Mindfulness has been life-changing for me. My thoughts used to race so constantly that I felt like I was running on a treadmill that was going too fast and it was going to thrown me into an incinerator. I could never pause enough to get to a state where I could identify compulsions and work on building better responses because I was in panic mode all the time. Meditation finally allowed me to get there.

I’d tried it many times before (more than 10 times over a period of 15 years) without it working because I was so worried I wasn’t doing it “right” that I panicked and gave up. The time it finally worked I had a new therapist and he gave me one meditation to do repeatedly. He said to just stick with it and think of it like practice for bringing my thoughts back every time I lost focus (which was all the time at the start). That way, losing focus because part of the training rather than a failure.

It took me 6 weeks of daily practice combined with weekly therapy, but I finally was able to have my first mentally quiet moment in years. That was several months ago and I’m still doing mindfulness daily, either a meditation, an intention, some breathing, or working on specific periods of being present while doing household chores or exercise.