Helen Nicholson - Mindfulness: How to Stay Sane in an Insane World

Mindfulness

How to Stay Sane in the Insane World

Helen Nicholson

Copyright 2022 TNCo Publishing

All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Art Painter
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America

Contents

This book is a dedication to:

Michael - my precious soulmate.

Sabrina and Caitlyn - my amazing daughters whom I'm so incredibly proud of.

The TNCO team - Caitlyn, Paula, Portia, Noku, Angie, KG and Shina , for doing such great "fairy-dust" work so that I could do the deep work required to birth this book.

Brookdale - My favourite recovery place in the whole world.

Part 1

My Journey to Mindfulness

CHAPTER 1

WAKE-UP CALLS

Mommy, I dont believe in the tooth fairy anymore. With tears in her eyes, her lip quivering, my eight-year-old daughter was the picture of disappointment and sorrow. The source of her misery was not only that some mystical creature (aka the tooth fairy) had failed to exchange her recently-fallen-out tooth for a five-rand coin (for four nights in a row!), but that I, as her mother, was somehow responsible for a great betrayal. I was too involved in my work to fully pay attention to the rites of passage that my girls were going through. Id let my twin daughters down horribly and it shook me to my core!

Most people who practice mindfulness have had some kind of a wake-up and smell the coffee call perhaps a health scare, a near miss in the traffic or a personal tragedy that literally brings them back to complete focus and reality. Arianna Huffington, author of Thrive, founder of the Huffington Post and one of TIME magazines most influential people in the world, knocked her head on a table and fell to the ground. Lying in a pool of blood in her home office with a cracked cheekbone, she realised she had to re-visit the quality of her life. She was working eighteen-hour days, was completely sleep deprived and lying on the floor injured, thinking: Is this what success looks like?

I had to have not one, but two Mindfulness reality wake-up calls (Im clearly quite stubborn). One was the parenting wake-up call I just mentioned previously, and the other was a brush with death health scare.

I was a single mother of identical twin girls, Sabrina and Caitlyn, from when they were three. These were not easy years. I felt mostly humbled, and the other word that best characterised my life was overwhelmed. I felt overwhelmed every single day.

In fact, I was so overwhelmed that I bought the book Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte twice, not even registering that I already had it, (although the covers did look different in my defense!)

I never got to the end of my to-do-list; I was tired all the time and was largely living an unconscious life. I realised that I wasnt just missing out on the tooth fairy I was missing out on my childrens childhoods and life in general. It felt like every week it was Monday; then it was Friday. Suddenly we were in October, and I thought: How did we get to be in October? I looked at my little girls who were eight then and I thought that I havent been fully present in their childhood.

I was putting on weight and yet I hardly ate during the day, while at night I would be so hungry that I ate all the contents of the fridge. I woke up tired and felt like a hamster on a treadmill always rushing and constantly busy. My standard reply to How are you? was Hectic, so hectic. I wasnt exercising at all, as I felt there was just not enough time in the day.

I felt like a character in a black and white movie. I was going through the motions, but it wasnt a conscious, high quality or happy life.

After the tooth fairy incident, I felt there had to be a better way to live, and started reading and researching options. I eventually hopped on a plane and attended a leadership programme in Orlando, Florida in the USA, called the The

Corporate Athlete. This was a life-changing course for me as the focus was on the link between ones physical, emotional and mental states. In the corporate world we live largely in our heads, dragging our bodies along behind our brains. These quadrants together physical, mental, emotional and spiritual combine to achieve peak performance. The programme also emphasised the power of strategic recovery (more about that in Chapter 2) which was a true epiphany for me. We are not designed to be ON all the time!

After attending the Corporate Athlete programme, I began to actively practise gratitude and I started to run. I started off with baby steps, but fifteen years later I still practice both religiously. Both gratitude and running have been life-changing for me. While the Corporate Athlete programme helped me with my physical well-being, there was still a lot of work to be done around stress and recovery, and the emotional and spiritual dimensions of my life.

My Health Scare

A few years later my family parents, sister, brother, children and my husband (I had remarried) went to the Drakensberg mountains for the Easter weekend. Id been sick with flu for weeks and Im asthmatic, so it inevitably goes into my chest, and the recovery period is always long. I was so impatient not being able to breathe and had been on three different antibiotics with very little result. We decided to go for an early hike on the Saturday morning. I had some tea when I woke up and thought that if I combined my antibiotic with an old bronchial dilator medicine, I would get better faster. The two were not meant to be taken together, and I went into anaphylactic shock. I remember collapsing and being supported by my husband, as I couldnt walk back to my room, and ripping off my clothes to get into the shower, desperate to get cool. I didnt

get to the shower, I passed out on the bathroom tiles where my family found me, naked and unconscious.

We were fifty kilometres away from the nearest town, so my family bundled me into the car in my unconscious state and drove quickly through the twisty mountain roads. They managed to find a doctor who gave me injections of adrenaline, cortisone and antihistamine and I gradually stabilised. I then had to deal with my very traumatised family, who said that witnessing my near demise was very upsetting.

They felt that I wasnt looking after myself well enough and were worried about where this self-neglect would end.

The doctor had looked at me very sternly in his office and said, Young lady, I hope you realise that you very nearly died today. My family and the doctor were right, my cavalier self-medication strategy had gotten me into real trouble.