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Tag: misconceptions

  • Finding Your Creative Inner Voice

    Finding Your Creative Inner Voice

    Finding Your Creative Inner Voice

    In a world full of definitions, labels, and productivity metrics, mindfulness has become one of those words everyone uses , but few fully understand.
    When I was invited to speak on a podcast recently, I called the conversation “Finding Your Creative Inner Voice.” It felt like the most honest way to describe what mindfulness has taught me, both personally and professionally.

    1. Clearing up the misconceptions

    There are so many misconceptions around mindfulness today. It’s often seen as a purely cognitive exercise, when in truth its deepest point of reference is the body, the felt sense of being alive. Also, practices that are now packaged under names like “compassion” or “gratitude” were never separate from the original teachings. And while calmness or improved productivity are lovely potential outcomes, they were never the goal.

    Mindfulness is not just another tool to manage the mind; it’s the awareness that underpins many modern therapeutic models and the engine that quietly powers them. They were designed with mindfulness at their heart.

    2. The real definition — finding your own way

    During one silent retreat, a teacher offered a definition that has stayed with me ever since:

    “In its truest form, mindfulness is about someone finding their own way.”

    That struck me deeply. Because to find your own creative inner voice isn’t just about artistic expression but can be about discovering a creative way to be in the world, especially when life doesn’t fit into neat categories or expectations.

    Many of us find ourselves outside the structures that society assumes we should belong to. When that happens, reframing becomes essential. For me, that reframing happened through mindfulness and the rediscovery of my first love – music – which had been silenced for many years.

    3. How I came to mindfulness

    My introduction to mindfulness was, in some ways, accidental. I first heard the word mentioned briefly in a pain clinic I was attending for chronic pain. Something in me knew it was worth exploring further, and this intuition proved right.

    At the time, I was carrying a lot: years of physical pain, the weight of parental illness, the strain of unacknowledged trauma. Mindfulness was the only thing vast enough to meet what I held, with awareness, wisdom, and kindness. Little by little, it gave me a new foundation, one that helped me reframe what had always been pathologised into something profoundly human.

    4. Rediscovering music — the creative voice returns

    Music has always been a powerful thread in my life, one that, for many years, I kept quietly in the background. As a child, it felt like a second language to me, something I understood intuitively. But, circumstances led me to set it aside and over time, I internalized the belief that it wasn’t safe to fully express that part of myself.

    Through mindfulness practice, and learning to sit with and listen to what had been silenced, I began to reclaim that voice. Rediscovering music became a form of healing, but also a reminder of my own natural affinity with sound. When I play, there’s a clarity, richness, and resonance that others often comment on, a quality that feels authentic because it’s fully me. The sound is my voice coming through, unfiltered.

    Closing reflection

    Finding your creative inner voice isn’t about reinventing yourself. It’s about remembering what has always been there, waiting quietly beneath the noise. Mindfulness gives us the courage to listen not just to our thoughts, but to the deeper intelligence of the body and the heart. Whatever form it takes, it’s asking to be listened to.

    To listen to the whole conversation: click here

  • Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

    Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

    I’m always on the lookout for podcasts that align with my values around embodiment, and different journeys of healing approached with depth and care. Last night, I listened to an ‘expert’ claim that mindfulness should be avoided in trauma work: encouraging people to stay present teaches the nervous system that the present isn’t safe, he claimed.

    This  once again frames mindfulness as just another option, in some wellness toolkit, showing limited understanding of its true nature and potential.

    If you’ve ever been told that learning mindfulness doesn’t apply to your situation, especially because of the trauma you’ve lived through, I want to say this plainly:

    That’s not true.

    Mindfulness isn’t a neat little practice reserved for quiet minds or calm mornings. It’s for this: for grief, fear, exhaustion, and the kind of pain that doesn’t always have language.

    Personal Story: Mindfulness in the Midst of Trauma

    Five years ago, my parents both died within two weeks.
    The lead-up to their deaths was a relentless combination of palliative care for my Dad alongside the upheaval of hospital and intensive care visits for my mum. It was a punishing regime marked by exhaustion, sadness, and a fear beyond words. My whole system didn’t settle during those years; it never had the chance. I was already carrying the weight of secret miscarriage, the disenfranchised grief of childlessness, relationship rejection due to my own physical condition, and early life trauma that had yet to surface in my awareness.  (I have since learnt that old pain can only be released from the body proportionate to the amount of safety you feel internally.)

    How could I have navigated this level of uncertainty and suffering without anything to hold onto?
    The small seeds of understanding I had begun to cultivate in the years prior were all I had. Mindfulness wasn’t a practice I ‘chose’ in calm circumstances, it was the only thing truly available to me.  The only thing big enough, wise enough, intelligent enough, loving enough to hold all that I came to it with, trauma included.

    The idea that mindfulness forces us to ‘stay in the present’ at all costs is a misnomer of Titanic proportions, and it needs calling out.

    Because an equal part of navigating presence is knowing when it’s too much to stay with, too much to bear.

    Distraction as a Vital Component of Presence:

    In contrast to the narrow view that mindfulness demands constant presence, we need to clarify what it really teaches: how to stay when it serves us, and how to step away when it doesn’t.

    Because distraction, when done with full intentionality and awareness, is an entirely different thing. Instead of shutting out pain blindly, we recognise what is tolerable in a given moment and make a conscious choice to shift focus if necessary.

    Not only that, but the kind of discernment which knows when presence serves and when it overwhelms, doesn’t come by accident. It requires training in presence itself, so we can recognise our limits not as failures, but as signals. When tuned into with full awareness these signals deepen our self-understanding, not just emotionally, but somatically, cognitively, and relationally.

    Notwithstanding all the misconceptions, it was the training in presence itself which led me to a potential of peace I hadn’t known was possible. Through learning this practice intentionally, we tolerate more with greater ease: we actually can be with more than we could before.

    In other words, being present doesn’t imply pain for the sake of pain.

    Expanding Understanding of Mindfulness

    You see, in trauma, reality is often fragmented, overwhelming, and deeply alive. Mindfulness, when taught with integrity, doesn’t ask us to bypass that. It meets us inside it, with choice, with nuance, with care.

    To dismiss mindfulness outright in the face of trauma is to miss its depth and versatility as a practice that evolves with the person and the situation. It isn’t rigid: it’s fluid, adaptive, and built to meet the full complexity of life.

    When mindfulness is stripped of its roots, reduced to a quick fix or productivity hack, we lose what it was always meant to be: a compassionate, discerning way of meeting reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is a sad consequence of the fact that so much of the original depth and nuance of these teachings has been shaved down to the extent that what we’re left with is a hollowed-out version, presented as lifestyle advice rather than a path of liberation.

    So rather than rejecting mindfulness in the context of trauma, we need to reclaim it. Not as a tool of control, but as a practice of relationship, one that invites us to turn toward what’s here, and just as importantly, to turn away when presence would be too much.

    That’s not avoidance. That’s wisdom.

    And it’s time we made more room for this wholeness. The kind that doesn’t fracture under pressure, but softens around it, steadily, intelligently, and in service of healing.

    To make whole, sweeping claims implying the appropriacy of mindfulness, we need a wholer understanding of what mindfulness is. Not a lifestyle edit. The whole practice: complex, compassionate, deeply relational.