What People Get Wrong About Mindfulness

To practice mindfulness, some people think you have to go on a retreat. Or chant. Or twist your body into a pretzel. Or meditate for eighteen hours a day.

You don't.

Most people who find their way to my coaching practice aren't looking for mindfulness. They just want relief. From the noise, the loop, the feeling that their own mind is working against them.

Mindfulness just turns out to be the thing that helps.

Not because it adds anything. It interrupts. Just long enough for attention to find its way back to what's actually happening — the breath, the room, the moment that's here before thought names it.

The shift is small. Almost nothing.

You notice you are thinking, rather than being inside the thought.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

And in that gap — however briefly — something settles. Not because you added anything. Because you stopped, for a moment, pretending you needed to.

This is what I work with in my mindfulness teaching and one-to-one coaching practice in Vancouver. What I've noticed, after more than twenty years, is that the easiest way to learn this is not through videos or books or even an AI explaining it to you. It's learning together with another human, one to one, using your own life as the classroom.