Mindfulness is a practice that was brought into my life by Trina Markusson. Any and all information that I contain should all be credited to her. Mindfulness has drastically improved the way that I handle change within my life. Mindfulness has helped me stay positive and hopeful in this ever-changing life of mine.
Trina Markusson defines Mindfulness as “moment to moment, non-judgemental awareness,” which essentially means knowing what we are doing, as we are doing it, with our full attention. It helps us be more accepting of the many things we experience in life, good or bad. With mindfulness, we become more aware of our emotions, ideas and actions. This awareness or mindfulness helps us come to terms with our feelings rather than victims of it. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, nervous, anxious and sad, which are completely normal things to feel as a human. Every human within their lifetime will feel this way. The question is if you will fight these feelings and create a bigger conflict than it should be or accept these feelings and embrace them with unprejudiced ideals.
I try to integrate mindfulness into everything that I do because it has given me so much. I was first introduced to mindfulness when I was in grade 10 at Campbell Collegiate. I was a rookie on our football team and I learned many things that year, but the most important thing was mindfulness. Trina came to the school once a week and worked with our team after practice. What Trina walked us through was something called “athletic focus” and the purpose was to keep us focused on the play at hand and not what might happen or what has happened. In everything that we do in life there are highs and lows and we can fluctuate between these frequently. Getting fixated on events that have already happened or events that have-not happened only takes us away from the present moment and thus, makes us unfocused. Trina helped us learn how to stay in the present moment and not drift into thoughts of what might happen or what I could have done differently. In our games I found that I performed better during the game, I wasn’t nervous or worried, and I was playing at the best of my capabilities.
I took the experiences I had on the football field and I worked to translate it to my everyday life. I took the teachings of Trina and used them when I was feeling swamped with homework or studying. At first, it was not super helpful, but I stuck with it because I knew how much it helped me in athletics. Eventually I reached the point where I saw similar benefits like I did when I played. Instead of worrying about getting it done before midnight or thinking about all of the different assignments I had to get done, I was able to focus on the one thing in front of me. Academically when I am using mindfulness teachings, I produce my best work. In the moment there is nothing wrong and the creative juices flow without any blockage. My grades went up and I worked more efficiently and overall felt much more confident in my own abilities.
Mindfulness has helped me so much athletically and academically, but it has also helped in a fairly specific situation that I have been living in recently. In May of 2022 I had to get total reconstructive surgery of my ACL in my knee. This was devastating for me at the time. Being active and moving has always been a huge part of my life and because of this surgery I was told that was all on hold for at minimum 9 months. The timing of surgery was pretty brutal; because of this surgery I had lost many opportunities to pursue sports in post-secondary. I was bedridden for close to a week and I was on crutches for the following month. The recovery from this surgery is very long and slow. I found myself clouded with negative thoughts like “What if I am never the same? What if I don’t heal properly? I should have never played in that game, then I wouldn’t be here and I’d be healthy.” My headspace was very negative and it was affecting everything else around me. I wasn’t focused on school I just wanted to sleep. I was being mean and rude to those around me, something I would NEVER do before. I was not feeling like myself and others could notice. Mindfulness brought me out of the slump I was in. I was able to bring myself out of the negative thoughts of the future and past and really focus on getting better day by day.
What is so effective about Mindfulness is that it teaches you to catch yourself when you start to drift into these negative past and future thoughts. It is inevitable that we think about the past and future and things we wish we could change, but with practice, we can stop ourselves before we dive into the thoughts that take us out of the moment. We cannot be totally happy and positive 100% of the time, but we can make an effort to keep ourselves from becoming consumed by uncertainty.
I am a huge advocate for Mindfulness if you cannot tell and I really think that everyone can feel positive change if they give it a chance. I do not know If it is a big practice and widely known, but I do know that it has helped me. Trina Markusson has a website that discusses lots of her practices and experiences and I will leave the link at the end of this page and also a link within the resources section of this website. I highly recommend you take a quick peak into her website and see if anything piques your interest.