First off, I’m not a violent man. Quite the opposite. For example, I’ve never once in my life gotten into a fight. And I didn’t even kill anyone until I was forty-two. Which, looking around my current professional environment, seems rather late – though, true, the week after that Idid bump off almost half a dozen.
That doesn’t sound great, I know, but anything I did, I did with the best of intentions. A logical result of my commitment to becoming more mindful. To harmonise my work and my family life.
My first encounter with mindfulness was actually very stressful. My wife, Katharina, tried to force me to relax. To improve my resilience, my unreliability, my twisted values. To give our marriage one more chance.
She said she wanted that well-balanced man back she’d fallen in love with ten years earlier, that young man full of ideals and aspirations. Had I responded I would also likeher to have the body back that I fell for ten years earlier, our marriage would’ve been over and done with. And rightly so. Obviously, time should be allowed to leave its marks on a woman’s body, but apparently not on a man’s soul. And that’s why my wife’s body was spared a plastic surgeon whereas my soul was sent off to mindfulness training.
Back then, I thought mindfulness was just a different cup of the same esoteric tea that’s warmed over and repackaged under a new buzzword every decade or so. Mindfulness was just autogenic training without lying down. Yoga without contorting yourself. Meditation without sitting cross-legged. Or, as the article inManager magazine my wife once demonstratively placed on the breakfast table put it: ‘Mindfulness means taking in each moment with love and without judgement.’ A definition that made as little sense to me then as those pebbles on the beach pointlessly stacked by people so de-stressed they’ve become entirely detached from reality.
Would I have even participated in this mindfulness racket if it’d only been about the two of us, my wife and me? Not sure. But we have a little girl, Emily, and for her I would hitchhike from Sodom to Gomorrah if it meant our family would have a future.
She’s the real reason why, one Thursday night in January, I had my first appointment with a mindfulness coach. I was already twenty-five minutes late when I rang the bell outside the heavy wooden door of his ‘mindfulness studio’ to discuss, among other matters, my time-management issues.
The coach rented the ground floor of a lavishly renovated old building in a fancier part of town. I’d spotted his flyer in the wellness area of a five-star hotel and seen his fees online. Someone
