Mindful Mom - Forever In Mom Genes

I spend way too much time looking ahead, wondering and worrying about the future. I seem to get pulled back into the past—mulling over things that I can never change. Life is right now. What is happening in this exact moment is the only thing that actually matters.

I’ve been working at putting that knowledge into practice. For something so seemingly simple, being mindful of what is happening right now is hard. Stress (or my inability to handle it well) has robbed me of daily joy. This is why I started reading and learning and writing about how to live more mindfully.

This page is about my attempt to be a more mindful mom and human being in general. It’s a work in progress…

I thought I was perfectly happy living in the past and contemplating every conceivable permutation for the future, oblivious to what was going on around me in the present. This whole being mindful and “living in the moment” concept was foreign to me. I like to hang onto things—to cling to past experiences and their corresponding feelings (good and bad) like some kind of memory hoarder. Read the rest…

Jewel, right? She’s an actual gem. I loved her in the nineties. And I love her now with her simple approach to mindfulness. Clearly we’re soul sisters because we both use these easy breezy breathing techniques. Read the rest…

I originally called this little #KarmaCleanse exercise a ‘Karma Kleanse’ but remembered that purposely using the wrong letters to be ‘cute’ annoys some people. God knows I wouldn’t want to annoy anyone and have them talk behind my back or sarcastically tweet about how “Some people think they’re so clever using two ks.”
The level of back stabbing and gossip and PATs (passive aggressive tweets) online is astounding. Whether you choose to participate or feed into it, is totally up to you. If you swim with sharks, you’re bound to get bitten. I prefer adorable dolphins. And whales and of course super cute seahorses. Read the rest…

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands. What, no clapping? Aren’t you happy?! Well, don’t let that make you sad because not many of us are consistently happy. According to the studies anyway. Science has us pegged as a sad sack of SOBs just trying to make it until cocktail hour. My daughter however, she’s perpetually happy. She gleefully claps her hands all the time for no apparent reason. It’s like a happiness explosion where her joy just can’t be contained and the sudden burst of happy claps is a way to let it out. I consider myself a very happy person, but I can’t say I feel “happiness explosion happiness” in adulthood very often. But alas, nobody is as happy as Avery. Read the rest…

When you are a parent you’re IN CHARGE of other people and as a result there can be moments that rattle your confidence and depending on the severity of the scare, the fear can linger and reek havoc on our life. And if you already have a tendency to worry, buckle up because you’re in for a long bumpy ride down anxiety road.

When our daughter was three, she scared the hell out of us. She had the first of several life threatening seizures that, unbeknownst to her dad and I, were part of her chromosome deletion disorder. I don’t have to tell you how scary it was to helplessly watch as paramedics worked to resuscitate our toddler. Read the rest…