I am a Transpersonal Coach, Meditation Facilitator and Youth Mindfulness Teacher. I have been practising mindfulness since 2005, and I have been teaching mindfulness since 2018. I see all of these mindfulness-based activities as invitations to create inroads in attuning to your authentic self, meaning and purpose, creating opportunities to know and be at home with yourself, and living and acting from your wisest self.
My life journey has led to experiences that I could not have imagined. The wisdom from those experiences has been a catalyst for coaching and teaching. The gifts I have generously received through my journey was directed by what seems like an innate longing for happiness and the inquiry into what “being happy” really means to me.
I did not seek to be where I am or what I do; life presented itself so that I put one foot in front of the other and followed the road that unconsciously felt the most authentic. Within that journey, I have taken many sidesteps along life’s path, discovering even the sidesteps appear to be a part of waking up and drawing me back to what is meaningful, to what wants to be created in me, through me, as me.
I struggled with self-esteem during my early life, not feeling good enough, not having a sense of meaning and purpose. My life was pervaded by what Tara Brach would describe as “the trance of unworthiness“. The turning point for me was discovering mindfulness.
My partner and I took a travel gap year, which was in itself a rich life experience. However, the most significant gift came when I felt drawn toward and actualised the impetus to participate in ten days silent meditation retreat in the mountains of Doi Sutep, Chiang Mai province, Thailand. It was then that I discovered a whole new way of being and experiencing the beauty and simplicity of a joyful life, which during my early years felt so heavy.
For the first time in my life, I saw that the disillusionment I was experiencing resulted from the mind patterns that I became aware of during meditation. Those mind patterns were the barrier to feeling joy, peace and happiness, keeping me feeling stuck. During my time at the monastery, I witnessed and experienced what life holds beyond the mind patterns, habits and reactions. Nothing had changed externally, but I felt a significant shift internally; lighter, more peaceful, joyful and more clarity. Then the journey began and continues in integrating those insights and experiences into everyday life.
Those ten days initiated the path to teaching mindfulness in schools and becoming a coach and meditation facilitator. I felt drawn to the opportunity to invite children, which then extended to adults, to know and understand the mind and cultivate a different relationship to thoughts and who we are underneath the conditioning.
At the core of being a transpersonal coach and a mindfulness teacher, for me, is an invitation to feel at home with yourself, to feel comfortable in your own skin in the full spectrum of who you are, not just the “good bits”. In my experience, I see that mindfulness in a coaching context is a helpful companion in opening to the possibility of living from the heart, from your wisest self. Through curiosity, compassion, and embodied present moment awareness, choice arises in places that once felt stuck, bringing the possibility to opening to see beyond who we think we are to who we really are, and arising from that knowledge has a quality of stability, a springboard to bring what we need, to be our best self.