Mindfulness helps us let go of conditionings and habits we’ve taken on and to experience our own Wholeness just as we are through learning to inhabit our body, reclaim the wisdom within, and as we come into community.

I teach women how to recognize these dynamics, to build skills and practices to keep them grounded in the face of upheaval, and how to be an agent for meaningful change. There are millions of ways to do this work. 

Learn to come into contact with your own tattered heart, come into relationship with the land where you find your feet, tend to your ancestry, come home to your body and your breath and sense yourself as a manifestation of this breathtaking life unfolding.

I don’t know about you but I grew up learning to be really good at numbing over and checking out and pretending to believe that things are as they are supposed to be. This cultural dynamic functions to keep us separate from the actuality of things as they are at a time when we need steadfast wakefulness, clarity, and discernment.

When we tap into the well of love in our hearts, build perspectives that expand our understanding, and integrate awareness of the narratives we’ve taken on without our knowing, we reclaim parts of ourselves that we’ve given away, we develop healthy boundaries around where we allow our energy to flow, we become aligned with our inner moral compass, and we become liberated and heart-centered.

We’re five weeks into our nine-week mindfulness program together where we’re learning to honor the whole spectrum of our human experience without needing to change it in any way. We’re learning to hold the whole of our humanity as a loving mother would tend to her distressed child. It is still one of the greatest gifts of my life to hold space for all that a human (including myself) may carry and I have come to realize this practice is a radical act of sanity.

The work of awareness as spaciousness that can hold the whole of your human experience is a love affair with life, and as a powerful bonus, it dismantles structures of internalized oppression and reclaims your sanity and soul through:

✨ Embodiment
✨ Radical self-acceptance…

I had an incredible conversation today in a course I am teaching with 23 mindfulness practitioners. We’ve been together on-line weekly now since Corona turned the whole world upside down. One participant shared that this is the first time in her entire life that she felt truly effective in working with difficult inter-personal dynamics. She said she felt empowered because of her newly developed connection to her body and her expanding capacity to honor her human experience, to bring in support, and to manifest meaningful change in her life. She. felt. POWERFUL.

Little Willow was just dozing off for the night when we heard the low throaty “Hoo Hoo...Hoo Hoo” and then a response, “Hoo..Hoo..Hoo..Hoo”, of owl calls closer than I have ever heard them in the 15+ years we have lived here on unceded Ohlone land.

Anxiety is a valid human response to all that is unfolding in these times yet it's not the only response available to us, and how I show up in this moment is very often how I show up in the next.

Twelve years ago I launched a mindfulness-based course at SJSU at the tail end of completing my certificate to teach MBSR through UMASS Medical School. It's been a humbling process of personal healing and evolution that has peeled lifetimes of programming about who I am allowed to be, how I am able to express myself, how others are allowed to treat me, how much joy and awe I can hold and it has softened the tattered edges of trauma.