Julianna co-founded and runs UnifiedMindfulness.com. With 17 years of experience, she has trained thousands of people in groups and individually. Julianna was drawn to mindfulness 20 years ago, to manage severe anxiety and depression as well as the dramatic emotional ups and downs of life as a professional singer/songwriter. With over 100 weeks of immersive silent retreat training in both mindfulness and zen, Julianna has racked up 12,000 plus hours of formal practice time, rewiring her brain and creating a new normal for herself. The result is exponential growth and the ability to truly be of service to her clients. Contact Info Company: Unified Mindfulness Website: UnifiedMindfulness.com Facebook: Unified Mindfulness Sign Up: https://unifiedmindfulness.com/mindfulnessmode Most Influential Person Shinzen Young (A monk) Effect on Emotions It accentuates the positive, makes me a much happier person, and its made me much more able to process challenging emotions when they come up. So I'm much more resilient overall. Thoughts on Breathing The breath is a place that is often a good place for people to start. In fact, at the very beginning, before I was introduced to Shinzen, breath was the first place I started. I focused on the tip of the nose, but I like to teach people how anything at all can be a focus in meditation, because that frees people up. What we want is to motivate people. We want them to get engaged in this practice. So, I like to introduce people to a technique that right off the bat shows them how they can focus on anything. As long as they're developing skills of concentration, clarity, and equanimity, they are practicing mindfulness and are getting those benefits that research has shown they can get. Suggested Resources Book: The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young App: Brightmind Bullying Story I was bullied as a kid. When I was about twelve an incident happened where these two boys decided that I had done something at a birthday party, that I had said something that got someone into trouble. They decided that I needed to be punished for that. So for a month or two after that, every time they saw me in the halls, they would kick me as hard as they could. I was terrified. I changed my pattern so that I could avoid them. I rearranged the whole pattern of where I was going. To get from class A to class B, instead of just going up the stairs, I would go down to the basement and around, so I would miss the boys kicking me. I would go to school everyday and would think about the fact that I was going to have to see these boys. I really felt terrorized by them. The day that it finally shifted, was the day that I shifted. I dropped into a natural state that shifted everything. These [mindfulness] skills are naturally occuring. We all know what it's like to be in a heightened state of mindfulness. We've all had some kind of peak experience where there's a level of clarity there. Where we're deeply absorbed, we're concentrating fully. We have a sense of harmony or we have a sense of willingness for things to be as they are and that's the overriding experience. All we're saying with mindfulness is that you can strengthen that. You can experience it with greater regularity and greater depth. Looking back on that event [with the bullies], there came this moment where I didn't run from it any more. I became willing to turn toward it and I remember vividly. I chose the route where I knew I was going to pass them because it was the shortest route to my class and I didn't want to run anymore so I started up the steps. As they were coming toward me, I saw this kid, Bert. He was gearing up to kick me as hard as he could. I found myself saying, "ok you wanna kick me? Go ahead, kick me." In that moment he was totally nonplussed. He stopped and he never did it again. It was because of the way I went into it. I just went into it with an absolute fierce willingness that I was not going to be inti