It seems like a bit of a rite of passage in the mindfulness world to talk about how we all came to mindfulness, especially among teachers.  Mine was subtle, my body something I struggled as a child to live in.  A struggle I was unaware of because we only know what we know, right?  Still, mindfulness has changed my life and the way I live for the better.  It's often in opposition to what modern society values and strives for.  But it has afforded me a presence as a dreamy child I would never have believed possible.  I wrote the article below some time ago, back when I thought I knew what I was doing.  I didn't and still don't, but it is a practice alive and ever present - and somehow it offers a space to hold it all. 

I want to share the practice not because I'm a Guru or an expert, but because I am not. Because this journey of mindfulness has been 'complicated' for me in so very many ways.  When being shut down has been a default position, a survival position, I know all too well.  But what is this life, if not to be here? And I know something of the courage it takes to choose something else.  To simply sit.  For there is nothing that simple about it. It's rather radical.

So here's the journey - as I saw it many years ago.

My relationship with mindfulness began two decades ago while living in Shikoku, Japan. My experience of this rural part of Japan was one of opposing, often extremely contradictory, forces. On the one hand, there was a buzzing, electric, fast-paced reality. Technology I'd never seen before; vending machines, selling cans of hot coffee, flashing pastel neon lights, gadgets designed to make the easy things in life more manageable, flashing casinos, kitsch, oversized, plastic trinkets & buzzing shopping malls. All of which seemed to collide and fuse in a glaring haze of flashing neon. Yet, on the other hand, it appeared to overlay something deep, enduring, simple and timeless. 

As I journeyed further into Shikoku, I learnt it was a land of temples, mountains, mist, and monks who wandered the landscape in brilliant white. I woke each morning, feeling the soles of my feet against the cool tatami flooring. The smell of incense from a cemetery built into the bottom of the vast, majestic mountain. I watched silently as people tended to their ancestors. There was something profound and still in the morning air as if held by the landscape.

The longer I spent in Shikoku, the more I noticed how everyone else noticed. I noticed the passing of the seasons, the revering and savouring of the parts of nature with the shortest life span, the cherry blossoms, and the fireflies that whizzed and sparkled gleefully in the dark night sky. I noticed the delicate, slow tending of the gardens, which looked like meditation. 

- Even tea! ~ especially tea! Making it and drinking it became a moment to step into 'being'. 

My formal mindfulness practice began some years later in the UK. Still, I learnt how to stop, pause, and experience my life in Shikoku, if only for fleeting moments. 

I practice because, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, 'your life depends on it'—indeed, it does.

Nicola Wright