Your Stories: February 2012

When did you first start practicing mindfulness and why were you motivated to do so?

I would say I first informally started practicing mindfulness when I was very young. My family has a lake home in Minnesota, where we would spend the weekends together. At our lake home, we do not have a telephone, television, computer, or much technical connection to others, etc. As a result, our days were spent mindfully cooking, eating together, walking in the woods, swimming in the lake, sitting, observing the world/nature around us.

When I think in my mind's eye of my favorite place in the world...it is here. I recognize that it is not necessarily a place as such for anyone who comes to visit. I have come to believe it is because of the years spent at the lake, it is a place of emotional and physical attachment enriched with mindful existence connected to my family.

Therefore what brought me to MARC (Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA) was a natural or organic walk.... I worked for the geneticist who is one of the founders of MARC. We connected on our conscious intention to be "mindful" of living in an environment that has created a certain level of anxiety within each of us that did not "sit well." So I guess I sought out a different way in which to formally as well as informally "sit" in life differently... more mindfully... and as an adult who cannot run off to the lake home every weekend.