Mindful Living Guide Podcast - Episode 1

In this episode, I discuss what I hope for the podcast and discuss my first ever experience with mindfulness.  It's not everyone's first introduction to mindfulness, but it was my first step in this beautiful journey that has been with me ever since.

Transcript

My name is Stephen Downie and this is the Mindful Living Guide.

For a long time I've contemplated creating a podcast and just to talk about mindfulness and about how we can bring it into our everyday life.

A lot of people have heard about mindfulness over the last few years,

It's gotten more and more popular but a lot of people see a lot of barriers to it.

They think it's a monk sitting in a corner meditating all day but it's absolutely not.

Mindfulness is just about bringing awareness into your life,

To be fully present in all of the moments throughout your day.

So my hope for this podcast is that I can help break down those barriers and help demystify some of the ideas people might have about mindfulness.

So I'd like to start by just talking about how I actually found mindfulness myself.

Like a lot of people in life these days it can get stressful and we can get anxious and a couple of years ago I was going through a pretty tough patch in work.

There was a lot of projects going on at the same time and I was really struggling and unfortunately that anxiety ended up in a bad panic attack.

But at the time I didn't know what was happening.

I felt unwell,

I felt like I needed to go home from work that day so I told my boss I wanted to.

But when I left the building a sudden gush of air hit me and suddenly I collapsed.

I wasn't able to talk,

My voice was all slurred and an ambulance was called.

Unfortunately at the time I was working in the airport in Dublin and I was on the wrong side of a security fence so the ambulance couldn't get to me in time.

So unknown to myself as I was sitting there,

There was a fire brigade from the airport fire brigade on the way.

So when they checked me over and wanted to bring me out to the ambulance to go to hospital I stepped out and there was a fire brigade and an ambulance literally outside the office I'd been working in.

So I was a bit embarrassed but I knew I needed to get checked out.

So I went to one of the main hospitals in Dublin and my wife was called.

At this point I still didn't know what was happening but my speech just kept slurring and I just,

It was like an overwhelmed uncomfortable feeling coming through me.

So after that my wife arrived at the hospital and I was waiting for a while to be seen and a consultant came out and he looked at me and said can you come with me Stephen?

And brought me over to a quiet part of the hospital.

I sat on the bed and he examined me over,

Checked all my signs and he looked at me straight in the face and he said something that will stick for me probably for the rest of my life.

He looked at me straight in the eye and he said Stephen I know what's wrong with you.

You're just stressed.

And for me it was like a light bulb moment going off in my head.

I said yeah I'm taking too much on.

For a while I was like things that other people mightn't have taken too serious I was taking very serious and I was reacting to the way life was happening around me.

I knew in that moment that I needed to do something so when I went home that night I sat in bed and I looked up stress management,

I looked up stress courses and the word stress kept coming out over and over again.

But luckily I found a course that actually was starting the next day.

The course was the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course,

The MBSR.

If anyone is familiar with mindfulness they'd be very familiar with this course.

It's an eight week course which is an introduction to mindfulness for many many people.

And for me it was probably the most powerful eight weeks of my life.

The next day I rang to book the course because it was very late when I saw it online and I got through to the shop that was right beside where it was run and they said oh well it might be fully booked but listen come along and you can have a chat with the teacher and we'll see how you get on.

So the next evening it was absolutely lashing rain.

I drove my car,

I was very nervous because of everything that's happened the last few days.

I've been in hospital,

I've happened to take some time off work and I parked a car and I took a deep breath and I just went for it.

I was slightly early because I wanted to talk to the teacher and I opened the door and I still remember the jingle of the bell as I opened that door.

And he looked at me and he said hi can I help you?

And I explained that I'd read about the course and I rang the shop earlier on and they said to just come along and have a chat.

And he was so nice to me Dominic and he looked at me and said listen normally I'd ring and I'd have an interview but listen come along sit down see it might be a bit raw.

It might be a lot going on at the moment so it mightn't be a good time for you to do it.

But I stuck with it and I had my first ever introduction to mindfulness and ever since then I've never looked back.

I've grown and I always say even though I'm now qualified to teach mindfulness I'm always a student I'm always learning something new about mindfulness.

It's been here for thousands of years it's not just something that's happened in the last few years since John Habitzin made it a lot more famous to Westerners.

But the traditions are in Buddhism and they've been here for a very long time.

But over that course I learned so much about myself about how I was reacting to life.

How I wasn't aware of my own body I wasn't aware of what was actually going on in my mind.

So I stuck at it and I've been practicing ever since.

Years later I decided to actually no it wasn't years later it was about a year or so later I set up my own mindfulness page called Our Mindful Moments to celebrate the moments in life.

Mindfulness for me has been life changing especially about six months after I finished that course unfortunately we had a tragedy with our family and I had to embrace every bit of mindfulness I could to try and get through that time.

Now since then I've had many ups and downs and things have hit me at times I never expected them to hit me.

But bringing that awareness to myself and bringing that awareness to just be forgiving to myself.

To forgive and be compassionate about listen we are all going through a bad time but that's okay it's just human.

Many times in mindfulness we talk about our mind straying and to bring it back just to our breath.

Because a lot of people that they come into mindfulness they think that suddenly once you turn on your mindfulness switch your mind can just go blank.

But it doesn't.

Our minds naturally think they naturally ruminate over thoughts over conversations over things that might have happened years ago but what mindfulness allows you to do is bring awareness to that.

Forgive yourself and just bring curiosity.

Why am I thinking like that?

Why are those thoughts going on in my head?

Not whether they're good or whether they're bad but just accept them.

So that's a little introduction to me and an introduction to my own mindfulness journey.

Sometimes you can put things off for so long so I just said I'll just sit here and I'll just record my first episode.

I had no agenda.

I had no idea what I was going to speak about but hopefully this will be the foundation of a podcast that will help people just to bring awareness to their life and to be present fully in their life.

So thank you so much for listening.

I'm going to be looking for guests so if you feel like you'd like to contribute to the show I'd really love you to get in touch.

The email address is podcast at mindfulliving.

Guide.

That's podcast at mindfulliving.

Guide.

Thank you very much.

I've been Stephen Downie and this is the Mindful Living Guide.

Reviews

Thank you Stephen!

Thank you.

Thank you, for the honesty and genuine sharing of your path. Looking forward for the next episode.