My lovely student K attended two of my retreats and completed the Find Your Pause online mindfulness course.
A year on from that work, we met up for a chat, and she thanked me for my work with her and said:
“Family events that used to be really difficult for me are now not. And I don’t have to spend all the energy leading up to the event, and I don’t have to spend all the energy coming away from it.”
This is her story.
She had found the same family gathering stressful for 15 years.
Every year, the same cycle. The weeks of low-level anxiety building up beforehand. The exhausting mental preparation. The event itself — dealing with a very difficult person, managing her reactions, trying to hold it together. And then the aftermath. Days of replaying conversations, processing what happened, recovering from the whole thing.
She described the dynamic as toxic. And she’d spent 15 years trying to fix it.
Then something shifted.
She didn’t fix the situation. She changed her relationship to it.
That energy drain she described? That’s what chronic family stress does to us. It doesn’t just cost us in the moment — it costs us before and after too. The anticipatory anxiety, the post-event processing. It’s exhausting. And most of us don’t even realize how much it’s taking from us until it stops.
So what actually changed for her?
Three practices that made the difference
She didn’t overhaul her life. She didn’t cut people off. She didn’t avoid the situation. She walked into the same room with the same difficult people — and she did three small things differently.
1. She scanned the room for safety first.
Instead of walking in and immediately focusing on the difficult people, she trained herself to look for who else was there. Who felt safe? Who was she glad to see? This one shift — scanning for safety instead of scanning for threat — changes what your nervous system does in those first few moments. It’s the difference between arriving in fight-or-flight and arriving with some capacity to actually be present.
2. She used the physiological sigh.
This is one of my favorite practices to teach because it’s completely invisible. No one knows you’re doing it. You can do it in a car park before you walk in. You can do it mid-conversation. A double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale — and your nervous system starts to settle. She said she loves it for exactly that reason. It’s hers. No one can see it. No one can take it away.
3. She used a self-compassion practice — with a twist.
In the self-compassion week of Find Your Pause, we work with the phrase “may I be kind to myself.”She took that practice and made it her own. By the time she arrives at the gathering, she’s already been quietly repeating it. And then she adds her own line at the end: “may this person learn to be kind to me.”
She told me that by the time she’s done all of that, she’s genuinely less stressed. She can actually appreciate being there.
And then came the no guilt boundary.
This is the part that really got me.
She described it as a revelation — the moment she realized that a boundary doesn’t have to be about the other person at all. It doesn’t need to change them, confront them, or make them understand. It’s simply about what’s acceptable to you.
For her, that looked like this: she attends the gathering, and she leaves at a certain time. That’s it. No big confrontation. No lengthy explanation. Just a quiet internal decision: I cannot tolerate this, so I will leave.
Her words. And they’re so good I want you to read them again.
“I cannot tolerate this, so I will leave.”
She told me she used to think that was selfish. That she should be able to handle it. That if she just tried harder, stayed longer, was more patient — maybe things would be different.
Here’s what she learned: she had been spending years trying to fix that which is unfixable.
That sentence hit me hard. Because how many of us are doing exactly that? Pouring energy into changing a dynamic, a person, a situation — that was never ours to fix in the first place?
The boundary wasn’t about giving up. It was about finally redirecting that energy back to herself.
What freedom actually looks like
She used the word “godsend.” She said it’s given her freedom.
Freedom from the situation? No — the gathering still happens, the difficult people are still there. Freedom from the weeks of dread beforehand. Freedom from the days of recovery after. Freedom to actually be present while she’s there, instead of white-knuckling her way through it.
That’s what this work does. It doesn’t promise to make your life perfect or your relationships easy. It gives you tmindfulness ools to meet the hard stuff differently — so it stops costing you so much.
The practices she used came from Find Your Pause — and my retreats
Everything she described — the room scan, the physiological sigh, the self-compassion phrase, the boundary work — these all came from her time in my retreats, my community classes, and the Find Your Pause course. She’s been part of this work for over a year. And what she described isn’t a dramatic overnight change. It’s the slow, steady result of actually using the tools.
They’re simple. They’re backed by science. And as she put it herself, you can use them anywhere: in the car, at a family function, in the middle of a difficult conversation.
That’s the whole point of my teaching. Mindfulness isn’t something you do on a cushion and then leave behind. It’s something you take with you.
If you’re curious about Find Your Pause, you can find out more here: https://www.findthatpause.com/findyourpause I open up the course twice a year - March and November.
