I sat in the therapist’s office, sobbing – huge tears spilled over like a cup overfilled with emotion.  And overfilled I was, yet I had no idea “what” I was actually feeling.

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“Why are you crying,” the therapist asked.

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“I don’t know,” I replied.

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The therapist had told me that I stuffed my emotions, and this outburst was a key turning point in my awareness of it. Since then, mindfulness has been on my mind.

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As the creator and publisher of Evolving Magazine for over 20 years, you’d think I’d have the whole mindfulness concept figured out. I’ve had partners comment that I’m incredibly self-aware. So when did this disconnect occur?

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I began to practice conscious mindfulness: What I eat and drink, how I move, and what I feel.

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I made major leaps last year changing my eating habits, increasing my physical activity doing things I hadn’t experienced since I was a teenager – lots of travel that included bicycling, kayaking, off-road adventures, and lots and lots of steps (oh so many steps in Montreal).

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I knew what I was feeling during these activities: I felt ALIVE! I practiced mindfulness meditations in the form of cooking, gardening, and walking, and listened to binaural beats on Insight Timer each night before bed. My sleep improved, I lost weight, and I kept commenting on just how good I felt – mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

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According to an article in Your Tango, we can even think our way thin. “After all, studies have shown that perceived health is a better predictor of mortality than actual health.” Just imagine the changes we can make with mindfulness.

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Still, it took practice to figure out what I was feeling. Whenever I felt the need to stuff my emotions with food or a cocktail (or binge on Netflix) and numb out, I asked myself,

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"What am I feeling?"

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Often, I didn’t know the answer. But stopping to ask myself this gave me pause and broke through the need to “fill” whatever it was – and brought me back to the present moment where mindfulness resides.

 

Journaling became my go-to activity to sort through my emotions. It allowed me to dump whatever I was feeling onto the page, bringing release from the turmoil. 

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So when I was invited to attend a wellness retreat in Mineral Wells, Texas – and the theme was Mindfulness – I didn’t hesitate to accept. It would be an important next step in my journey.

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Although I was hosted at the retreat, all opinions are my own.

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Here I Am

I’ve learned through the years that any twinges of anxiety that creep in originate from a place of “What If” (the future). The present moment, and mindfulness, reside in “What Is.” And what is, I’ve found, is always a perfect moment. The saying goes that depression lies in thinking about the past; anxiety in thinking about the future, so reminding myself “Here I Am,” brings me back to the present moment and its resulting peace.

 

Of course, the day I was to fly to this mindfulness retreat I needed to remind myself of this tactic. The weather forecast for Dallas/Ft. Worth, where my plane would land, called for heavy storms. Before I even left for the airport I started worrying “What if” it was storming during the plane’s arrival, or, if the hour or so drive to Mineral Wells would be stormy. I quickly got my thinking in check, and realized that at that moment, everything was fine – and I knew that no matter what the weather was like, it would be fine then as well.

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And it was. My plane arrived before the storms began, and because I was meeting with the retreat facilitator for a couple of hours at an airport restaurant while we waited for another journalist to arrive, I watched as bright flashes of lightning lit the sky from the safety of the airport. The rain was gone by the time we drove to Mineral Wells. (See how much energy would have been wasted on worry…?)