It was 2014. Me and my husband just moved into a small apartment in Ottawa from Toronto. We were still newcomers to Canada. I was still grieving the loss of my mom, who passed away as I was in the process of preparing my medical school application. I took almost two years off, but it didn’t feel like enough. I just started my first year of medical school. We didn’t know anyone in the city, and our marriage was going through some serious challenges. Money was very tight and we had to live off my medical student loan which was causing a lot of stress on top of the pressure of just trying to keep up with learning medicine in a totally new educational system and in my second language. I thought I was hiding all that pretty well, but I knew I was a mess inside.
When we had our neurology block, one of our professors introduced us to mindfulness and invited us to enrol into a free 8 week mindfulness program. She taught us about some fascinating evidence on how it helps with neuroplasticity and rewires our brains to become better regulated and better adapted to withstand stress. She seemed so chill – I wanted to get a little bit more like her, because I felt I was on an emotional rollercoaster all the time. I was tired, wired, lonely, overwhelmed, stressed out and insecure all the time. I didn’t know if that was normal or if I was just broken. When I finally got brave enough to see my family doctor about it, thinking I got clinical anxiety, she smiled at me and told me I feel like a normal medical student and that I need to take care of myself. I wasn’t reassured – I felt dismissed, because she didn’t give me a quick fix. But I knew she had a point – I had to start looking after myself better. So I signed up for the free course on mindfulness as a first step because that was free and required relatively low time commitment.
The course had some reading materials, some recordings of guided meditation practices and some self reflective exercises. It was pretty much self paced and I didn’t think it was groundbreaking. But I followed the prompts and did the exercises. Some of them felt painfully boring, especially any meditation exceeding 10 minutes duration: I felt restless and occupied with “when will this be over?”. Some of the guided practices I didn’t like: some voices just sounded unpleasant to me, or reminded me of someone, or seemed to have a triggering tone for me. But one book in the recommended readings really resonated with me: “ Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World” by Danny Penman and Mark Williams. The recorded meditation practices accompanying it for some reason landed really well for me too. I liked the voice and the pace of the narrator. I could follow the instructions, follow the guidance and sometimes even felt a few seconds of peace: the noise in my head paused and the anxious “rush” that my body was running on chronically would let go for some “empty” feeling of hollowness in my chest (that’s the best way I can describe it subjectively for me), I didn’t feel the tightness and the subtle lump in my throat for brief moments. I started enjoying these practices (“The 3 Minute Breathing Space” and “The 8 Minutes Body Scan” – I still do them sometimes). I wasn’t always compliant with them and often skipped days. After I finished the course I wasn’t miraculously transformed, but because of those occasional shifts in my states that I felt, I got hooked. I wanted to give my nervous system more of those episodes of breaks from fight or flight mode. I learned to not expect anything from the practice, and oftentimes I was still doing the meditation in a very “messy” state of mind. However, I decided that even though I don’t feel instantly zen, I will just stick with it and see what happens. I was just going through the motions on multiple days per week. Sometimes I would fall asleep, sometimes the noise in my head would be louder than the guided meditation. I had no money for therapy, and I had no close friends to talk to about my problems at the time. But I could find 3-10 minutes to meditate on most days.
So that’s how my journey with mindfulness began.
