The Silver Lining: How Practicing Mindfulness Saved My Life

by Gabrielle Plastrik

The breaking point for me was the day 26 years ago that I threw up in the hallway just outside my middle school’s cafeteria. I can still see the wide gray hallway, the wooden paneling on the right and the windows into the typing classroom and the teacher’s bathroom on the left. Behind me, 500 six and seventh graders witnessed what my older cousin would later call “The Grand Upchuck.” 

I had been trying to get to the bathroom quickly enough so that no one would know I had thrown up. This was the first time it had happened at school, which had formerly been a safe place. I was terrified.

Most of my life that year was about hiding. My memories of 6th grade are a confusing jumble of laughter, friendship, my teachers, and vomiting. Until that moment – when the symptom of my problems became visible to the entire school – my life was “successfully” compartmentalized. 

At home, I hadn’t made it through dinner or bedtime without throwing up in months. My siblings and parents knew things were definitely not normal. The only time I was “okay” was in the morning. I had a ritual and routine and little time to worry. I could always keep my cereal down. A skinny, high-achieving ice skater who throws up during every meal makes for a pretty easy-seeming eating disorder diagnosis.

But it was never an eating disorder. It was an anxiety disorder. Triggered by stress over a situation involving my parents and an intense fear of illnesses, including AIDS, e-coli, and (ironically) eating disorders, I did not feel like I could stop my mind from worrying. On top of that, I had fears associated with succumbing to drugs and alcohol thanks to relentless assemblies and ad campaigns reminding young people about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. I felt helpless in the face of real world concerns. In retrospect, I was clearly exhibiting the irrational thinking and sense of being overwhelmed that comes with an anxiety disorder.

Because, as I now know, digestive processes are tied to our neurological systems in key ways, my stomach was always upset. It was not long before my digestive system started to suffer. Undiagnosed acid reflux exacerbated the situation.

I also had five siblings across two households. A lot was happening at home. For my parents, my throwing up at dinner and bedtime was an inconvenience, not a disaster. For me, though, I wasn’t sure how I would survive. That mortifying moment when I couldn’t keep my lunch down saved my life and put me on a path toward a more compassionate life. It is the reason I practice mindfulness.

After I threw up, I was mortified and scared. I kneeled on the linoleum and cried. A friendly bystander walked me to the nurse. Sitting on the medical bed in the nurse’s office, my Keds dangling over the edge, I shared everything about what was happening for the first time. I put words to my experience and felt heard. The nurse promptly ushered me to the guidance counselor, and the counselor called my mom. I started therapy that same week.

In addition to being my ally in some really challenging conversations about what was happening at home, my therapist taught me three essential tools to confront my anxiety: 1) progressive body relaxation, 2) walking meditation, and 3) breathing exercises. Those same tools have been the pillars of my mindfulness practice.

Within a few sessions, I felt empowered in the face of a situation that had seemed hopeless; I could do something. Nightly, I worked through tension in my body:

Clench toes. Say, “my toes are relaxed.”

Wiggle ankles. “My ankles are relaxed.”

And so on.

For the first time in months, I could go to sleep without a prohibitive fear of my anxiety taking control. For the first time in months, I knew everything was going to be okay because, and this is important to understand, fear of an anxiety response became as strong as all of the other fears combined. The script he gave me was a tool that put me back in control of my response to my thoughts. I could just “be” and observe.

When I couldn’t sleep, the therapist said to “do something.” He was clear: “Do not just lay there worrying. Change the channel.” His primary prescription was getting up and walking around the house, so I took to night walking on the roughest nights. I would pace around the first floor loop of the house and focus on where I was, what I was seeing: the color of the walls, the way the kitchen smelled, the lingering heat of the dryer, how cold it was by the windows. This was walking meditation. Grounding myself with sensory perception allowed me to be in the place I was in—nothing more and nothing less. 

He also taught me to breathe, breathing out for longer than I breathed in: “Take a deep breath in. Hold for one, two, three, and a deep breath out. Hold for one, two, three, four. Again. Take a deep breath in. Hold for one, two, three, and a deep breath out. Hold for one, two, three, four. Again. Take a deep breath in. Hold for one, two, three, and a deep breath out. Hold for one, two, three, four.” He did not teach me to watch the rise and fall of my abdomen or the difference between thoracic breathing and deep belly breathing. Learning more about the breath would have helped, made it more useful to me. Nevertheless, he gave me the gift of thinking about the breath as a tool. I could control how my body felt by controlling my breath.

Those three practices—progressive muscle relaxation (which I shifted to doing mostly with joints, not muscles, because it made more sense in my head), walking meditation, and breathing—were the sum total of my mindfulness experiences for many years. In high school and college, I practiced yoga as exercise, which informed some of my mindfulness practices, and in graduate school, I took a course on Buddhism and was introduced to Thich Nhat Hanh. Peace Is Every Step became my first meditation guidebook. I now had a language I could use to talk about meditation and mindfulness that also helped me integrate mindfulness into the prayers and rituals that are a part of my religious practice.

It wasn’t until 2010 that mindfulness became central to living my daily life. By this point, I was four years into my professional teaching career, and my students were anxious. They reminded me of middle school me, except they were not hiding it. Some had crippling stomach aches, some were visibly agitated much of the time, some spent excessive hours doing work, some could not complete any work at all, some wore their shoulders up around their ears for most of each day. The kids were not all right.

I started from my experience, telling them what had happened to me when I was in middle school. I let them know that I ended up being able to manage my anxiety. That helped a little. 

When I started researching mindfulness activities to do with students, there were few resources, and almost none were dedicated to work with middle school students. The public library had a few books for teachers of very young children and parents. I took some of those activities and some from mindfulness practices I already knew. The students agreed to experiment. We would do mindfulness activities periodically throughout the week, and they would tell me whether they liked them or not and why or why not. We would work together to develop tools and habits of mind that would let each student be in the driver’s seat of their experiences. We would engage in heightening our awareness, perspective taking, and being more compassionate with one another with a common goal of being able to be more in the moment.

Over the course of several months, all students reported feeling like they had tools to manage their anxiety when it was overwhelming, and all students were more likely to sustain attention during challenging tasks. Anecdotally, our experiment had been a success. Their mindfulness extended beyond the exercises and meditations we were doing together. A paradigm shift was happening.

As a result of positive feedback from students and parents about our mindfulness work, my principal decided to engage in school-wide professional development. She contacted the Center for Healthy Minds, whose guidance during professional development helped me understand that any mindfulness practice with students needs to start with the teacher’s own mindfulness practice. My most important take away as a teacher was that I needed to practice on my own more regularly.

Around the same time, I was going to physical therapy for chronic daily headaches. My physical therapist sat with me and taught me how to hold my body when I breathed. He showed me how I could use breathing to control my physical pain, and he recommended how often and when I should turn to the breath. This connection between the physical and mental aspects of mindfulness felt new to me: breath and awareness provided me with tools to manage pain and stress and anxiety. I am still in awe of how powerful mindfulness practices can be.

When I paired these new lessons about the breath with meditation scripts, in particular cognitive diffusion scripts, both my students and I noticed marked difference in our stress responses. There were changes in the moment of doing the script—we felt more relaxed and aware—but also in future moments when we might feel uncomfortable emotions. Emotions could become data points, entering and leaving our minds, but telling us something about ourselves. Meditation allowed for a greater knowledge of ourselves.

The final component of my mindfulness fell into practice during that training with the Center for Healthy Minds. I shifted the way I perceived the actions of others. In each encounter, I started from a place of compassion – what could be going on here? – instead of from a place of assumption. My worldview shifted. Compassion is at the core of mindfulness practice. If we are fully aware in a moment, we are not limited to our own emotional understanding of that moment. For me, the acronym RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, and non-identify) became a particularly useful tool. At least once a day, and often as many as ten times a day, I run through this exercise, processing emotions and then choosing how to act after processing.

Chance encounters, grocery shopping, a walk through the neighborhood, the way I managed my classroom, my relationships with students, and my interactions with friends and colleagues – everything – was different when approached with mindfulness and compassion. Since 2010, I have reshaped my teaching practice. I use a mindful approach to all aspects of my work with students. I also teach my students to meditate, making time for them to learn the habits of mind that are so essential to growing up in this highly anxious world. I find moments for the breath and heightened awareness throughout my day: the color of the water as I drive by, someone reacting unexpectedly to something I did or said, a look passed between friends, the smell of freshly cut grass, a gentle touch on the shoulder.

In recent months, I have had the opportunity to share some of those mindfulness practices with guidance counselors, teachers, and parents at conferences and speaking engagements. For the most part, the feedback I have received is that children and teens today really need mindfulness. We all really need mindfulness.

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Gabrielle Plastrik (she/her/hers) is a National Board Ceritifed Teacher who guides middle school students through inquiry based learning at an independent school in Washington State. Mindfulness and meditation are a regular part of her life and her teaching.  She is passionate about being out and about in nature, cultivating curiosity, reading, and engaging in meaningful discussions. She is also a mother. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter @Gplastrik.