Job gone, relationship over, back on my mum’s couch. I turned to meditation to quiet my mind and didn’t expect who I’d meet in the silence… or that she’d change how I saw everything.

My introduction to meditation wasn’t particularly Instagrammable. I was 36, on my mum’s couch, wondering what on earth had happened to my life.

I had lost my job. My money had run out. After six months of looking for work without success, my visa had expired, and I had to leave Dubai, where I’d built my life. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I was also going through a breakup.

Apparently, life had decided to clear its entire inbox at once.

I didn’t come to meditation because I wanted a more impressive morning routine. I came because being alone with my thoughts had become exhausting, and I desperately wanted to feel something other than loss, failure, and uncertainty.

What I didn’t expect was that quieting my mind would change how I understood myself.

When the life you built stops telling you who you are.

Until then, so much of my identity had been wrapped up in the life around me: my work, my relationship, the city I lived in, and the independence I’d built.

When those things disappeared together, it felt as though I had disappeared with them.

Around that time, I discovered Abraham Hicks and the idea of meditation as a way to quiet the mind and connect with who we truly are.

Something about that felt immediately familiar.

I was drawn to the possibility that I was more than my physical body, my thoughts, or the emotions currently making themselves very comfortable in my chest. That there was a bigger, non-physical part of me, having this temporary human experience.

You might call that your soul, your higher self, or something else entirely. For me, it offered a little breathing room.

Perhaps the version of me on my mum’s couch wasn’t the whole story.

My circumstances had changed. That didn’t mean they got to define the whole of me.

The pink elephant problem, and why I started meditating

Through those teachings, I also began exploring the law of attraction: the belief that our attention and energy influence what we draw into our lives.

What stayed with me was how much attention I was giving to everything I didn’t want.

I didn’t want to be unemployed. I didn’t want to leave Dubai (spoiler: I’ve been back since). I didn’t want to feel like I was starting again while everyone else appeared to be getting on beautifully.

My mind was giving the same painful story unlimited airtime. And it was like I’ve been having a cinema in my head, playing a movie on repeat I didn’t want to watch.

Of course, telling yourself to stop thinking about something is a fairly useless instruction. If I say, “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” you now have a pink elephant in your head.

Possibly quite a large one.

So trying to argue myself into feeling better wasn’t getting me very far. Meditation gave me something different to practise: allowing a thought to appear without following it through every possible miserable conclusion. It’s like I’m finally leading the orchestra, instead of being swept along by whatever it happens to be playing.

I wasn’t trying to convince myself that everything was wonderful. I was looking for a little space between what was happening and the story I kept telling myself about what it meant.

How mindfulness became my most honest form of self care

I began meditating every morning and again before sleep, often for at least an hour each time.

That was how much I wanted relief. It was my practice during a particularly difficult chapter, rather than a timetable anyone else needs to copy.

At first, my mind had plenty to say.

I pictured it as the sky, with my thoughts moving through it like clouds. When one appeared, I would acknowledge it and try to let it pass.

Your mind is the sky, everything else is just the weather.

Some were small and ordinary. Others arrived as full storm clouds, heavy with emotion and apparently carrying supporting evidence for why my life was a disaster.

I practised letting those pass, too.

This became my experience of mindfulness: noticing what was there without automatically getting pulled into it. Whenever I followed a thought, I would gently return to the quiet again.

Sometimes, after 30 or 45 minutes, I reached moments that felt completely still. My awareness of my body softened until I barely noticed my hands or feet. The usual mental commentary faded, and I felt light, peaceful, and deeply present.

In the language that made sense to me, it felt as though my vibration had lifted. Like a soft reset from the inside.

Those moments mattered because they showed me that my emotional state could change, even while my circumstances were still unresolved.

Self care had become much more personal than doing something lovely at the end of a difficult day. I was learning how to sit with myself without making the day even harder.

That attention to the small internal shifts is something I’ve carried into The Carefree Journal: a place to reflect on your meditation experience and notice what changes as you keep returning to the practice.

The evening I saw myself differently

One evening, I sat down to meditate, feeling particularly low.

With soft music playing, I began letting my thoughts pass. Beneath all of them was a very simple plea: help me. I wanted to be lifted out of the emotional heaviness I was carrying.

Then I experienced a vivid inner vision that I still remember clearly.

I went into that meditation asking someone to rescue me. I wasn’t expecting who showed up.

I was inside something like a pod or cocoon, standing upright and leaning slightly backwards. Its front was transparent, almost like glass. I was awake inside it, and to my left I could see a row of other pods beside mine.

Suddenly, an arm reached through and took hold of me.

In one movement, I was pulled out and swung into the arms of another being. The momentum carried us around together, almost as though we were dancing, circling.

I felt rescued. Held. Completely safe.

And then I saw who was holding me.

It was me.

Or, more precisely, what I understood in that moment to be my higher self, the larger, non-physical part of me I had been beginning to connect with.

I still get goosebumps remembering it.

I had been asking to be rescued, and the face I saw was my own.

What that meditation experience meant to me

I can’t tell you what someone else would have seen or how they would interpret it. I can only tell you what it meant to me.

I felt that the part of me living through this difficult chapter was held by something much larger. That beyond the fear and the disappointment, there was a part of me that hadn’t lost sight of who I was.

I understood that presence as my higher self: guiding me, cheering me on, and seeing possibilities I couldn’t yet see from my own limited perspective.

That didn’t suddenly make unemployment pleasant or heartbreak convenient. But it changed the perspective from which I experienced them.

I no longer felt quite so reduced to what was happening.

One of the images I kept returning to was a cork being held underwater. Once released, it naturally rises towards the surface. That was how moments of ease began to feel to me: as though I was loosening my grip on something that had been keeping me down.

A bad day doesn’t equal a bad life. It’s all about perspective.

I still experience sadness, frustration, and fear. Life happens, and those contrasting experiences help me recognise what I want and what no longer feels right for me. Having a difficult day doesn’t mean I’m failing at meditation or somehow doing life wrong.

But I also know what ease feels like, and even when I get caught up in the emotional weather, I know I can find my way back to it.

Bringing that perspective into everyday life

Looking back, I can see connections I couldn’t possibly have understood while I was living through them.

At the time, leaving Dubai felt like losing the life I was supposed to have. With distance, I could begin to see how one experience led into another, and how my understanding of myself changed along the way.

I don’t need to put a beautiful meaning on every painful moment to recognise that my story kept unfolding.

That is the perspective I still return to when I get caught in the details: I’m inside a chapter, and I can’t see the whole book from here.

It’s also the thinking behind the frog and bird perspective exercise in my guided mindfulness journal. From the frog’s view, you’re close to the situation, surrounded by everything that feels immediate and enormous. From the bird’s view, you give yourself a little distance and ask what else might be visible.

The situation may still need your attention. But you can approach it with more room to breathe.

For me, that is where meditation and everyday mindfulness meet: in the moment you notice you have become completely tangled in a thought, and gently give yourself another perspective.

A softer way to come back to yourself

If you’re reading this in a season that looks nothing like the one you planned, I won’t tell you to simply think positively.

When your life feels unfamiliar, even deciding what to do tomorrow can feel like a lot. You don’t need someone turning your pain into another assignment.

What I can offer is the possibility of a few minutes in which you don’t have to solve everything.

You might sit somewhere comfortable, notice your breathing, and allow your thoughts to come and go. When you realise you’ve followed one, you can return to the breath without making a problem out of it.

You don’t need an empty mind or an extraordinary experience for mindfulness meditation to be worth returning to.

Afterwards, you could write a few lines about what you noticed. What were you carrying when you sat down? Did anything soften? Is there something you need that you hadn’t given yourself permission to hear?

This is the kind of companionship I wanted The Carefree Journal to offer. Its five weeks of guided reflection, meditation tracking, and evening check-ins give you somewhere to bring those observations, whether you’re beginning a meditation practice or finding your way back to one. You can grab it here.

There’s room for the restless days alongside the peaceful ones. Sometimes the thing worth noticing is simply that you made time for yourself.

I began meditating because I wanted to escape how I felt. What stayed with me was a sense of connection with the person beneath all those feelings.

The woman on my mum’s couch was still me. She hadn’t become less worthy because her life had become less certain.

If you’re finding your way back to yourself, too, you’re warmly invited to bring your own story to these pages.

With pure love,

Katharina 🤍

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