far, my readers are intelligent enough to draw that line themselves. 

And in case it’s not…

All of the blogs I have written, all the writing I have processed out loud here are not only something I experienced on a deeper level with a full facing view of reality while moving through these difficult life changes, but also a result of my mindfulness and meditation practice. 

First I sat. When I first started sitting for mediation. I couldn’t sit consistently and I didn’t really know what I was doing or why, but there was a regulation I could propriocept.

Then I went to school for it. I learned what the Buddha taught. It was validating. Suffering is inevitable, all the toxic positivity I grew up with began to be safely released. I wasn’t wrong to have my emotions. To not feel happy all the time. And it wasn’t just from a book or a meme… it was an academic endeavor of validation. I could meditate better, more authentically, and with more openness.

And it did just that. It opened me up deeper to myself, increasing my capacity to withstand moments of discomfort. 

I meditated in silence for a whole straight week. Woossshhhh… more opening. Life was never the same after that week. 

I used mindfulness to be with the discomfort of making small and big life changes… daily habits, cigarettes, alcohol, nutrition. 

The pandemic offered me an opportunity to be with the deeper discomforts of my parenting, my marriage, my anger, the parts of me that I loathed, feared, chastise, by taking away the distractions and noise of daily life obligations, opening me to make more changes. The changes needed to align me with my truer purpose. 

I was able to lean into the discomfort and begin the process of approval. But I was not the same person anymore. And my life around me needed to adjust along with it. 

The divorce closed me quite a bit. I fell back into old patterns that looked new. I wasn’t drinking, but I wasn’t feeling. I learned how to disassociate through meditation but I didn’t recognize it. I wrote. It helped. And because of my practice and my desire to continue to grow and move forward, because of mindfulness, I was never going to stay closed. It was more like that bow and arrow analogy, being pulled backward to shoot further than ever before. I’m somewhere in the beginning of that release point now. Plus I needed that survival strategy of disassociating to make it through a year of divorce.

I have a new teacher who reminds of how to do this with my body. She shows me the ways I close when I had no fucking clue I was closed. She shines light on the things I look away from.  The importance of having a teacher in these practices has become immeasurable. Doing this work in isolation is not sustainable.

Neuroplasticity is real, but we don’t change our brain and then we’re all perfect and calm and peace. There is still a lot of internal and external hell to face.  As long as there is war, this work is forever. 

Enlightenment is real, but it is not a destination, just like our job, we have to get up every morning and go again. 

So I write. I write about my internal wars. I write about the external shit I resist. I write to show you that mindfulness and meditation are forever, that even as a practitioner I have shit I face and shit I have to work through. I write to bring awareness to it, to help you bring awareness to yours. I write to normalize the inevitable pain of being human. That suffering is real and beautiful and even more so when we open to it. That it’s less when we are in approval of our suffering.

This is what mindfulness is. It’s opening to life, fully, with our whole fucking bodies. And that's what I’m writing about. Bringing awareness to absolutely everything, over and over, forever and forever.

Drawing the line to mindfulness with my own life experiences, Owning my shit one beautiful transgression after another.