089 Stigmatized for being single and childless: A story on adenomyosis

Belinda spent her whole life struggling in relationships and rejection. Living with the painful condition of adenomyosis caused painful sex and infertility, leaving her single and questioning her self worth. 

As she watched friends marry, have children, and move forward in life, Belinda faced grief, loneliness, and the challenges of chronic illness. She shares about the stigmas of single and childless women in society, and her path to mindfulness and creativity. 

This is a raw and heartfelt conversation about grief, chronic illness, mental health, and the strength to survive loss.

You can find her mindfulness course on: www.heartmindbreathe.com
Her music on her instagram page: www.instagram.com/cellobelinda

Transcript

Painful Intimacy and Hidden Trauma

SPEAKER_03 0:04

Whenever I was in relationships, they would sort of end for the same reason, and it was because of painful intimacy. But there was a great sense of shame around all of it, and it also involved miscarriage a couple of times. There wasn't ever a treatment for it, and there wasn't anything that could fix or change it. I was carrying trauma in my body. I don't think being alone and loneliness have anything to do with each other at all. Trying to control our thoughts is like trying to control the weather. We have that little control in it. We create a bit more space within ourselves, and that permeates into the rest of life. There is no space for labels such as fat, thin, young, old, ugly, beautiful. They don't work anymore. I am a mindfulness teacher and a professional musician. I have a background in primary school teaching and teaching English abroad and teaching across the board, really, adults, children, different subjects, different spheres. I've always been a musician and I actually work in the health service as well, part-time, so National Health Service within mental health. So obviously that's all closely related to the field.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Love it. It's great to hear that you're doing so many things and you've tapped into so many different areas. For reference, you know, listeners, I have listened to some of the music and it's pretty amazing. But we're gonna get to that in a minute. I'm I'm I'm really curious as to sort of like, where does it all begin for you?

SPEAKER_03 1:37

So early on, I took to music very, very young, and I found it a very automatic thing. I found it like it it felt like what I would describe as as an affinity. It was like a natural voice. And this got this got cut off quite unfortunately. You know, various things happened in childhood, and I think I can I can really pinpoint that that episode when I was even younger as as a kind of a message to my subconscious of that it wasn't really okay to show up as me, you know, it was like a quite a defining message, and I I've learned now that this is very common for people to get this message from things that happen in the 70s. Life went on and but just sort of zipping forward to early adulthood, I actually found that whenever whenever I was in relationships, they would sort of end for the same reason, and it was because of painful intimacy. So I I think it's really important to say that I didn't know there was anything wrong with me, or I didn't experience this as a problem before the way it was manifesting. And it's only come to me recently how much that everything is in the way it's framed in society, you know, everything is in the way things are met and expected of. Because with hindsight, what I experienced wasn't really making a man feel really great about themselves, you know, but I've only I could only really see this very recently because it's expected that that's a normal part of a relationship, but it it wasn't for me without a great deal of pain. So in my twenties, the relationships would come and end very quickly, and in my 30s it was three long-term relationships that were spaced out, and it was devastating. It was just devastating, and it was always and I didn't really know what was happening, it was just unfolding. And it's that thing of when it's you and when it's normal for you, you don't really look at yourself from the outside and think, Well, I'm so odd, I'm so different. You just carry on, but there was a great sense of shame around all of it. I sometimes reflect that that shame was felt like it was linked to that early shame of you know not showing up as me. It was never easy to talk about, and I never wanted to talk about it because it's it's obviously taboo and it's uncomfortable for me as well. But whenever I would try and discuss it, or even in medical settings um when trying to seek help, it was just only ever met as something to be fixed and changed, and it's it was like it it was seen as a problem. And then trying to tell people, and women as well as men, I mean women have said more unhelpful things than men often, because it's like people sort of mentally grow horns on you and pathologise you, and it's actually such a random thing. But the way this the effect on me was repeated rejection, you know, which was reinforcing that it's not okay to shelp as me and I'm not okay as I am, and there's a huge problem deep within me. So so it was very painful and and it also involved miscarriage a couple of times, quite early miscarriage, but I I was diagnosed at age 41 in a private fertility clinic with what's actually called adenomiosis, and I always remember the doctor, the Spanish doctor, the way she said it to me at the time is very matter-of-fact. She said, You have adenomiosis, it will cause painful sex and miscarriage for all of your fertile years. And I was quite grateful actually that about her manner because I didn't really want sympathy and I didn't really want all the sad looks I'd had over the years. But what I really wanted was all of those ex-partners lined up in the room hearing, she can't help it, it's genuine, it's not psychological, you know, all these things that were sort of implied about me and projected onto me. This was a reality rooted in my body that I couldn't do anything about. And it's was so it was one arbitrary thing, there was nothing wrong with me.

The Struggle with Marginalization

SPEAKER_01 5:19

I read about this online and it and it turns out that it's related to the uterus wall lining being really, really thick, and which is common and apparently it's progressive for a lot of women from the age of like 30 to 50. That's a thing that kind of affects um intimacy and everything as well. But yeah, you're right. One of the most important things is almost being diagnosed in a very objective and matter-of-fact way, because that makes you realize that hey, like this this is a thing, and I'm not the only one, and that there are treatments for it, and that there is a way out. We have to go through so many breakups and so much rejection and so much pain, and that society places so much pressure on us as women, stigma around like why can't you hold down a relationship? Why are you not able to have children? And all of those kind of like self-doubts that come in as a result. It's it's almost like if only people had access to open and honest conversations, kind of like we do have today, maybe things would be quite different.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

Yeah, very, very damaging all of that. Um, and I'm not sure it wasn't the responsible for the whole of the impact on me, actually, other than the problem itself. Um, but interestingly, there wasn't a way of, you know, there wasn't ever a treatment for it, and there wasn't anything that could fix or change it. It's only been in the reframing, which has been a whole scale reframing of of all of it, even including those early life events to some extent, or or understanding them and the impact on me that's that's allowed any kind of healing and health to come through because there just wasn't an answer to it. It always needed to be accepted, it needed acceptance, inclusion, love, normalization, and none of that ever happened. And I was never told you're just okay as you are until I came across, you know, the mindfulness teachings and something bigger, a bigger framework, a bigger point of reference, other perspectives, possibilities of possibilities that went beyond societal expectations. I often reflect, you know, it was the only thing big enough to hold what I came to it with all these life events and traumas. My my dad was pretty much always ill since I was a young age. He had MS, he was diagnosed when I was 15. It was a very dark, heavy shadow. It was something that I I took in on a very deeply somatic level. That's just my personality type being highly sensitive. And I I know that it it kind of went into my cells, this dark, dark, heavy feeling. Because I I still have dreams about it now, about my dad's illness, but it really affected me. And then my mum came ill in the last few years of his life. So I had one parent in end-of-life care and one parent in and out of intensive care. It was just a brutal regime. And then they they eventually they finally died in 2019, and my dad died in the August, and my mum died two weeks later, a day after his funeral. My mum wasn't predicted to die. My dad had been it, my dad's end-of-life care was seemed to be very prolonged. But when my mum died, she was actually thought to be getting better, so it felt very cruel. But I think only only after my parents died, there was actually the space to address some of the early life trauma and the way it's impacted me, especially with music. And my foot into mindfulness was already quite well established between five and eight years by that point. But I'd done the teacher training, and when I now look back on it, it actually was giving me some kind of a sense of an anchor of something for me. It hadn't fully opened out, but I continued with it because it is a lifelong thing for me and a way of life. So it's that continual peeling back of onion layers to get back to what was always originally there, and quite beautifully for me, there's this strong musical voice which I found, as well as the layers of trauma which have needed to be addressed and all of the unhelpful messages and things I've picked up along the way.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Just to sort of unwrap and unravel this condition a little bit more. Is it common for it to be sort of related to stress or trauma? Is that sort of like a general cause for a condition like this? I really don't know.

Mindfulness as a Lifeline

SPEAKER_03 9:26

I'm I'm really not too sure on that, but I think what comes out resoundingly for me is the it was the inability for things to show up as themselves in the the pelvic region, the way that they weren't able to in the subconscious. It's almost like I was carrying trauma in my body. So I resonate with that, but I've never had any proof of that or any anything to concrete evidence. But I mean, it's so common with trauma in general, isn't it, that we somaticise it and then and it shows up physically. And there's certainly nothing that's ever been pointed out that's any concern or worry within within any of the tests. I went through a number of very painful, invasive, sort of completely unnecessary treatments actually, and having foreign bodies put inside me and various different physio techniques, which none of none of which were necessary, but it's this thing of there wasn't ever anything wrong in that sense. It's just a a sort of like an arbitrary condition, the bits of cell are in the wrong place and it causes pain, which for all I know is is gone now. But it it's that whole way that it was such a severe um the impact of it, the impact of it was so crushing. And I I remember when I was age 30 or 31, and I was just sitting on a park bench before a dentist appointment, and I got a really, really dark feeling inside me, and it just was saying to me, You're never gonna have a husband or children, and I couldn't say why, but I just knew something about this continual cycle of rejection of whenever I met someone and got into a relationship, whether it happened sooner or later, it was still the same result, and it was something so physical. And I and there's no doubt it was that reason, you know, because I was told in many different ways. Because I guess for them, they they couldn't, they weren't the ones to fix it and heal it, and it didn't make them feel good that they didn't make me feel great. But for me it held no I adored the relationships in my 30s, I would have happily I was in them forever, that's why I was in them one at a time, you know. But I didn't have that chance, so it was always taken away. And and also all around me at the time, um, especially as a primary school teacher, everybody was going off on maternity leave, building families, and being celebrated for their connections and multiplying their connections, and that was all a great celebration, whereas for me I was just going through repeated loss and rejection and miscarriage. So it I I I don't really know how I got through through that time sometimes when I look back. You know, there's been a lot of reframing which has enabled me to have any strength around it, and just like you say, as well, all the pressure of the marginalization of childlessness in society and all of that, and feeling lesser, feeling inadequate, and really being referred to as that and being spoken to a number of times and being at the hand of that sort of attitude of not not feeling like a real woman and all of that as well on top, as well as my own grief. So yeah, I was in a quite a fragile, diminished state with all of this, with my parents' health and the early life trauma that I didn't really know about at that point, but in my late 30s, I really was in a quite a fragile state when I when I first found the mindfulness, and that's the point that I first ever had reference to it at all.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

I totally feel you when you talk about this, because really hard in your day, in your waking day, when you're going to work and you're trying to do the best and you you know you're going home to your own empty space, how how hard it is to sort of wrap your head around, like, okay, you know, I'm I'm okay on my own when you know there is a certain life you wish for, you look for. And you know, the fact that you lost your parents quite in the thick of it as well. I can imagine, you know, you contesting the idea of like being alone versus loneliness. I think that's that's a kind of concept that I've battled with as well a lot. You know, I can be surrounded by friends, I can be surrounded by relationships and partners and family, but ultimately there's there's a stark difference between being alone in your own space and feeling lonely. Can you just talk to me about what was that like for you?

SPEAKER_03 13:28

Yeah, I mean I I don't think being alone and loneliness have anything to do with each other at all. And I actually love, I mean, I think that there's a beauty in solitude, you know, and I and I would quite often choose to seek that out. I really like my own company. But loneliness is being in situations not feeling seen and heard, just not feeling seen, not feeling represented by society in any way. I always remember something I heard in the staff room of two teachers talking and it was after one of the summer holidays, and one was saying to the other that her mother had died in the holiday and she was she was in her fifties or something, but they were both commenting on how well you take on your new role as a mother, don't you? You take on your new role, you have your new new life and your new circumstances and you and it goes into the next phase. And and I I mean I didn't know how my life would pan out, but I had a fairly good idea that it wasn't going to pan out like that at that time. And I overheard them and I just I I really was sort of had this voice inside me thinking, Well, what what what if it you don't have your new role and your new life, you don't become a mother, and it was so unthought about, you know, it just wasn't given any point of reference, it just didn't it didn't have a place in conversations or in in people's thoughts. I mean I think it's I know it's changing a bit now, but that was very, very tough to withstand. I had a lot of invalidation in in various ways when I tried to try to talk about it. But I think sometimes the weight of adenomiosis and holding all of that and being under that weight of feeling there's some terrible problem with me and that it's always going to manifest in this way. I sometimes think now when I look back on that that what I was holding was the sense that well I'm really different from other people's. I have to explain it to them when I can't explain it to myself, but I also have to keep quiet because it's taboo. I mean that's such a great weight to have to hold.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

So I felt very fragile with it all. To your close friends and loved ones, what kind of support did you did you get? Feel like you got from from them?

SPEAKER_03 15:31

To be perfectly honest, I had a lot of invalidation from a sibling who told me that I didn't have a clue and that she had friends with real problems such as infertility, which I didn't have a chance to find out whether I was infertile or not. I mean, and then later the miscarriages, but that was the most crushing thing. That that felt very cruel, and it was very cruel, you know. And also part of the layer of ignorance around it, because there is no monopoly on becoming childless, whether it's I mean, that was I had a slip disc at the time, so that time that was going on. So I was in a relationship I was told not to try. But I mean, really, it could be 20 failed IVF attempts or that you just don't meet someone. I mean, there's no monopoly through mitigating prenatalism, the effects of prenatalism, marginalisation. And actually, and on that point, you know, being offered IVF is in in a way it's somewhat of a privilege. I had a very humiliating conversation when I was 39. Well, it wasn't that humiliating, but I felt very small and I felt that sense of shame that I had to ask because I didn't want to let that window of time go by without asking. And the doctor just looked at me very, very sadly and sympathetically and said, Well, you probably won't be allowed it because you're single. And it was a it was a postcode thing, you know. Like I I don't know if that's the case everywhere, but certainly in England it is. And of course, I got the letter a few weeks later, no, you can't be granted it. Um, and I had a friend who was a similar age in a stable relationship because she had the relationship, she had the IVF and she got the child. So it's almost as though, well, you're not you're not significant, you're single, you don't take up enough space in society, you can't be given that. And that felt really defining as well.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Yeah. It's it's really frustrating when you hear these kind of things because I have living proof of a lot of people who've had children out of wedlock or had children without being prepared or ready for it, or parents that couldn't actually handle the responsibility of children, put them in in foster care and adoption centers. And on the flip side, you've got someone who, whatever the circumstances is, they're ready, they want it, they're financially ready for it, they're meant mentally and emotionally ready for it to give a child a beautiful life, but the system is just sort of makes that kind of judgment on their own kind of terms. It's just so marginalizing in a sense. And I don't know if you ever thought about or talked about adoption and what that kind of looks like for a single parent. Is that something that you ever thought about?

Beyond Thoughts: Creating Inner Space

SPEAKER_03 17:56

I did I did momentarily look into it and I actually got the fear at the time that I would get rejected on grounds of my slip disc and my back at the time because I had chronic back pain, and that's actually what led me into the mindfulness initially was chronic pain. I I think and I didn't take it further because I thought, well, that would just be the nail in the coffin. Everything was very fragile around there, so I didn't feel I'd get support. I had a very good friend actually who um from university. She had two children, but she always said to me, Oh, Bella, I'll put the children aside for you. I remember that I was trying to start a group for childless or child-free, you know, different communities, but childless, child-free people, single people in my late 30s. And I mean it was a complete flop trying to set it up because I wasn't very loud about it, and I sort of wanted to be anonymous, but I wanted to so it was the way I went about it, but also to do with where I live, it was a very pronatalist, provincial, sort of 2.4, it wasn't the right place to be doing anyway. It didn't come to anything, but I always remember this friend saying to me, Oh, but Belle, if you had those things, you wouldn't need a group like that. And that that was very invalidating because I'm the point was I'm trying to spin it on its head and say, Well, I'm gonna reframe this and I'm gonna try and empower myself to make the other side of it good. But if I'm just told, Oh no, because you won't need a group if you get a partner and children, you don't need that group. It was and she she was saying out of kindness, but you really want people to get the message of can we bring the other side up a bit? And I've always had that sort of sense of however much I wanted to have a child or children, something in me also it doesn't feel right about this imbalance around it and all these messages, and something in me wanted to be part of changing that as well, and to stick up for this the lesser side, the smaller side, which is very much what I used to do in my classes of kids with the underdog. The underdog always got a bit more from me because I resonated with them, but I didn't do it consciously, it wasn't it wasn't a very um obvious thing I was doing, it was very subtle, but you see them, you just see these kids straight away, and it's like the loud, well-adjusted, privileged ones in that sense, they can kind of take care of themselves more. But on the face of it, you're behaving the same towards them, but in your heart it's different. And I always felt that about the childless, child free, and single community. You know, I want to be part, I wanted to be part of reframing that, and I felt that really, even though I couldn't have articulated it then, but I certainly I think I did want that inside to make society a bit more equal. Do you feel like that that's changed now? Yeah, um I think it's changing, um, and certainly because communities have sprung up and I've had a dabbling in both the childless and the child free, which are wildly different communities, you know, even within within those, there's so many different nuances that um they don't converge at all, but where they converge is in terms of pronatalism because they both face the same the same uh marginalization, so I do relate to everything everyone says in both groups. So there certainly wasn't anything around like that 10-20 years ago when I desperately needed it, but I but yeah, that's very heartening. And in terms of childlessness, I honestly feel I've gone through post-traumatic growth since losing my parents, and I also feel as though I've reframed it, and I would say that you have to want to do that, and I I feel I'm allowed to say that because I've done that, so you can stay in the identity forever of being childless, but there's also a way of empowering yourself through it, and I think again through mindfulness, you come to really know yourself and find your voice in these ways and finding ways of belonging as well, because a lot of it is around belonging when society doesn't really let you belong. So I think you really can reframe even the most painful things, but you do have to be intentional around that.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Belinda, I'm I'm interested to sort of like know that mindfulness journey. Like, what was the thing that kind of really triggered you to start looking into mindfulness and some of the epiphanies and things that you kind of came to understand in that process?

SPEAKER_03 22:37

Yeah, so the very first reference that I ever heard to mindfulness was in a chronic pain seminar at the local hospital because I was going through all this stuff with my back. And they actually were very, very brief with it. It was hardly mentioned, but I just kind of got a sense out of all the things they said that day that this was something to look into and explore further, and I did, but I I really sort of took it on myself to research it a lot. Something really intrigued me about the fact that we could have any influence where our mind goes. It turns out to be, I mean, mindfulness is really about the body, but I hadn't learnt that much about it at that time. So that really intrigued me, and I found the work of John Cabotzin, and who very first brought it to the West in the 70s and 80s. Uh, I was very determined about it at that point. I would sit and do 45 minute meditations on my own. I downloaded his programme because I mean I don't want to make light of the the sort of state I was in, I'd call it an emotional rock bottom because I felt isolated. I'd been through yet another rejection, and the impact of these rejections was cumulative, you know. I couldn't move a lot of the time, my back was so much pain, I couldn't walk. That was when I had the slip disk, it was particularly debilitating. So I felt I had this lifeline. One of the things John Cabotzin says that stuck with me, the few things, but one of them was so long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And when you feel really at your lowest, that's just something to hang on to. You think, oh, I've got something to to work with here. So I stuck with it. And he also says about the this eight-week programme, people in his his programme he would say to you, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. And I I am a disciplined person. I've been I was like that growing up, and I I've always sort of had that ethic about work and stuff. And to me, I was willing to put that work in, and I did since then it it's kind of grown exponentially. When you embrace mindfulness and you have a regular practice, you adhere to the teachings and you know you're following this this way of sort of this path. It actually enables you to navigate every aspect of life. It's not really one thing. I was I was sort of I did the teacher training in um 2018, and I only did it under two very eminent Buddhist teachers who I'd heard from for years doing talks from Silent Retreats. I wouldn't have learned from anyone else at that point. It just felt like things came together because I'd been a former teacher and I was entrenched in mindfulness, so bring it together, but with the best training, you know, and this training took a year, it's globally accredited training, and it's always far too big of a thing for me to leave it aside. It's it's it's forever work, you know, and ever deepening into it. And I've I've kind of I've learned, you know, especially working in the health service, where I I was able to to implement it to some extent, but because there's such a limited understanding of what it really is, you know, it was it was always in a limited form, which is why I always wanted to break out and do it in its full scope on my own. Um, but it's seen as um sort of like another modality like CBT or DBT or ACT, whereas it actually underpins those modalities, you know, a lot of their the body of those models are taken from the mindfulness teachings, whether it's made explicit or not. And I think when it comes to lasting change, integration of trauma, transformation, post-traumatic growth, whatever we call it, I don't think you can start with the top-down. It there's no sort of substitute for that really foundational awareness training and really sitting with the nervous system and expanding the capacity of the nervous system. And I heard an analogy which I quite liked the other day about when we plant seeds in soil for the soil to take root, it's got to be watered and cultivated and and nurtured, and this is like the daily practice or the regular practice at least of meditating. And meditating, you know, is like the Petri dish of the rest of life because we actually see things in close up.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:34

So and I've done a number of silent retreats where we just watch the different tastes of the mind, and that that's that would I would say that's where the deepest training happens, really, just really when you're sitting with yourself and you don't have other stimulation and you don't have distraction for for for extensive periods of time.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Yeah, that's so interesting.

The Language of Music and Self-Expression

SPEAKER_03 26:53

And I think the way, you know, mindfulness has has been sort of truncated, which is an inevitable process of the popularity, and people jump on the bandwagon, it's in every sphere now. But these byproducts that are a C, you know, like it brings calm, it brings focus, productivity, but it's actually at its core, it's it the it's essentially non-attachment to any of those outcomes at the start. And those things may or may not happen, and there are physiological reasons to why we might feel calm after meditating, because our systems get the message they can slow down a bit. But you know, that might might not play out like that. But the fact is that the the sort of the scope of awareness training is so much bigger than any of that, and it's so much bigger than these sort of the benefits, the way they're laid out, and the way the apps all gear it towards these these these benefits that can or cannot happen. But I mean, I guess it's about people starting somewhere, but I'm just quite hungry to put back some of the integrity into these teachings, which I hope is what I've done in my course, my eight-week course, to put back that meaning and depth where so much more is possible from, you know, and it has been for me.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Can you can you just elaborate a little bit more about what does it actually look like? Because for a person who may not have actually sat down and done a meditation, um, they're probably likely to feel quite dejected after a session or two because of how many distractions our brain is kind of like filled with, and how many, how often is it we find ourselves, you know, deviating away from the actual kind of purpose of that meditation.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

Yeah. Well, I went straight in hard with 45 minutes because they were guided, because it was his MBSR program. And he wrote this program for it's called for chronic stress, but it's basically even people that are given terminal diagnosis and they're told to go away and live with it, but they're not taught how to live with it. So it's not about solution, it's not about answer or outcome or goal, it's a way of living alongside, and the way this really happens, in in the best way I can find to describe it, because it's kind of beyond words in a way, but we create a bit more space within ourselves, and that permeates into the rest of life, into our perspective, into our experience of things, and that's on a fundamental level. So creating this space can enable wiser choices or a pause between how we react or in terms of habit change, you know, very fundamental and addictive, wanting to change addictive behaviours and patterns and anger management, things like that. But on a deeper level, it's actually coming to know the self because the more we sit, the more we're actually experiencing the self. We'll we we we learn to listen to the body, we learn to listen to very subtle sensations. It's not about anything glamorous or fancy, it's not about adding music. You asked if it's guided. I started off with guided ones, I now prefer to do them unguided, but it essentially it's always the same direction in terms of the fact that we are gaining more distance from our direct experience.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

What are the meditations that you you do? You were talking about it being um some guided meditations.

SPEAKER_03 30:00

What attracted me to the initially with the work of John Cabotzin, which really essentially is mindfulness, you know, I always thought there were people that could meditate and people that couldn't, and I was the latter, you know, and then you hear people saying, Well, I can't meditate, I have such a monkey mind, and and we all we all have that, you know, and that needs to be normalized, and it's not about not thinking, you know. We have these five senses, we wouldn't expect them to stop when we meditate, we can't stop hearing, we can't stop seeing. Well, we can close our eyes, but you know, we don't expect sounds to stop coming to us, so we can't expect thoughts to stop coming to us. It's it's like uh it's unrealistic and I think it was John Cabotson that actually said trying to control our thoughts is like trying to control the weather. We have that little control in it. So that's really normalized. But it's about seeing our thoughts, seeing emotions, seeing sensations. It's a way of slowing everything down to see it and meet it and know it and understand it. And through that process, we create more space which is instrumental in all the rest of our going about our day. You know, we actually meditate for the time that we're not sitting there. We don't meditate for the time we're meditating, it's for the time that is all of the rest of the day. So it kind of has this filters in this impact gradually, and I think the effects of it are what motivated me to continue. You know, there is an amount of you you do it, but like you said, you don't have to like it, you just do it, and there is an amount of the intentionality showing up, doing it, but then it becomes into its own flow because you know that you can show up as you, you can think, you can it's however anything is, you know, everything is welcome in mindfulness. So I think that there's so much misunderstanding around it, you know, that it that we have to have a clear mind or that we we can't think and and that it's that's some cognitive thing, whereas really it's about the body in its true meaning.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Can you tell me about when did you have your first breakthrough in this mindfulness journey of yours? Uh and especially in particular in your meditation journey, and what was that breakthrough?

SPEAKER_03 32:54

I'm not sure that I actually had a breakthrough as such. I think it was all a very gradual continuum. I feel that I got more handle on the pain or more distance from the pain because of the ways of working with chronic pain in meditation. So the very subtle ways that we can tune into any part of the body that isn't in pain, or the ways that we can tune into the fluctuations of sensation in pain rather than it being some blanket thing sitting on us as as like a heavy trap of pain, because pain feels very solid and stuck like that, doesn't it? But um, and particularly for me, I I get really I'm very bad at very low pain threshold really in general. But um when we tune into it, we notice that actually it's not a big heavy block, it's actually different sensations of tingling, burning, sometimes lesser, sometimes it's very nuanced, and actually no sensations are the same. So a few minutes later we can concentrate on the same body part and we'll be having different sensations, you know. So it but then when it when it's too much, when it's overwhelming, then we just tune into another part of the body, and there's just these very subtle ways that we cannot do without that amount of intentionality, you know. That's not going to happen in daily life in all the busyness of all the tasks and everything we have to keep up. It takes that focused sitting, and and it's always important to remember that you can't actually guess it wrong. We can't get it wrong. The only thing getting it wrong is not actually showing up to do it because whatever happens in a meditation is valid, whatever we meet is valid, we're just sitting and meeting it. So we're always growing our awareness all the time, and it is it is this gradual thing. I don't believe at all in sort of cutting things down and and diluting them, chopping them down. I've had to do a lot of that in the health service with the sort of diluted, truncated forms of everything, but but the fact is to have any meaning, it's not a tick box sheet, it's not a worksheet, it's not some quick transformation, it's it's kind of the long game, but it but it lasts forever because it's your your foundational grounded detachment that you can you can live with. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

It's ironic though, isn't it? There is that common ground where it's like in in the medical industry, they try to be as objective as possible and then just tell you what the symptoms are, what what the experience is, what you can and should expect that they really chuck it down to a science. But meditation, to an extent, it's all about feeling, it's all about removing the judgment and the label, and it's just about really just tapping into that feeling that you might you might have a label to. You might even in that meditation journey be like, okay, I know that this is a result of the slip disk, and that slip disk is a label in itself, but you are able to sort of look at it in a very different way.

SPEAKER_03 35:37

Absolutely. I think it's this whole thing of approaching life with the intention of chronic well-being as opposed to reacting to chronic illness, which is what the medical model is there for. Um, but I'm always very interested in chronic well-being. How can we live well? And and mindfulness has been such a um it's been the foundation for all other healing modalities I've found along the way, you know, breath work, um, shaking, tapping, lots of things around nutrition. It's been the whole groundwork for those things to have so much more benefit, I think, overall. And and what you said about removing labels, I mean, that's exactly what that that's what's so freeing on in the in the the short term and also in the in the longer, in the bigger picture of things, because for instance the body uh in the teachings we can have these um there are six contemplations of the body. One of them is in terms of the elements, so you probably heard of this teaching, but it's well known about that the body can purely be defined in terms of earth, water, and fire. And you can go into different levels of depth as to how we define that, but very simply, you know, the fire is the metabolism and heat and cool, the air is the way that we move through the body, the space between the cells, the water is all the liquid, and the earth element is just massive because it taps into all of the trauma healing, the grounding, stabilization, and the fact that we need to have a sense of ourselves plugged into the ground to not be up in the mental space all the time, which a lot of life encourages us to do every day, you know, and just to keep up, that happens. So, and under these these elements that we're framing the body within, there is no there is no space for labels such as fat, thin, young, old, ugly, beautiful, they don't work anymore. So it's immensely freeing, and all of the contemplations are like that, they're all these beautiful alternatives of viewing the body, and it's not about this is the truth or this is this is right and wrong, it's about challenging the duality that society creates around things and that we create in our minds because we're so susceptible to these messages.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

That's really well put. Do you feel like it's important in that process of like mindfulness that we unravel some of the darker times of our childhood? And what was that like for you?

SPEAKER_03 38:03

Yeah, um, it really definitely is imperative in doing that. A big part of this is self-compassion, which also came through these teachings, and there are separate practices that you can do specifically for compassion, but it comes with that basis of the traditional mindfulness meditation. So I was quite grounded in this when one day I had an epiphany about four years ago, and I I realized this thing about having the music taken away, and I remembered the event very clearly, and it was always something that I knew cognitively had happened, but I somehow got this visceral sense in my body about oh, the violin, music, my voice, and everything kind of I can't really put it into words, but I got a very strong sense of the impact of that event. And what actually happened was that later on as a teenager I was told the reason for it having been taken away. And it was around the fact that my progress had been too quick that would have outshadowed my sibling, who was only slightly older than me. So it was deemed and not a helpful dynamic because it would have caused rivalry. In some ways, I I wish I hadn't been told that because I I don't know how it served me. Um, but making sense of it, I think that that message put me in a very sacrificial role of you know, someone else's needs being put first, which they were. There's no argument around that. And I don't say it with bitterness or angerness, I d uh anger, sorry, I don't actually have any anger towards my parents. That that's not something I've done a lot to overcome. I just don't really have it for some reason. Um, because I think sometimes when I tell the story, people try to incite that from me, and that's just not the sense of it. But it was a thing that impacted me very deeply and also played into the sense of shame and well created it really, um, of that well, you can't have your voice and don't don't show up as you, you can't do that again. So it's it it's really played out in how I show up in music and in life in general. And the event when I was three, just to very quickly touch on that, but I actually jumped into a swimming class lesson when there was a lesson going on and I didn't know, and the reaction from adults was just pure disgust, you know. But so that took in, and it sounds like a trivial thing, but it was that message of no, you you you can't show up as you. I'd just seen it in water, I thought it was exciting, but whatever. But both of those events were very divining, and then the the violin more so. What what has happened through the journey of mindfulness is that I really have discovered this inner musical voice, and when I when I got the space, because I think things only really come up when they have the space to come up, um, and you can't that's a process you can't control in life. But when I did start to think, well, blind me, I play all these instruments. Why am I not telling the world and telling people and having it as part of my identity? I kind of felt like there'd been a lot of time wasted with it, but I had to do what I could, so I made an Instagram page that just showcases all of my instruments. I think whenever I'd said it before, so when I'd mentioned as a primary school teacher or in any other capacity I was in, I said, Oh yes, I'm a musician, it felt cloaked in the shame. It all felt cloaked in the shame that accompanied a lot of my my life until then. Whereas now I feel it's reframed through mindfulness and through inner work as something to be really proud of, and that I I love sharing it and I find it healing to share it. And I feel that the Instagram page, you know, it's not done in a in a marketing sales pitch type of way, it's purely just showing who I am, what I can do, and giving my voice, and people enjoy it, you know, they love it. And when I feel that someone across the world has seen a video or heard my music, it's like it's a very health-giving feeling. I don't know, it's it's like I've I've lived a bit more and I've shared music I've given because that's that's my real powerful voice, you know, that got shut down and now I've kind of reclaimed it.

Reclaiming Voice Through Creativity

SPEAKER_01 42:02

Yeah. I I love the way that you sort of like described this whole experience as well, in a sense, because that one event, that one conversation that you know happened when you were much younger, how it deeply impacted you in the way that you showed up to a lot of different things, and maybe the way that you represented yourself from relationships as well, in the sense that downplaying the talents, downplaying that wonderful, beautiful side of you. When I heard your music for the first time, you know, when when we when we first started speaking, and I was gonna have you on the podcast, I was like, this is pretty, pretty cool. I mean, I'm not I'm not in music, I don't know very much about music, but the fact that you were able to play them all so fluently, I was pretty shocked to see that the flute, the piano, like whatever that you were playing, you were playing it at such a professional level, and you're you've been, you know, creating your own music, finding your own voice, and even the style of music that you have out there, they're all so vastly different from each other. You've got that really classical style, you've got the really slow and somber kind of music, you've got the really uplifting, happy tunes, and and it's just it's I felt like such a strong emotion just kind of exude. And I felt like so much of it was kind of like based on maybe the time of your life or the experience, the circumstance that you were in at the very time when you were composing this music, felt like it was real raw human emotions. And and that's kind of why I was really drawn. There's a type of music that goes for all kinds of, you know, moods and circumstances, which I thought was really, really cool. Like that versatility, you don't hear very much in in many musicians.

SPEAKER_03 43:34

Yeah. Well, thanks so much for saying that. Um, I think you've you've described it really well. The thing with the over the overriding feature of all of it is I actually haven't practiced. I haven't put my time into music. Life could have been very different in terms of music being my whole life and where I could have gone with it. And and you know, I I remember as a kid playing on the playing in all the London concert halls, just um from from picking up the cello a few years later, but just the things I was involved in and briefly being on TV and things like that. But the whole of life could have been a different route. Um, but I really haven't practiced that I was spending years being a teacher, you know, and I I rarely got my instruments out, and I rarely get them out now, and I certainly don't practice when I do. So the thing I'm proud of is that there's a certain amount that's already always there for me. It could have, yes, it could have been a lot better, it could have been transcended a lot of levels and been a different life, but what is there is enough to be proud of, it's enough to show, and it's pretty much done in the rawness of lack of practice. That I know that professionals that I'm alongside, you know, with the same kind of level, but they've put the work in. And you know, someone said to me a few years ago, um, well, Belinda, people that are playing in concert halls now, they haven't been a primary school teacher, they haven't taught English abroad, they don't work in mental health. Um, you can't do everything in life, you know, and you've done quite a lot. And it and that that resonates with me now. Um, whereas when she said it, it went over my head a bit. But I think I think that's true, you know. I think that the level of music I have is is I I'm quite impressed when I look at myself almost in that third person way. Um, so I just want to get it out there. I just want people to hear it.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Yeah, that's great. And can you tell me a little bit about like how that's helped you find your voice or helped you kind of understand yourself on a deeper level, like reintroducing music into your life again?

SPEAKER_03 45:21

Yeah, I just feel like it is my voice really. It there's something very direct about it. I mean, especially the recorder, you if you take the recorder, it's it's breath, it's breathing. So you kind of directly put your put your expression into it, yourself into it. And various people say to me, How do you make that sound on the recorder? I've never heard it sound like that, because that's your voice. So I think it's my voice coming through.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

Um quite literally.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

But then all of the instruments lend themselves to so much expression, you know. People think the piano is just keys that you hit, but no, you can put so much interpretation and emotion through the waist of the finger, the support of the fingers, and just really through your heart. I don't know, and it is one of those things again, it's beyond words to explain. But with me, it's always very direct, it's always very automatic, and it's it's just kind of there. And there aren't many things in life that we we turn our hand to and think, oh, that you know, that's that's really easy for me. You know, it's a complex thing, but it's really easy for me. And so it's just one of those things that I I I find myself in it, and I think, oh, there she is. Lost it for a bit, but there she is.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Yeah, I love it. When you are really one with that instrument, you're kind of no longer a part of this bigger outside world, you're in a space, you're in this little bubble with you and that little instrument where you're just truly free. And I can imagine that for you just like being why, why it's such a you know, attractive kind of dopamine hitting thing for you to do because that's kind of that that non-judgmental space that you can be in raw, true, authentic, and just free again.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

And it's it's healing as well because I mean it does, it's not pain-free. Music is always gonna be quite a triggering thing, but I think that I'd rather have it out there showing people and people benefiting from it than just hide it away. So I think that is healing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

Do you feel like like for you being creative is also a part of the mindful journey? You feel like is that something that you would have also recommend to people, like when they're going through their own mindful journey to find a creative outlet?

SPEAKER_03 47:29

Well, I I have this kind of like almost a tagline through my course. I help people find their creative inner voice. We can all find ways of creative outlets, but I believe that the statement actually points to something bigger in terms of the fact that finding your creative inner voice can be find your creative way to be in the world. How do we how are we gonna be? How are we gonna exist? How are we gonna show up? So it's open to interpretation. So yeah, there are all these ways, and I'm sure that it is very important for people to do, even if it doesn't mean resurrecting an old pastime, it can mean a creative way of being, you know, but I think it's essential for us to do, yeah. I think I would I would maintain it benefits every single human. So I can't pin it down to this group of people or this demographic that it would benefit because really it's it benefits human nature to build awareness and to live creatively.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Yeah, I love that. Well, in the final plug-ins, can you tell us a little bit about this eight-week course of yours? How and how can people find it? I think it's actually seven-week. I made a mistake, sorry.

Finding Abundance in Every Moment

SPEAKER_03 48:29

So the course has seven different themes. Um, very, very briefly, we cover embodiment, the body, then uh a brief journey into feeling tone, the senses, the emotions, the thoughts, and self-compassion. They all interweave, they're all overlap into each other, um, and they all actually could last for many weeks in themselves. So it's very much of a sort of grounding in all of it. And also another thing to mention about it is that part of the sessions involves meditating, and it's done very it's very approachable, you know. Um they start off very short, and the the little bits of work to be done in between are very are guided, and they're they're they're very short, you know, so it's not sort of a big part of our time that's taken up or anything. But what we start to find through this is this other aspect of abundance, which I haven't mentioned, but but through meditating and through this that that very slight curiosity and space that opens up, we can start to gain more in every moment. There's this abundance of taking in more from every moment, so everything kind of gets enriched. So that's just another area. So the sessions are a mixture of theory and concepts and meditating. Um, there's always a short meditation to arrive, and then there's a a more meaty one later on, which is part of the theme, and it's also discussional. In the meantime, there's homework that's sent over. Um, I don't like calling it homework, but you know what I mean? It's just not just the sessions, it's important that somebody can just show up to do that little bit of input. Very approachable, very gentle, um, and always learning to apply kindness to ourselves. We do that in each moment, in each situation. So the details, more information about that is on my website, which is the three words heartmindbreathealtogether.com. If if you want to sign up to the newsletter, there's a free meditation, and then the blogs get sent in the newsletter. I've been told that I've been fed back that my blogs are very inspirational. So hopefully they're inspirational for people to read. And in terms of my music, I the Instagram page is at cello belinda.

SPEAKER_01 50:36

So cello is C E L L O at Cello Belinda on Instagram. Thank you, Belinda. Thanks for sharing your story, your journey, and like all of the sort of like, you know, healing and and the and the and the mindfulness as well. I think this is gonna be really inspiring for our listeners to sort of take some, you know, nuggets of gold from this.

SPEAKER_03 50:56

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

If you enjoyed the episode and would like to help support the show, please follow and subscribe. You can rate and review your feedback on any of our platforms listed in the description. I'd like to recognize our guests who are vulnerable and open to share their life experiences with us. Thank you for showing us we're human. Also, a thank you to our team who worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

SPEAKER_03 51:23

Stefan Menzel.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

Lucas, the show would be nothing without you. I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and you're listening to Multispective.