Many people often turn to mindfulness during challenging times, especially when they feel worn out or disconnected, recognizing that their current approach to life isn't effective. While it's perfectly natural (and highly encouraged) to seek support when feeling overwhelmed, I have realized that you don’t have to wait for difficulties to arise before starting a mindfulness practice. Even though there isn’t a right or wrong way to engage with mindfulness, I wish I had learned earlier that embracing it during moments of ease can be just as valuable, as practice helps build a stronger connection with yourself, your surroundings, and others, paving the way for a smoother and more gentle path forward.

For many of us, burnout manifests long before we can identify what keeps us awake at night. After years of enduring demanding workdays, absorbing constant news cycles, carrying collective stress, and convincing ourselves that we will eventually slow down, we often find ourselves overwhelmed. Mindfulness doesn't offer a grand solution; rather, it invites us to engage differently with the load we carry every day.

That was certainly the case for me. After two previous work experiences that left me deeply burned out, I wasn’t actively searching for a mindfulness practice. I was simply looking for a different rhythm, something that felt more humane. Around the same time, the broader atmosphere in my country, Ecuador,  felt increasingly heavy, and like many people, I was absorbing more tension than I realized.

Being completely honest, when I started working full-time at the Niroga Institute last year, I didn’t frame it as a personal turning point. I saw it as a professional opportunity. What I didn’t expect was that, almost by chance, mindfulness would begin to weave itself into my everyday life, quietly and practically, at exactly the moment I needed a shift.

How Small Moments Of Mindfulness Practice Became Part Of My Day

My first encounters with mindfulness didn’t feel planned or premeditated. I didn’t sit down and decide to “start a practice.” Instead, it appeared in small, everyday moments, like a brief breathing reset before a meeting, a moment of awareness when my body felt tense, returning to what I was learning through my work. Looking back, it almost feels like I stumbled upon mindfulness, but then I started to find my rhythm. 

As someone working in marketing and communications, I was constantly exposed to mindfulness in action. I edited videos of instructors during practice for our events, heard about and read about how mindfulness and movement were moving the needle in schools, juvenile justice, households, workplaces, and more, and listened to conversations where consistency mattered more than performance. That visibility challenged another assumption I didn’t realize I held: that mindfulness had to be private, silent, or separate from real work.

For the longest time, thanks to the commercialization and glamorization of wellness, I always thought that yoga belonged in studios, in hour-long, intensely focused sessions, and that practitioners were athletic people in expensive outfits who had somehow earned the privilege of unlocking the secrets of breath and movement. But happily, I was mistaken. Mindfulness, movement, and awareness belong where people are, every day, not as a luxury reserved for a few, but as a human capacity we all already have. If you have the means, time, or access to dedicated spaces, that’s wonderful. But movement-based mindfulness was never meant to live only there. It belongs in classrooms, offices, kitchens, meetings, and moments of overwhelm. It belongs to everyday people navigating everyday stress, offering simple ways to pause, reset, reconnect with the body, and meet ourselves and others with more presence and compassion.

It all started with Niroga's amazing tradition of opening every meeting with a simple breathing exercise. Not to fix anything, but to stay present, to take a little pause and reset, be in tune with the rest of the attendees. Those moments didn’t remove stress, but they created enough internal space to respond rather than react, a small shift that would slowly begin to reshape how I moved through my days.

Learning Through Work: When Theory Meets Lived Experience

One of the things I love most about Niroga is the profound humanity and empathy you can find in every member of our team. Work conversations are never isolated; they are always grounded in the understanding that we are whole individuals living full lives beyond our professional roles. During my regular meetings with BK, we didn’t just discuss content calendars, optimization plans, or deadlines. Instead, we checked in with each other. We created space to address what was actually happening: how I was feeling, what I was navigating, and what my nervous system was dealing with that week.

As we worked on creating articles for The Breathing Room’s launch, covering topics such as mindfulness in daily life, mental health and regulation, movement-based practices, education, parenting, work, and social-emotional well-being, I began to learn far more than how to explain these concepts on a page. Through research, interviews, and drafting content meant to support others, I slowly started to recognize how deeply applicable these tools were to my own life.

For me, this past year encompassed the full spectrum of the human experience: health challenges, loss, heartbreak, complex family dynamics, and the constant weight of living in a world and a country marked by uncertainty and instability. In those moments, BK consistently met me with kindness, compassion, and something practical: a small breathing exercise, a grounding cue, or a gentle way to return to my window of tolerance. Not as a way to bypass what I was feeling, but as a way to support how my body and brain were responding to the never-ending flow of life and its ups and downs.

These conversations became quiet gifts I didn’t know I needed. Over time, I started weaving the practices into my own days, before meetings, during moments of overwhelm, in periods of grief, and in ordinary transitions. Alone or with friends and family. What began as internal support slowly expanded outward, helping me relate differently to my immediate surroundings and the people embedded in them.

In many ways, some of the articles that now live in The Breathing Room are a reflection of that embodied journey. They are not just researched resources but lived ones, shaped by real conversations, real challenges, and the understanding that mindfulness is not about escaping life; it’s about learning how to stay present within it. Understanding that things don’t happen to us, but happen through us.

Last year, we launched The Breathing Room, one of the dearest projects I’ve worked on in over eight years of professional experience: Niroga’s resource hub designed to offer grounded insights and practical tools for navigating everyday life with more awareness, regulation, and compassion. Our little gift to the world and a testament to how movement-based mindfulness can (and should) be accessible to everyone.

Sharing What Movement and Mindfulness Are Giving Me With Those I Love the Most

As mindfulness became part of my life, it slowly began to show up through small, almost curious gestures every day. I found myself inviting my family and friends to pause and breathe together in moments of stress, before difficult conversations, and even during moments of gratitude. What surprised me most was how natural it felt.

These pauses created subtle but meaningful shifts in me. Instead of reacting immediately, I was softening my stance in the face of stress. What doesn’t bend is doomed to break, so I’m learning to go with the motions of life. Over time, this shift from reactivity to embodied awareness has become noticeable not just to me but to the people around me. Is there resistance to the idea of mindfulness? Yes. But when that initial barrier is broken, either by curiosity or empathy, breathing together becomes a way to reconnect, a reminder that regulation can be shared and that presence is contagious. 

This realization has stayed with me: If we want to change the world, or at least the way it feels to live in it, we start by changing what surrounds us. Regulation, presence, and compassion ripple outward through families, friendships, and communities. When we shift how we respond, we quietly invite others to do the same. Meaningful change doesn’t always start with grand gestures or big systems. Sometimes it begins with a single breath, shared in a room with familiar faces.

Conclusion: An Ongoing Practice, Not a Destination

Starting my mindfulness practice while working at Niroga has fundamentally changed how I relate to my professional life and, by extension, to myself. I’ve become more aware of my limits, more intentional with transitions, and far less prone to numbness and burnout. Mindfulness hasn't reduced my problems, but it changed how I carry them.

In my personal life, I can confidently say that I trust myself more. I notice sooner when something feels off. I recover faster after difficult moments. Stress no longer feels like a personal failure, but like information, a signal asking for attention rather than judgment.

Mindfulness hasn’t solved my problems. It hasn’t removed uncertainty, grief, or challenge. But it has changed how I move through them. It didn’t arrive in my life as a solution. It arrived as a companion. One that meets me in meetings, in family conversations, in moments of grief, and in everyday transitions. It has taught me that presence doesn’t require perfection, only willingness.

As I continue working at Niroga Institute and navigating life, mindfulness remains a practice I return to not because it promises ease, but because it offers honesty, grounding, and choice.

And for now, that feels like more than enough.