After my husband died, I lived on autopilot for a long time.

I went through the motions of life; work, errands, routines without really being there. I was surviving more than living.

One afternoon, during my lunch break, I was walking to the bank. The crosswalk light turned green. I stepped off the curb, ready to cross.

And then I heard it.

A very loud, very clear:

“STOP.”

Startled, I froze.

A car flew through the intersection, followed immediately by a police car. Had I taken one more step, I would not be here writing this.

Shaken, I looked around to thank whoever had just saved my life.

But I was alone.

Completely alone.

At the time, I tried to explain it away. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the police officer yelled something through a loudspeaker. Maybe there was some logical explanation I simply could not piece together.

But looking back, I know that isn’t what happened.

It all happened too fast. The officer could not have warned me in time. There was no one standing nearby. No obvious source for the voice.

But something stopped me.

For me, I have come to understand that moment as divine intervention. A moment when it simply was not my time, and something unseen stepped in.

That experience is only one of many moments of grace that have shaped my life. Some were dramatic. Others were quiet. Some arrived as warnings, dreams, signs, synchronicities, or encounters that could have been easy to dismiss.

And for a long time, I did dismiss them.

I shrugged them off. Minimized them. Tried to rationalize them away.

Now, I’m looking closer.

I’m currently working on an upcoming book called When the Light Breaks Through, a collection of real-life stories of grace, guidance, protection, signs, synchronicities, visitations, near-death experiences, and moments that seem to defy ordinary explanation.

Some of the stories are mine.

Many are being shared with me by others.

The heart of this book is simple: to gather true stories that remind us we are not as alone as we sometimes feel.

These stories do not have to be big, flashy, or impossible to explain. Some of the most powerful moments are the quiet ones. The whisper. The dream. The stranger who appears at exactly the right time. The sudden knowing. The sign that arrives when you most need it. The moment something shifts, and you know in your bones that there is more happening than coincidence.

Your story might include:

🌟 A sudden voice, warning, or inner knowing
🌟 A dream or visitation that brought comfort or clarity
🌟 A stranger who appeared at exactly the right moment
🌟 A sign from a loved one beyond the veil
🌟 A rescue or intervention that defied logic
🌟 A near-death experience or out-of-body moment
🌟 A medical event where survival itself felt miraculous
🌟 A synchronicity too meaningful to dismiss
🌟 A quiet moment of grace that changed how you see life

Some people call these experiences divine intervention.

Others call them synchronicity, guidance, protection, spirit, grace, or love reaching through.

I have come to think of them as moments when the light breaks through.

Several stories have already been entrusted to me, and I hold that trust with deep gratitude. My hope is that this book becomes a gathering place for these real moments — the ones many of us carry quietly, sometimes for years, wondering what to do with them or whether anyone else would understand.

If you have experienced something like this, or know someone who has, I would be honored to hear your story and possibly include it in When the Light Breaks Through.

You are welcome to message me on Substack or email me directly at:

mouseandmeditation@gmail.com

If this invitation brings someone to mind, please pass it along.

Because even now, even here, the light still breaks through.

When many people hear the word meditation, they picture something very specific.

Someone sitting cross-legged. Eyes closed. Hands resting neatly on their knees. A silent room. A still body. Maybe a peaceful beach, a glowing light, or a mountain stream being visualized in the mind.

That version of meditation can be beautiful for some people. But it is not the only version.

And when it comes to children, it is often not the most realistic place to begin.

Children are not usually designed for long stretches of stillness and silence. Many of them wiggle. They hum. They ask questions. They get distracted. They need movement, touch, rhythm, play, and connection. That does not mean they cannot benefit from meditation. It simply means we may need to expand what we think meditation is supposed to look like.

I was reminded of this recently on a flight home from Mexico.

I sat next to a young woman who was on her way to work as a camp counselor for the summer. We started talking, and somehow the subject of meditation came up. I told her I had written a book about meditation and that I had been teaching my 9-year-old some simple breathing techniques for stress, overwhelm, and fear.

That led her to tell me about a little girl she had once cared for at camp.

The child was timid and withdrawn. She did not voluntarily join activities or play easily with the other children. At night, she was often scared. Her stomach hurt. She had nightmares. At the time, the counselor simply tried to soothe her fear and help with the physical symptoms. Looking back, though, she wondered if the little girl may have been struggling with anxiety.

Then she said something that stayed with me.

Even if she had recognized it as anxiety at the time, she would not have known what to do.

That conversation made me think about how often adults want to help children through big emotions, but do not always have simple tools to offer them. We may comfort them, distract them, reassure them, or try to reason with them. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it does not.

But what if children were also taught how to return to their own breath?

Not in a heavy, formal, overly serious way, but as something gentle, playful, and always available. Because children already have natural meditative moments.

They watch bugs.

They pet animals.

They listen to rain.

They color.

They sway.

They hum.

They collect rocks.

They notice clouds.

They feel grass under their feet.

They cuddle a stuffed animal.

Meditation for children is not about teaching them something completely new. Sometimes it is about helping them recognize the quiet, grounding moments they are already drawn to.

A child lying on the floor with a stuffed animal on their belly, watching it rise and fall with each breath, is practicing awareness.

A child slowly tracing their fingers along the edge of a leaf is practicing presence.

A child listening to rain at bedtime is experiencing a mindful moment.

A child taking one deep breath before answering, crying, yelling, or shutting down is learning that there can be a pause between feeling and reacting.

That pause matters.

Children, like adults, experience stress, frustration, sadness, fear, embarrassment, overstimulation, disappointment, and anger. They do not always have the words for those feelings. They do not always understand what is happening inside their bodies. Big emotions can feel frightening when no one has taught them how to sit with what they feel.

Simple breathing practices can give children a calm place to land. Not as a way to shut emotions down, and not as a way to force them to be quiet.

Not as a replacement for comfort, connection, therapy, medical care, or adult support when those things are needed.

But as one small tool in their emotional toolbox.

And the breath is a particularly powerful tool because it is always with them.

A parent, grandparent, teacher, counselor, or caregiver cannot be beside a child every moment of the day. But the child’s breath is there before a test, after a nightmare, during conflict, in a new environment, or when the world simply feels too loud.

A simple practice to try: Stuffed Animal Breathing

Have the child lie down and place a favorite stuffed animal on their belly. Instead of making it serious, make it playful.

You might say, “Let’s give Teddy a ride on your belly,” and then invite the child to breathe slowly enough that the stuffed animal gently rises and falls.

That is it.

No perfect posture.

No forced silence.

No need to visualize anything.

No pressure to meditate for twenty minutes.

Even one or two minutes can help a child begin to notice their body, their breath, and the possibility of softening when they feel tense or overwhelmed.

Different children will connect with different practices, just like adults do. Some need quiet. Some need movement. Some need sound. Some need touch. Some need imagination. Some need a candle, a blanket, a stuffed animal, a song, a walk, or a hand to hold.

And some simply need a calm adult sitting nearby, showing them through presence that they are safe.

That presence can be its own kind of meditation. Meditation does not have to look one specific way to be meaningful. For a child, it might look like breathing with a teddy bear.

And sometimes, that is enough.

And for the adults, if meditation has ever felt difficult, awkward, or inaccessible to you, Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed offers a gentle, practical approach for busy minds, non-visualizers, and anyone who needs meditation to feel a little more human.

It is available now from Genius Book Publishing.

I think a lot of people are not actually looking for meditation. Not at first, anyway.

I don’t believe most people come to meditation because they dream of becoming perfectly calm, spiritually enlightened, or capable of sitting cross-legged in silence for an hour while thinking absolutely nothing.

I think most of us come to it because we’re overwhelmed. Because our minds won’t stop racing. Because we’re exhausted.

Because we’re anxious, angry, grieving, burned out, disconnected, emotionally reactive, or quietly falling apart inside while trying to look functional on the outside.

That’s certainly what brought me to it.

When I first started trying to meditate, I thought I was terrible at it. Every guided meditation seemed to involve “visualizing the light” or “seeing the peaceful garden,” and I couldn’t do any of it.

I didn’t yet know I had aphantasia, the inability to mentally visualize images, so I genuinely thought I was failing at something everyone else seemed to naturally understand.

On top of that, I was carrying around a tremendous amount of anxiety, anger, and emotional overwhelm. Sitting quietly with my thoughts didn’t feel peaceful. It felt impossible.

So for a while, I resisted. I assumed meditation just wasn’t for people like me.

But something in me kept nudging me back toward it. And slowly, I began realizing that meditation wasn’t actually about “clearing my mind” at all.

It was about noticing. Noticing when my thoughts started spiraling, when my body tightened. Noticing when I was about to react instead of respond. Noticing that I didn’t have to follow every fearful, angry, or anxious thought that appeared.

That changed everything for me.

One of the biggest misconceptions about meditation is that the goal is to stop thinking.

It isn’t.

Thoughts will come. The mind will wander. You’ll remember your grocery list halfway through breathing. You’ll replay an awkward conversation from six years ago. You’ll wonder if you’re doing it wrong.

That’s normal.

Meditation is simply the practice of noticing when your attention drifts and gently bringing it back.

That’s it.

That moment of returning? That is the practice.

And strangely enough, once I stopped trying to become “good” at meditation, it actually started helping me.

I remember one moment very clearly. I could feel myself building toward one of those emotional explosions where your heart pounds, your jaw clenches, and you can already feel the regret forming before the words even leave your mouth.

But this time, something different happened.

Instead of reacting immediately, I paused.

I stepped away. I breathed. I gave myself a moment.

Nothing magical happened in that moment. My problems didn’t disappear. I didn’t suddenly become enlightened. But I was able to return calmer, kinder, and more grounded.

And for the first time, I realized meditation wasn’t changing me into someone else. It was helping me become more like myself underneath all the noise.

That’s why I continue to meditate now. Not because I’m trying to become perfectly peaceful all the time. Not because I never struggle. Not because my mind suddenly became quiet.

I meditate because life is loud, it can feel heavy at times, and sometimes we need a place to set things down for a few minutes.

Sometimes we need one small pause between ourselves and the chaos. One breath before reacting. One moment where we stop feeling like we’re failing at being human.

That’s what meditation really is.

Not escaping life. Just learning how to return to ourselves inside of it.

I actually wrote an entire chapter in my book Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed about this idea. What meditation really is, why so many people think they’re “bad” at it, and why it may matter far more than we realize.

And if you’ve ever thought:

“I can’t meditate.”

“My brain is too busy.”

“I’m doing it wrong.”

You may be exactly the kind of person meditation was made for.

Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed was written for the people who think meditation isn’t meant for them. For the anxious minds and the restless thinkers. For the people carrying grief, overwhelm, anger, exhaustion, or self-doubt.

It offers practical approaches to meditation for non-visual thinkers, busy minds, and anyone searching for a little more peace inside the noise of everyday life.

I’ve been working on a new book recently, and this one surprised me a little. It is a book about forgiveness.

Forgiveness did not come easily for me. For much of my life, I was not a particularly forgiving person. I could hold onto a grudge with both hands, and I often believed I was justified in doing so. Sometimes I was. The hurt was real. The betrayal was real. The anger made sense.

But eventually, I began to understand that my anger was not hurting the person who had hurt me. Most of the time, they were going on with their life while I was the one still carrying it. I was the one replaying the conversation, remembering the betrayal, bracing myself against old pain, and letting something from the past take up space in my present.

That does not mean the anger was wrong. It simply means it was heavy. And over time, I began to see that forgiveness was not about excusing what someone had done, or pretending it had not mattered. It was not something I gave to the person who hurt me so they could feel better. It was something I eventually chose for myself, because I was tired of letting the wound keep taking from me.

Forgiveness, when it finally became real for me, released a weight I had not fully realized I was carrying. It did not erase what happened, and it did not always restore the relationship. But it did give me back pieces of myself I had been tying to the hurt.

Part of what moved me toward writing this book was a conversation with someone close to me.

They shared a deeply personal story about someone they love, someone who had endured severe abuse as a child and, after many years, had eventually found a way to forgive and even begin rebuilding a relationship with the parent connected to that pain.

The person telling me this story was proud of their loved one. They could see how much healing it must have taken to reach that place. But they were also struggling, because they could not understand how forgiveness had become possible.

At one point, with so much heartbreak in their voice, they asked me, “If she can forgive her mother, why can’t I?”

And the answer came to me almost immediately.

“She had forty years to grieve, process, and eventually forgive. For you, this is still fresh. You deserve the same grace.”

The sob she uttered in response was not one of guilt, shame, or anger, but one of gratitude and relief.

Because I think so many of us do this. We compare our healing to someone else’s. We look at someone who seems peaceful, forgiving, or farther along, and we wonder why we are not there yet. We start to believe that if someone else has released something, we should be able to release it too.

But forgiveness does not work on someone else’s timeline.

Pain does not expire just because enough time has passed. And sometimes pain that looks old from the outside is still fresh inside us, because we are only just beginning to understand it, feel it, or tell the truth about what it meant.

That is part of what I want this book to explore. Not forgiveness as something forced. Not forgiveness as a spiritual performance. Not forgiveness as pretending something did not hurt, or allowing someone back into your life who should no longer have access to you.

But forgiveness as something honest. Something deeply personal. Something that may take time. Something that cannot be demanded, rushed, or measured against anyone else’s process.

As I begin writing this book, I would love to hear from you.

When you think about forgiveness, what feels hardest? What questions come up for you? What would you want from a book on forgiveness?

Would journal prompts be helpful? Gentle reflections? Personal stories? Guided meditations? Practical exercises? A spiritual perspective? Something else entirely?

I’m still shaping this book, and I would be grateful to know what might actually support you, not in a perfect, polished, “just let it go” kind of way, but in a real human way.

Subscribe now

If you’re new to my work, I’m also the author of Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed, a meditation book written especially for people who have struggled with traditional meditation. It’s for busy minds, wandering thoughts, ADHD brains, aphants, and anyone who has ever thought, “I must be doing this wrong.”

The kind of day when your mind feels crowded, your shoulders are tight, your breath is shallow, and you need a few minutes to come back to yourself.

This short meditation is for those moments.

You don’t need to be “good” at meditation. You don’t need to clear your mind. You don’t need to visualize anything or force yourself into perfect calm.

Just pause.

Breathe.

Let yourself be supported for a few minutes.

You can read along below, or simply press play and listen.

5-Minute Reset Meditation

Let’s settle in…

Close your eyes if that feels comfortable…
or simply soften your gaze.

Notice the surface beneath you…
allowing yourself to be supported for this moment.

Take a slow breath in…

…and let the exhale be a little longer.

Another breath in…

…and out.

Let your shoulders soften.

Take another breath here…
In…

And out…

You don’t need to clear your mind.
You don’t need to change anything right now.

Just notice what’s here.

Notice where your body feels tight…
without trying to fix it.

Just noticing.

Take a slow breath in…

…and out.

Whatever today has felt like…
you don’t have to carry it all right now.

And now, for the next few breaths…
we’ll add a few simple phrases.

You can repeat them quietly to yourself…
or simply listen.

“I am steady.”

“I am here.”

“I am okay.”

Now let the phrases go…
and simply follow the breath.

No need to control it.
Allow it to find its own natural rhythm.

If your mind wanders, that’s okay.
Gently bring it back to the breath.

Nothing to fix.
Nothing to force.

Just this breath…

And when you’re ready…
you can stay here a little longer…

or gently open your eyes.

Maybe place a hand over your heart…
and thank yourself for taking this moment.

One breath at a time.

Five minutes won’t fix everything. But it might change just enough to shift how the rest of your day unfolds.

And sometimes… that’s everything.

If this helped, this is exactly the kind of approach I teach in Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed. Simple, accessible meditation for real life, especially if your mind doesn’t work the way traditional practices expect it to.

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