I'm Not Being Mindful

What a wind chime, a dead squirrel, and a lost phone taught me about forcing it

I’ve got it all. The meditation pillow next to my desk. My tarot card deck next to my bed. My perfectly curated tea selection, kettle, and cute Danish tea cups in my kitchen. I’ve got the podcasts, the meditation guru, the mindfulness coach, my hippie breath work guide in Topanga, and even a hypnosis expert I Zoom with from Portugal. A person I call for cord cutting, a playlist I put on when I’m anxious, the therapist I’ve worked with for over ten years on IFS, EMDR, and more. In other words, I have every tool there is.

You guys, I am all about mindfulness…… But am I?

Mindfulness has become such a buzzy word, and we’re all working so hard to “practice” it, that I think we’ve lost the point entirely. We’ve turned presence into a performance. One more thing to be good at, one more box to check, one more way to quietly feel like we’re failing.

Over the past month, after taking three weeks “off” from Substack, barely checking my email, and casually posting on Instagram (which is the easiest thing I do in my life), I noticed something kind of funny. Okay, maybe funny isn’t the right word, but I really noticed something new.

Every genuinely present moment I had over the past few weeks showed up when I wasn’t trying. It found me. A rocking chair in Texas. A missed flight at LAX. The chimes on the back porch. A dead squirrel in Montana, of all things. Losing my phone in Copenhagen. None of it was scheduled, none of it was a practice. In fact, most of it was downright frustrating, or annoying, or the kind of thing that could have been off putting. But every single one taught me something about how backwards we’ve gotten this whole thing.

So let me tell you about them. (left an audio of this at the bottom for those of you “on the go!”