212 | The Mentor You Didn’t Know You Had: A Mindfulness and Resilience Practice for Trauma Survivors

What if one of your greatest mentors for resilience and mindfulness has been with you all along?

In a fast, overwhelming world—especially while navigating trauma recovery—it’s easy to forget the resilience you’ve already built. In this episode, Michael shares how tapping into your own lived experiences and “high peak stories” can deepen your mindfulness practice, strengthen your resilience, and guide you through the toughest parts of healing.

Takeaways:

• Learn how to access hidden wisdom from your past to support trauma recovery
• Discover why mindfulness means remembering your strength—not just chasing calm
• Try a digital health tip that creates space for resilience and mindfulness in your daily life

Take a full breath in and a releasing breath out and to rediscover your built-in resilience and learn how mindfulness can help you heal more intentionally after trauma.

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With Whole Again: A Fresh Approach to Healing, Growth & Resilience after Physical Trauma through Kintsugi Mindfulness listeners explore resilience through personal stories of trauma, scars, and injury while learning to overcome PTSD, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and perfectionism with self-compassion, self-love, and self-worth. Through insightful discussions on stress management, mindfulness practices, and digital wellness, the show offers practical tools like breathwork, micro-dose meditation, grounding techniques, visualization, and daily affirmations for anxiety relief and stress relief. Inspired by the art of kintsugi, the podcast embraces healing as a process of transformation, encouraging a shift in perspective from worry and being overwhelmed to gratitude and personal growth. By exploring the mind-body connection, micro-dosing strategies for emotional well-being, and holistic approaches to self-care, this podcast empowers listeners to cultivate emotional resilience and live with greater balance and intention.

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover one of the wisest mentors you always have access to. Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors a physical injury and trauma, reclaim their strength and resilience through the wisdom of Kintsugi. On Fridays, I love sharing a microdose of wisdom with you to help you become whole again and step into the person you’re becoming.

And today, as we finish up another week that feels like it’s gone completely bananas, you’ll discover one of two mentors that you always have access to as well as a digital health tip. So you can reclaim your power over your smartphone. But first, I did wanna take a moment to thank you for being here, and I also want to thank you for being a fellow survivor.

I hope you always remember that you’ve got this and I’ve got you together. We’re gonna go far. All right, here we are at the end of another crazy week. You’re not alone. If you feel like 2025 is flying by, it can feel overwhelming and reactive and all that vibe, all that energy can impact our healing and our overall happiness or how we look at life.

So when things feel like they’re out of control, that they’re uncertain or unstable, it can make us feel like we’re not really sure what to do next. So it’s natural to ask, what should I do? So we ask a friend or a teacher or a boss, heck, we even asked chat, GPT, what should I do? But there’s danger here.

Yes, it’s good to tap into, as I would say, your Peloton people who can help bring out the best in you, but they’ll generally provide guidance through their own lens and they truly don’t know you, like you know you. And here’s where two of your best mentors step in. I’ll share one this week and another next Friday.

And the first mentor you can access is the younger version of you. All the different experiences that you have lived through, and today, I don’t think anyone, certainly not me, will judge you for feeling overwhelmed. Things are uncertain and although I. What you’re currently dealing with as you go through recovery or simply trying to navigate life today may not be exactly the same as what you’ve experienced in the past.

You can go back and tap into those experiences. There’s wisdom there. I. Through the lens of appreciative inquiry, which is a coaching process that I use when I coach executive leaders. That’s based in curiosity. So there are many prompts. These questions help us remember our high peak stories, and once we remember these, then we can pull from those stories into the current moment because there’s some wisdom in our past.

I’ll give you a couple different examples. Here’s one around recovery. Can you remember a time, no matter how small, where you felt strong and connected with the body as you went through an injury or illness, what helped create that moment for you? Or tell me about a time when you had doubt you could do something, but you found a way to do it.

What did you discover about yourself in that moment? Questions like these are essential to pause, breathe, and reflect on as we go through our recovery, or just simply trying to figure out how to live today with all that’s happening, because it’s quite easy given the circumstances to go negative, to have doubt or worry or fear or imposter syndrome, and we can go down that spiral.

That toilet bowl spiral pretty quickly. So these prompts and our experiences from our past help remind us that we’ve already done hard things and we can borrow from those moments and bring them forward to today so we can find the strength and the resilience and the motivation to keep pedaling. So this week, when you find yourself getting stuck, see if you can tap into the younger version of yourself and get curious with it.

Tap into one of your high peak stories and see if that experience can help you with whatever you happen to be dealing with Next. Now I’m only gonna speak for me, but my younger self didn’t have a smartphone to worry about. And smartphones are a contributor to our digital health, and our digital health impacts our mental health.

Have you gone on social media lately as well as our physical, social, and spiritual health? So here’s our whole again, digital tip of the week. To ensure that you are using your smartphone and your smartphone isn’t using you. We’re gonna do a little spring cleaning and redecorate your home screen. And we’ll start by taking all those distracting apps.

You know the ones that are like vampires, they suck your time and we’ll move them off your home screen. You can put them into folders or at least place them a few swipes away from the home screen. This small amount of friction can really help reduce your usage of those distracting apps. And very soon I’ll be able to share with you a new update.

In my pause, breathe, reflect app that has helped people reduce their screen time by up to 55%. It’s pretty cool and I can’t wait to share it with you, but until then, do a little spring cleaning, redecorate your home screen and move those distracting apps away and let me know how that goes for you. As always, thank you for being part.

Thank you again for being a survivor.

In this episode, you discovered the value of tapping in to the younger version of yourself and remembering your high peak stories, as well as the importance of doing a little spring cleaning, a little redecorating on your home screen so you can have better digital health. And more time for things that bring you more joy.

Again, thanks for being here. Remember, you’ve got this and I’ve got you, and together. We’re gonna go far

and if you wish to further enhance your digital health, I’ll invite you to take my smartphone wellness check and you can access it through the link in the show notes. Or you can visit my website, which is Michael O’Brien schiff.com and it’s absolutely free. And it’ll help you scroll less and live more.

And of course, I hope you’ll join us here on whole again every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and discover how to heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience. Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.