Hello!

I’m Kimberly Morrison and I hope to be working with you soon, in order to help you perform at your peak – even in high stress situations.

Years ago, my son, Jack, was very ill and non-responsive to treatment.  Mindfulness was recommended to him, but it was presented as a new age alternative that sometimes worked for certain kinds of people.  He didn’t think that was him and he didn’t go in for it.  I was a bit wary myself, but feeling desperate on his behalf, I began to do my own research in an effort to persuade him to give it a chance.

With its roots in Eastern traditions, mindfulness has been extensively researched, and its positive effects are well-documented in Western medicine. The more I learned, the more I realized, "As a caregiver, I need this!"

In fact, I was already a fairly mindful person – although I didn’t have that vocabulary for it.  I grew up in the Adirondack mountains and spent most of my childhood outdoors, tuning to the sights and sounds and scents of nature, allowing them to ground me, and experiencing a tranquility that you would not necessarily predict based on some of the other events of my childhood.  In my early adulthood, I further cultivated this mindfulness, still without a vocabulary for it, when I studied the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a Montessori-based religious education program that includes leading meditations with young children -- at which time I developed a practice of contemplative prayer.

While my inclination to quiet my mind in nature and in prayer, were both healthy behaviors that served me well, they did more to extend the limits of the stress I could endure than they did to regulate what happened once I had reached my limit.  I had four children in four years.  No multiple births.  My oldest was 4 years old when my youngest was born.  And I homeschooled these kids during middle-school!  Our house was always full of energy (and noise) and in those teen years, it was full of hormones.  Plus, I’m half Italian.  The story in our house went, “mom has a very long fuse, but it’s explosive when it runs out.”  I always felt a bit outside of myself in those moments.

As I deepened my understanding of mindfulness (most impactfully, reading John Kabat-Zin’s Full Catastrophe Living and Buddah’s Brain by Rick Hanson), I was compelled to begin practicing -- working that mental muscle of awareness.  Soon, I found that I could recognize better when I was approaching my limit and more often choose how I would respond in stressful situations.  Certainly not perfect, but growing in a way that was good for me, good for my productivity,  my performance, and good for my family.

When my youngest daughter was in the eighth grade, I began to discern what my life might look like once she started High School.  I arrived at the decision to bring mindfulness to others, and began the process of being certified to teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction – the program to which all of my early research had led me.  Soon, I was specializing in Mindfulness for performance.

When Jack died in 2020, I was shattered, consumed with thoughts of how his story might have ended differently, going over every choice point not only in his medical treatment, but in our parent-child relationship.  I was broken apart by sadness, and I wanted to believe that I could have controlled things better, that there could have been a better outcome.  Mindfulness was, and remains, so important to working through my grief.  In those initial months, my mind was too dark and stormy a place to visit, and I relied on mindful movement to tether myself to reality.  Even now, the grief is always there.  Each moment without Jack being a new moment to grieve.  But the skill of turning toward what is difficult allows me to process all that I think and feel in a way that provides clarity (rather than getting caught up in the lies anxiety or depression tell).  The skill of open awareness allows me to hold the happy memories right alongside the grief.  The skill of acceptance allows me to move forward -- to be a parent to Clara, Crae and Leah, to be a partner to my most-wonderful husband, Tim, and simply, to live.  The skill of self-compassion allows me to move past regret and instead learn to be with Jack in a new way, when he alights in a bird or a butterfly, or shows up in the wind or a rainbow.

I notice him in everything that is beautiful.  I thank God for the grace to be able to do this, and I thank God for the gift of mindfulness in my life.

I hope you will experiment with it, and see whether mindfulness will benefit you as it has me and so many others who have given it a chance.

Take good care of yourself, Kimberly