So in 2019, I really had no experience with mindfulness or Compassion Cultivation Training© (CCT™). I would say the course probably came at a good time in my life. I had been in the law enforcement profession for 18 years and I was very stressed — working busy night shifts, working overtime and suffering from serious sleep deprivation.

I responded to an email invitation to attend a Courageous Heart 3-Day Immersion. I didn’t know what the 3-Day Immersion training was, but it indicated leaders — particularly sergeants (as I was at the time) — should please consider it. So I read the information and said, “Oh. I’m gonna go try this out!” But really, the reason I signed up was because I wanted to be off of the night shift for a week!

I knew nothing really about yoga, meditation, mindfulness, or compassion. But the description said there was going to be yoga and meditation, and I just thought, “Okay, well, I could go do a cool thing like that for a couple of days.”

When I got to the class, I’m not joking when I say within about 20 minutes, I was hooked. And I’m not a person that’s typically drawn in like that. But the workshop just spoke to some of the things I was going through. And at that point, I didn’t even realize that I couldn’t articulate what I was going through exactly. But I was dealing with sleepless nights and chronic stress.

I couldn’t sleep during my work week because I was getting home at 6:00am. I had a young daughter, and I was trying to get her ready to go to daycare because my wife was working at the time. And then I was getting to bed at about 8:00am and found myself wide awake again at 11:00am! I had insomnia, and no idea why. So, you try everything to try to go to sleep — sleep aids, a beer before bed— and nothing works. The impact of that [the lack of sleep] was felt in both my professional and personal life; on the weekdays as well as the weekends.

On the very first morning of that training we talked about sleep. So that was one of the main hooks for me. I was already going through extreme sleep deprivation, and didn’t know how to change things. We started talking about mindfulness and began to be trained in several practices. I saw a major change in my ability to handle stress, the way I thought about stress, and the way I handled sleep. And then some of the other things that were going on with me, physiologically, began to improve.

I just found a huge benefit to practicing mindfulness. It just really made me so much calmer and happier, and I was really able to connect negative feelings that I was going through with their causes. I learned that if I knew the cause, I could deal with those things.