I’m L. I’m a journalist and a writer, though over the years I’ve also been a marketer, a creative, an entrepreneur — whatever the moment called for. I have three small girls who are the loudest and best part of my life, and I’m not going to tell you my last name or where I live.
Here’s what I am going to tell you, even though it’s not the whole story yet: a few years ago, things got hard. There were some medical issues — serious enough that they rearranged how I thought about basically everything — and I’m still not ready to write about the details publicly. Maybe one day. Just not today. What I can tell you is what happened after, because that’s the part that actually became this blog.
Down the Rabbit Hole
When conventional medicine had done what it could do, I went looking for whatever else was out there. I fell into the deep end of holistic healing, the power of the mind, the idea that your thoughts and your nervous system are a lot more connected to your health than most doctors have time to tell you in a 12-minute appointment. Joe Dispenza was a big one for me back then — I read the books, watched the talks, did the meditations at 6 a.m. before anyone woke up.
I was in deep enough that I actually recorded a video of myself explaining my whole situation and asking for advice, and sent it in. Somewhere in his organization, apparently, actual humans review those. I found out someone had watched mine — there was a small, undeniable sign of it — and I panicked and deleted the whole submission within about four minutes. Not because I regretted asking. Because I suddenly could not handle the idea of a stranger having seen me that unguarded. I still laugh about it. I also still mean every word I said in that video.
How I Actually Got Into Meditation
That whole strange, embarrassing, sincere chapter is how I ended up in meditation. In wellness. In a genuine hunt for non-traditional ways to calm my mind and get some kind of handle on my emotions, because the traditional ways weren’t cutting it and I didn’t have the hours a retreat requires anyway.
And I needed a lot of it. I had three small children at home through all of this, and the hardest part of the entire experience — harder than almost anything else about it — was pretending, every single day, that everything was fine. Packing lunches. Signing permission slips. Doing voices for bedtime stories. All while carrying something none of them were old enough to understand and none of them needed to carry with me. That performance took more out of me than the actual hard part did.
One Thing That Actually Helped
Out of everything I tried in that stretch, here’s one that stuck: a two-minute visualization, done first thing in the morning before my brain fully wakes up and starts arguing with me. Close your eyes. Picture one specific moment from the day ahead going well — not vaguely “a good day,” but one real moment: dropping the kids off without a meltdown, getting through a hard conversation calmly, whatever’s actually on your plate. Hold the feeling of it, not just the image, for two minutes. That’s it. No app, no course, no forty-minute commitment.
It didn’t fix anything by itself. But it gave me two minutes a day where I was choosing what my mind did instead of just surviving what it did to me, and on the hardest mornings, that was enough to get me out of bed and into the version of myself my kids needed at breakfast.
More of what I found along the way — what worked, what didn’t, what I’d take back if I could — is coming. This is just the beginning of it.
— L
Leave a Reply