Meditation: What Does it Really Do for Us and How Do We Do It? | Emily Paulsen & Nadene Cherry
Before Nadene Cherry began teaching mindfulness to global companies, she spent years inside the rhythm of corporate urgency. Early mornings, late nights, and a constant drive to deliver left little room for reflection. When her mom became ill, the noise around her life quieted in ways she hadn’t expected. What filled that quiet was attention.
On her daily commute, she started closing her eyes for a few minutes, listening to her breath, the movement of the bus, the sound of other people’s lives brushing past hers. Those small moments began to gather meaning. Work felt steadier. Her conversations deepened. Her choices held more ease.
Meditation entered her life without fanfare, more discovery than discipline. Over time it shaped the way she moved through the world and how she invited others to move through theirs, with awareness that doesn’t chase outcomes, only presence.
What We Practice When We Pause
When Nadene led me through a short meditation, her words landed with a kind of quiet authority. She spoke about finding an anchor, something simple, like the weight of your body or the feeling of the ground beneath your feet. That’s where the attention begins, she said, and where it can always return.
As we settled in, the air seemed to thicken. Breath slowed. The sound of small movements, the shift of a chair, the faint buzz of equipment in the background, became part of the rhythm. She asked us to notice what moved through the mind without trying to steer it. Thoughts appeared, lingered, faded. Others took their place. Everything belonged for as long as it needed to.
There was no promise of transformation, no expectation of calm. Just a steady invitation to witness what was already present. In that witnessing, something subtle happened: awareness widened. The room felt softer. The edges between attention and environment blurred.
When we finished, Nadene spoke about practice as relationship, an ongoing conversation between the mind, the body, and the moment at hand. Each breath an introduction. Each pause a way of remembering that presence doesn’t have to be earned.
Living with a Loose Grip
When Nadene spoke about living with a loose grip, the phrase carried more ease than instruction. She wasn’t talking about surrender or control. It was something subtler, an orientation to life that allows room for what arrives.
In her years working in high-pressure sales, she learned how easily focus can narrow until everything feels like a deadline. Meditation widened that lens. She began to notice how a conversation could open when she stopped pushing for an outcome. How curiosity created more connection than strategy ever did. Clients felt it. Colleagues felt it. The work began to flow in ways that didn’t depend on force.
She told a story about a deal that once fell apart. Earlier in her career, she might have spiraled through blame or self-doubt. This time, she paused. Within days, the delay revealed an opportunity she hadn’t seen, one that turned into something larger and more collaborative than the original plan. That, she said, is what happens when the grip loosens: the world expands.
Listening to her, I kept thinking about how often we cling to certainty simply because it feels familiar. Nadene’s perspective offered a different rhythm. A way of moving through work, relationships, and change with a kind of steady curiosity, hands open enough to receive whatever meets them.
Curious About Calm?
Calm has a way of revealing itself when attention slows. Nadene often describes it as a quiet current running beneath the surface of daily life, always present, rarely noticed. The work is simply to sense it.
A few places to begin:
In the morning, pause before reaching for anything. Notice the light in the room, the sound around you, the rhythm of your breath as it moves on its own.
Let your attention travel to your feet and the ground they rest on. Feel how that contact anchors you without needing to hold still.
When thoughts appear, let them drift through like weather. Each one temporary, each one a reminder that the mind is alive and moving.
Choose one part of your day to inhabit fully, stirring your coffee, walking to the mailbox, listening to someone’s voice. Let the moment unfold at its own pace.
At night, recall one small detail you noticed. The practice isn’t about keeping score, only about remembering that awareness is already happening.
Calm gathers in these quiet recognitions, the body breathing, the ground steady, the mind still in motion yet somehow more spacious.
What stayed with me after talking with Nadene was how natural presence can feel when it stops being a goal. The space she creates, through her voice, her work, her own daily practice, feels like an invitation to return to what’s already happening. Breath. Sound. The steady rhythm of attention.
Let’s Stay Curious Together
These conversations keep teaching me that awareness doesn’t need structure to matter. It just asks for participation. For a willingness to meet each moment as it is and notice what shifts when we do.
You can listen to Episode 55 of Curious Life of a Childfree Woman wherever you get your podcasts, and find more reflections on Instagram @curiouslifeofachildfreewoman.
Let’s stay curious together.
