What Brought Me To Mindfulness?

I found mindfulness because I was burning out as a teacher of at-risk youth. And I didn’t want to leave my profession. I was a new mother, and only a few years into teaching, and starting to experience panic attacks. I was reaching a breaking point, something had to change. I had already tried meditation in college, but needed support and more education to try it again. I found that group at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Over the course of a couple of years, meditation helped me find joy and calm in my life, really for the first time. Mindfulness meditation helped me recognize how much of my stress came from my thoughts constantly wanting to worry about the past and future - rehashing and rehearsing. Exhausting!

I also recognized how often I said yes to things that I didn’t really have time for because I was not keeping my priorities in life at the forefront of my mind, and making decisions based on those. Mindfulness meditation gave me the space to understand why I did this and then allowed me to make changes to my life to better line up my priorities with my decision-making.