My Mindful Path Through Dyslexia



Before I started to practice mindfulness I had a sort of faint awareness of how I didn’t feel a particularly confident person and I had the worst inner critic and that I never felt good enough! But the more I practiced the more I became aware of this and I realised how harsh I was on myself and I began to think where did this come from… I feel it came from being dyslexic and struggling throughout my entire education. I didn’t find out I was dyslexic until I was at university when I was 22, I was really struggling in the second year I just couldn’t keep up anymore so I went to student services for help. 

Up until that point I had worked myself into the ground to try and keep up with my classmates but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I think that’s why it never got spotted at school because I worked soooo hard to try and keep up. I was actually in the top set for English!!! But I always got awful results in tests and exams but my English teacher felt I had something , so she kept me in that set! This constantly working hard pushing myself was utterly exhausting, I was burning out. After hours of hard work I would just get poor or just average results, other class mates wouldn’t spend half the amount of time on things as me and would get much better results. That stuck, everyone was better than me. The more this happened throughout my schooling the more I felt I wasn’t good enough, I could never keep up. 

College classes and seminars at university were awful. We’d have to read a paragraph and then talk about it with the group, I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t retain the information and then make sense out of it, to be able to talk about it that quickly, this left me feeling ashamed and I would just sink to the back of the class in silence. So as a result of not knowing I had dyslexia and then not having the right support my self confidence was rock bottom, my inner critic was on over drive and talking in front of groups was an absolute no no!!! My mindfulness practice has completely turned all this around for me! 

Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating moment-by-moment awareness with kindness and without judgment.  This practice has allowed me to reconnect to my self kindness, to be able to step back and look at those thoughts of not being good enough and realise that they are just constructs of my mind, to be able to be aware of situations that I might find a bit difficult and do things to help myself. To connect to a space of deep peace within and this space is something that we all have. 

Mindfulness really has changed my life! Now I’m a mindfulness teacher so I have to stand in front of others and teach, I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing that a couple of years ago!!! In fact when I was teaching recently I had to write words from the group on the board and I couldn’t spell them! But it didn’t matter!! I explained I was dyslexic and actually it made the group feel closer, more connected as they all helped me to spell! I give my self-time now, I recognise the learned drive in me and slow down, so I don’t exhaust myself anymore. 

There is a lot of educational support out there for people with dyslexia but often the emotional effects are completely forgotten about and these can last a lifetime. It doesn’t have to be that way though! For me mindfulness has turned my life around, I am happy to be dyslexic, I am happy to be me. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Mindful Pregnancy

Image
When I found out I was pregnant with my first child I was overjoyed! I knew being pregnant would be a massive change in my life, a whole bunch of new questions were whirling in my mind, would I be a good enough parent? What would the birth be like? Will I manage the sleepless nights? How will I feel not having the same amount of freedom to do what I want? I’ve been a mindfulness teacher for a couple of years now. It is my absolute passion and it never fails to amaze me how much I continue to learn from the practice. As all these questions were spinning through my mind I thought what better time to really deepen my mindfulness practice then bringing a new being into the world! As the early weeks of my pregnancy passed I began to see that I was really holding on. I became aware that I had this constant background fear: what if something goes wrong…what if I lose the baby….I began to notice I was wishing days away just trying to get through the next hurdles until the 12 week
Read more

The Beautiful Breath

Image
When was the last time you actually took notice of your breath? When was the last time you felt the rhythmic motion of your lungs drawing in the cool air through your nostrils? I  know I never paid much attention to my breathing, when I was living at home and going through a stressful time, Mum (who is a yoga teacher) would often gently say Carla-Jo you’re hardly breathing!! This would just irritate me and I’d probably just hold my breath even more!!! I was totally disconnected from my breath. When I was feeling particularly anxious I would unconsciously hold my breath, my chest would feel tight like I couldn’t breath, it was really scary. This way of breathing became a pattern even when I wasn’t feeling worried or panicked. When we feel stressed, anxious or depressed we often hold our breath or breathe very shallowly. This affects our overall sense of well-being and can create layers of tension in the body. In mindfulness connection with the breath is integral. We build
Read more