My Meditation Path

With so many types of meditation teachers and coaches to choose from these days, how do you know if you’ll be on the same wavelength? How do you know if I’ll be the right fit for you?

For those who would like a more detailed picture of my flavor of facilitating, here’s a bit more about the teachers and influencers who inform the various branches of my work.

The Breakthrough Guides

As I shared in Blooming Into Mindfulness, I stumbled into present moment awareness – the most basic definition of mindfulness – during my recovery from breast cancer treatment in 2009.

Eckhart Tolle’s work was my gateway, dropping onto my path via an “accidental” audiobook download shortly after my mastectomy. Having returned from a three-year posting in Germany for my husband’s job shortly before my diagnosis, I was contemplating what office job to go back to. Not the book I expected it to be, Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose blasted through the noisy clutter of my thinking mind. The transformative shift I experienced – yes, a true awakening – revealed the peace to be found if I would just sit still for a few minutes and tune into the present moment.

I credit nature – and my garden in particular – as being my first “in person” mindfulness mentor. Tolle’s framing helped me recognize and later write about why digging in the dirt was so calming for my normally stress-filled mind. The sensory experience of nature grounded me in the here and now, infusing me with a sense of wonder, possibility, and connection to something bigger than myself.

Early Headspace Adopter

Realizing I needed an inside practice to supplement my outside practice, I decided to learn how to meditate more formally. With my boys still at home and no space of my own, I set myself up on a meditation bench in my bathroom in the early hours of the morning before my family awoke.

I started to blog about my mindfulness learning journey in 2012, not as a teacher – nothing was farther from my mind  but as a lonely explorer. In response to a piece I wrote about my clunky DIY meditation efforts, a blog reader shared Andy Puddicomb’s “All It Takes Is Ten Mindful Minutes” TedTalk with me.

A former monk with a passion to make meditation mainstream, juggling balls (like so many thoughts in our head) to get his point across, Andy was my perfect guide via his brilliant new Headspace app. Low-key, down-to-earth, and humorous, Andy’s style was both accessible and motivational for people like me who never would have imagined themselves as meditators. These influences show up in my own teaching style today.

Going Deeper With Dharma Teachers

My pool of influencers expanded over the years to include Insight Meditation and Lovingkindness teachers Sharon Salzburg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein, along with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) founder Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mindful Self-Compassion pioneer Dr. Kristin Neff, just to name a few. As Nature has played such a strong role in my journey, Mark Coleman, founder of Awake in the Wild, has been a particularly important guide.

Mark Coleman (in the hat) and Pascal Auclair, Awake in the Wild Retreat, Rocky Mountain Eco Dharma Center, July 2023

Retreats

Though I do not identify formally as Buddhist, I find great value in Dharma teachings and the container created to unplug from technology at residential meditation retreat centers, which I attend on an annual basis to deepen my practice. Some of the silent retreats I have had the privilege to experience include 10-Day Vipassana (SN Goenka’s and IMS teachers’ versions), week-long retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and week-long Awake in the Wild retreats with Mark Coleman. During covid, when the centers were closed, I took myself to a tiny cabin for a solo silent retreat, where my lead teacher was a bear!

Certified Teacher and Coach Training

My deep dive into mindfulness practice and my curiosity around why it was so impactful in my own life led me to the fascinating research of contemplative neuroscientists exploring what happens in the brain when we meditate. 

Why was I noticing more focus, self-awareness, self-management, clarity of purpose, greater productivity, and more happiness? Why were my relationships improving? Why was I able to live and work more skillfully with less stress and more joy since I had cultivated my daily meditation practice?

The answers to these questions are woven into the Search Inside Yourself curriculum (now SIY Global), an intensive mindfulness-based emotional intelligence training program born at Google and grounded in neuroscience. I learned that our brain’s alarm system can hijack our access to skillful responses to life challenges, that the tool of attention brings our prefrontal cortex back online, and that what we practice grows stronger in the brain. Focus, awareness, compassion, and gratitude are trainable skills. So exciting!

I knew immediately that this was the program I was wired to teach. I completed the 9-month SIY Certified Teacher training program in 2018.

In addition to the nuts and bolts of the robust curriculum, the even deeper value added was the training I received in how to facilitate transformational learning experiences and guide meditations safely. 

I learned that anybody can read a script, but true embodiment of the practices through dedicated personal experience was the secret sauce of impactful teaching.

The next “perfect fit” to support my calling arrived when I was invited to participate in Shirzad Chamin’s PQ® Mental Fitness training for coaches. Shirzad’s innovative Positive Intelligence app-based program illuminates how the types of mental exercises I had been teaching for years allow us to 1) intercept the inner Saboteurs that hold us back from our full potential and 2) shift to our Sage powers to live a more empowered life. The group and 1:1 coaching training I received during the PQ® certification process has allowed me to serve my Damselwings community in fresh ways (and later in the day for those who can’t make my morning programs!).

Creativity Guides

Running parallel to my meditation journey, and even preceding it now that I have more perspective, is my cultivation of creativity as another channel for my mindfulness practice and purpose work. “Inspiring Mindful Living Through Words and Images,” my first business tagline, reflected my creative tools of writing and nature photography for storytelling.

It was a long journey to get to that tagline! In 1997, when I was struggling with my decision to leave my full time economist career (and ego identity), I won a door prize at a networking event for a free session with a life coach. After a brief doodling exercise over the phone, the coach recommended I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Though the “spiritual” word scared me at the time, the book inspired me to come back to writing, a lifelong but undernourished passion.

Another inspirational shero of mine, Elizabeth Gilbert, released her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear in 2015, just a few months before I launched Blooming into Mindfulness. Perfect timing, since it is indeed pretty scary sending your life story into the world! Liz continues to be a role model for me in how she translates her inner work into outer world action. (Read about the time I met her here.)

I was called to ramp up my creative courage even further when interest in my nature photography increased outside of any planning on my part. I had mentioned my year-long 365project.org Photo-A-Day exercise in a late chapter of Blooming into Mindfulness, but it was only after the book was published that my camera became a clear tool of my purpose work, one aspect of which is creating wall art that invites states of calm, wonder, gratitude, and joy. Read about my big magic experience with Sibley Hospital in Washington, DC, here.

Just as had been the case with meditation, I could only get so far with my photography on my own. Sure, I could learn the mechanics of the camera from a lot of different sources, but I needed octogenarian Freeman Patterson to reveal the potential of my photography to truly express my soul’s calling. Freeman’s workshops in New Brunswick, Canada, on Photography and Visual Design and Inscape: Imagining, Dreaming, Creating, are the building blocks for my next chapter of photography.

I am barely out of the gate with this work, but Freeman’s example of deep connection to nature, a vibrant sense of playfulness and curiosity well into his 80s, and his admonition to continue to be portals for the universe’s creativity make him my teacher on a much broader scale than photography alone. I simply want to be Freeman when I grow up! 

Creativity is our greatest gift. Using that gift is the finest way that we can possibly say thank you for the gift of life.

~ Freeman Patterson

With Freeman Patterson on my left and his co-teacher André Gallant in Freeman’s garden, August 2022