This is the bare truth of why I teach mindfulness. It is not because I am naturally mindful, if anything it is because I am not.
I used to work in various support worker roles. I was on the front line in young people’s sexual health clinics and supporting adults with learning difficulties to manage their tenancies so they could live independently. These and similar roles involved working with people’s harrowing life stories in emotionally exhausting work on unstable contracts due to austerity related cuts in public funding. So I thought I would retrain to teach at sixth form.
This was a sensible step, I knew my subject, I was used to working with young people, but largely on a one to one basis, and I had a bit of a phobia about public speaking. I figured that would resolve itself along the way, so took a deep breath and signed up for the course.
One of the final assessments of the teaching course, logically, is having to teach a lesson to the other people on the course. You can teach anything you like, something that you do as a hobby or in your spare time, so I chose to teach meditation. During the stress of the support worker roles, the professional and personal instability with the ending of contracts, and the end of my marriage, I had found that mindfulness was increasingly helping me to deal with the difficult times and enabling me to keep on a relatively even keel.
There were a few times during this period when I felt like I was trying to run through concrete. I was struggling to deal with ongoing stress and instability at work and at home, and each of these issues impacted on the other. I had too many conflicting priorities, lack of time and too much sadness to be able to keep afloat let alone thrive. I didn’t have the skills to manage these pressures and started to feel like I was going under.
Mindfulness and meditation gave me some respite at this time. It helped me sleep and gave me a few minutes away from ruminating on all the things that were going wrong, which at the time felt like everything.
However a large part of the reason behind the decision to teach mindfulness at that session was that as I was teaching the meditation, people would have their eyes closed, and the meditation itself would help me manage my nerves! I was frankly terrified about delivering this twenty minute lesson.
The day before I was due to deliver the lesson, I happened to be helping out at my son’s school and his teacher asked me what I had planned for the weekend. I said that I was well aware of the irony behind my absolute panic about my meditation lesson. She laughed and said, ‘Great! When you’ve done that, can you come in and teach the kids?’. Gulp.
So I passed the teaching course and hoped that the teacher would forget about the whole thing, but she kept asking and I was running out of excuses so I decided to give it a go. My first step in overcoming a public speaking phobia was a class of thirty five eleven year olds. I was literally sweating fear.
But I did it and they loved it. Then I taught it to the other years in the school. Six weeks of 15 minute sessions once a week. In that time they told me that they had used it to get to sleep, to focus before auditions, to deal with confrontation at home, to put younger siblings back to sleep, and twice to feel calmer at their grandparents’ funerals.
At a time when everything felt like it was falling apart, I looked forward to going to teach the children and hearing how they had used their new skills during the week.
Small people in the village pointed at me and told their parents, ‘Look, it’s The Breathing Lady’ (which was funny because previously I had been known as ‘The Condom Lady’). Parents came up and told me how the meditations had helped their children. They asked if I did this professionally, and when I said no, they looked confused and suggested that maybe I should.
I had never occurred to me to do this professionally. I was just sharing a skill that could help the children. I had no idea how much impact it could have on them. I could see how it could help the year 6 manage their exam nerves. I never dreamt that it could help so many children with their sleep and their stresses. When I tell people about the year threes who used it at their grandparents’ funerals, my voice still wobbles. I am so touched that I could help these little people to deal with their stresses and sadness.
At the end of the year, the feedback was so heart warming that I took the decision to retrain and start teaching mindfulness full time. I have trained to teach adults and I show them how to share it with their children. I have had a few couples of mum and teenage daughters and that has worked very well.
As I have learnt more about mindfulness and made it an increasingly large part of my life, I have benefitted immeasurably. The more I learn and the more I practice, the better life is. What started off as a survival strategy has grown into a whole new way of living. This has impacted every part of my life positively, how I run, how I work, how I parent and who I am.
I have gained the ability to manage the stress and deal with the bad times and also to make the most of the good parts of life, and it that which I love to share with other people.
I love this work. I love helping people to learn to manage their stress. I love that these simple techniques can help people of all ages and in all situations. I love making it easy for people to manage their stress and improve their quality of life. I love to bump into people years later who tell me that they are still using these skills and that it is still helping. That is my story and the truth behind why I teach mindfulness.