Ready, Mindsette, Go
Between the Here and the There
Welcome to the KLARITY Mindsette Substack. I am happy you are here. It has been quite a journey to get to this moment. Eleven years ago I wrote my first blog post and as I was preparing to hit “publish” I felt very similar to how I feel at this moment. There is excitement intermingled with fear, and paired with the thoughts themselves are the physical effects of those emotions… my heart is beating a bit more rapidly, my face feels flushed and a couple beads of sweat feel like they are beginning to form on my upper lip. Why do these moments arrive with such intense emotional and physical responses? Because these moments are THE moments; they are the beginning of something, something unknown that comes with the vulnerability of sharing your authentic self. Why am I sharing this with you right now? Because the first step in a mindfulness practice is being able to notice what is happening inside you while it is happening.
That first blog post opened the door to a journey I would not have ever imagined. It started me on the path to find my voice, to cultivate my mindfulness studies, to lead retreats all over the world and to share my messages weekly with several hundred interested readers.
For those of you who find yourself here as our first meeting, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Allison Waguespack; wife, mother, former advertising executive, current yoga & mindfulness teacher & retreat leader who has spent the last 20 years teaching yoga and mindfulness to individuals, groups and corporate teams. Over that time I developed the KLARITY Mindsette Mindfulness Program which is a set of techniques and learnings that allow us to utilize mindfulness as the superpower it truly is.
As I mentioned I have been writing in one form or another for quite some time and even though expanding my offering to Substack is a natural evolution, those same feelings are showing up. We are creatures of habit and our thoughts are no exception. It can be easy to get lost in those negative feelings. Noticing them is the first step. Once we notice them, we then have the opportunity to soften the hold those thoughts have over us. There are many ways to practice softening that I will share with you here; however, taking a few mindful breaths can be a good place to start.
As I was writing this, my inaugural Substack post, I decided to take a look back at that first blog post entitled “Here I Go”. It felt quite apropos to share an excerpt here:
As a Yoga Instructor, I spend a lot of time talking about the breath; when to inhale and exhale, how to inhale and exhale. Oftentimes I will teach breathing exercises to help people connect more deeply to their own breath.
In one particular exercise called retention breath, I ask students to pause once they inhale and hold the inhale for two counts before exhaling and then once they exhale fully to hold for two counts again before they inhale. After several rounds of this type of breath, you learn to surrender a bit to the pauses between the inhales and exhales,…to settle the anxiety of being between a breath, and enjoy that moment…magic happens in the pauses between the inhale and the exhale. That is life, those moments that happen between the here, and the there; those little stops along our life journey can offer just as much as the big ones.
Even back then, (before KLARITY Mindsette existed), I was on my path to sharing this miraculous discovery that is mindfulness. A mindfulness practice helps us cultivate an understanding that the joys of life exist BETWEEN the here and the there; that the journey itself IS the joy. If you join me here, I will share with you, through stories of my continuous journey, how to get the most out of yours.
Allison