As we steamroll our way through life it’s not often we take time to check in with ourselves emotionally. We’ve grown accustomed to seeking an immediate fix from an outside source, turning inward feels counterproductive. The quicker we can find an answer and the less we have to think about it the better. Facing ourselves emotionally is not something we’ve generally been trained to do. And now we’ve created a vortex, a loop which becomes increasingly uncomfortable, causing us to see out relief, with one of the latest buzzwords becoming mindfulness.

Meditation seems to go hand and hand with the search for mindfulness, a practice in which we are trained we need to clear our minds to calm our spirits. Many begin, some find a bit of sustainability, but often the practice is discarded for one reason, our thoughts wonder.

It wasn’t until I actually stumbled upon mindfulness that it became of any genuine interest to me. I’d given it a brief shot long ago and read the books about meditation making us 10% happier and moved on, storing that in the back of my mind with the countless and varied self-help methodologies I’d sought out.

Where things got really interesting to me was when I began using hypnotherapy in an effort to get a handle on personal weight loss goals. I had arrived with the idea of reprograming my mind to gain control of the compulsive addictive behaviors when I found myself being triggered. What I found was not at all what I’d expected.

I too went in looking for a quick fix, an immediate answer. I wanted to make the unwanted behavior stop and to move on about my day. What I got instead was a feeling of relief and release I’d not known possible. I should mention I went in with a very open mind, other than wanting a fix I had zero agenda. I may sound like I’m pushing hypnotherapy; I’m not. It is a completely amazing experience and I do recommend it absolutely. But the main takeaway for me was an amazing fresh awareness of the roots of the problem and an understanding of how to make the necessary changes.

I ran headfirst into an area that seem most wish to avoid, childhood trauma. While more information is continually coming out on this topic, I don’t think we realize that even the smallest of things can cause trauma, fear, repressed painful emotions in a child; mainly because our total dependence in those early years’ replicates something similar to survival mode. Which is a whole other article. But what ensued was a deep dive into exactly how neglected and isolated I’d been as a child, uprooting the cause for all the repressed pain, fear, insecurity and conditioning that had creating low level anxiety and limiting beliefs that had driven my entire adult life. Piece by piece, as I faced each one down, releasing it from my subconscious, I became more conscious, more present and more at peace and finally as I said, stumbling on mindfulness in my daily life. BECOME EMOTIONALLY EMPOWERED.