On Creating a Mindfulness Practice When Just Showing Up To Life is Hard
In my last post,The Role of Mindfulness in Healing Trauma, I shared how sticking with a mindfulness practice as part of my own trauma healing created space for me to learn how to cope with triggers and chronic stress. What I did not share was how painful, ugly, and hard it was to cultivate this practice.
I am on a mission to increase people’s capacity to practice self-care, and normalizing the difficult aspects of self-care has the potential to empower more folks to take on self-care practices.
I cannot measure how much time I have spent staring at my meditation cushion, crying on my meditation cushion, crying on other meditation cushions while in public, feeling completely misunderstood by meditation teachers, and having an overall misperception of myself as a “bad meditator.” I can just tell you it was an awful lot of hours stretched over a few years. But I kept at it, reminding myself that meditating is not easy and that is why we call it practice.
While there are numerous resources out there to teach one how to establish a mindfulness practice, I found myself feeling very alone in the challenges I faced that were specific to me as I…