Juno Kim first became fascinated by mindfulness and meditation in his psychology courses at university. Then, as his career as a chef was taking off with alarming speed in the early 2010s, he turned to it as a tool for managing severe burnout. Since then, he’s left the kitchen (he’s now a photographer) and continued to research and practise daily, even if just for 10 minutes or informally. “My mindfulness practice is to be very in tune and aware of my body, the context I’m in. It’s an active meditation of sorts,” says Kim. “But it’s a throughline during my day, and it’s been life-changing.”
Meditation, for Kim, isn’t necessarily about avoiding or escaping stress. “At the end of the day, we live in a very complex world. And challenges and difficulties are what create the conditions for joy. So well-being, I feel, isn’t a lack of stress. It’s the ability to return to a state of safety or baseline after the inevitable stress that we all feel through life,” he explains. “So that’s where nervous system regulation, somatic practices, embodiment, all of that, is so important. And I think that’s what truly leads to emotional intelligence.”
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Here are Kim’s tips for embracing a mindfulness practice that will stick.
1. Start When You’re Feeling Good
Don’t try your first day of meditation if you’re not feeling your best. “It’s hard to find peace in a moment where you’re struggling or triggered,” says Kim. Taking moments on good days to notice peace and tranquility is a good baby step to warm you up for a new habit. “A good time to try is when you had a really long day at work, and you’ve had a good day, but you’re exhausted and you get home and you sit down on the couch and you just kind of have a moment of, like, a deep breath and feeling how good it feels to just be in that moment,” says Kim.
2. Don’t Bother With a Timer
“Time ends up becoming your boss in that moment,” says Kim. Instead, make it your intention to just sit and notice. “Notice your breathing, your body, notice your sensations, the sounds around you, all of that. And set an intention that you’re going to sit there and when you get a feeling in your body like, ‘Oh, we need to get up, we need to change what we’re doing right now,’ sit through it.” Kim suggests waiting until that wave of discomfort has hit three times before you stop, a practice he learned from Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams. “You won’t be oppressed by this clock, this timer that you have to endure. But you can start building the blocks of practising: sitting and noticing and breathing.”
3. Try a Mindfulness App
“I really like the Waking Up app,” says Kim. “I find a lot of mindfulness apps are designed as escape tools for tuning out of stress or disconnecting from your experience. This one, though, has a little more curiosity cues and things to notice.” For Kim, meditation shouldn’t be a productivity tool; it should be a way of truly connecting to your being from moment to moment.
4. Be Kind to Yourself
For many of us, meditation is an experience that breaks a lot of lifelong habits of reaction, thinking and controlling our experience. “Meditation is so counter to those habits that it can bring up a lot of frustration or a feeling of, ‘This isn’t for me.’ And that’s normal,” says Kim. “Mindfulness is a way to get under that. Being compassionate to yourself and soft when you sense any frustration or feeling that this is a silly practice is key in the journey.”
