ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Domet
is the author of two
novels, including Fallsy
Downsies. She was the
host of “Mainstreet”
on CBC Radio One,
and lives in Halifax,
where she destresses
mindfully by puttering
in the garden and
sewing her own clothes.
Pat Rockman “woke up” for the first time
when she was 14 years old, at a leadership
conference put on by the Anglican Church.
“I was sitting in a little valley and
I remember having the experience—it
sounds kind of hokey—of really being one
with all of the environment,” she says.
“And I recognized that that’s not usually
the way I walked around.”
The experience changed her life. In
the short term she broke up with her
boyfriend (“Because I couldn’t talk to
him about this experience. I remember
saying, ‘you can’t see the stars, I can’t be
with you,’” she says, rolling her eyes just
a little at her younger self ), and changed
her circle of friends. In the long run, “it
initiated a path of seeking and study and
wanting to understand what it is to be a
human being.”
Rockman pursued that understanding
from all directions, studying Sufism for a
while, looking into Buddhist psycholog y,
becoming an MD, and then a medi-
cal psychotherapist. She trained with
Zindel Segel and began offering Mind-
fulness-Based Cognitive Therapy to her
patients. In 2011 she and Tita Angangco
opened the Centre for Mindfulness
Studies in Toronto, which delivers mind-
fulness programs to trainers working in
healthcare and other fields, as well as to
the general public.
These days, Rockman values the
interdependence of the group of women
with whom she collaborates on writing,
teaching, and developing mindfulness pro-
gramming, with a special focus on mental
health. “I love the work. I really want to
be able to bring people, and many of them
are women, into this work and I love
working with them. I feel really lucky to
be a woman doing this. I just feel grateful.
What else can you feel?”Feel the
Gratitude of
Connection
PATRICIA ROCKMAN
46 mindful August 2019
leadership