What happens when a meditation teacher stops meditating — and decides that’s okay? In this deeply personal episode of the Empower Students Now podcast, host Amanda Warner gets honest about the chaos of her life right now: selling a house, moving her family to Uruguay with a one-way ticket, packing up her entire life — and barely keeping up with her own self-care practices along the way.

Rather than pretending she has it all figured out, Amanda shares the one mindset practice that’s actually getting her through: self-acceptance. Not the polished, Instagram version. The real kind — where you accept the stress, the guilt, the skipped meditations, the unhealthy eating, the sleepless nights, and the tears that come up mid-sentence while recording a podcast episode in your car because your empty house echoes too much.

If you’re a teacher navigating end-of-year overwhelm, political anxiety, or just the weight of everything changing at once, this episode is a reminder that you can always take one breath — even when you can’t do anything else.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What self-acceptance actually looks like in practice — especially when you’re not practicing what you preach
• Why a meditation teacher skipping meditation isn’t failure — it’s part of the practice
• Amanda’s life update: selling the house, one-way tickets to Uruguay, moving a dog and a cat internationally, and trying to say “Uruguay” in Spanish on air
• A simple self-acceptance practice you can do right now: place your hands on your heart, breathe, and say “I am aware”
• Why beating yourself up is an ingrained habit for women and teachers — and how to notice when you’re doing it
• The difference between self-care as a checklist and self-acceptance as a way of being
• Why crying is healthy, rest is productive, and you don’t have to hold it all together to be okay
• A guided breathing moment to close the episode — because no matter how chaotic your life is, you can always take one breath

This episode is for every teacher who’s white-knuckling it to summer break. You’re going to be okay.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who needs to hear it right now.

Transcript

Amanda: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to the Empower Students Now podcast. I am Amanda, your host, and I’m excited today to tell you some updates about my life and, uh, craziness that’s going on around me. Um, and I wanna share, so a really important mindset shift, I guess you could call it, that’s helped me through. Some really, really, really stressful times, and I feel like the end of the school year, it can be very exciting, but it can also be extremely stressful.

And so I wanna help teachers navigate all of the, the hard times ahead. I mean, I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel with summer vacation coming up, but you gotta get there first, right? So this episode is gonna hopefully help you with that. Welcome to the Empower Students Now podcast. A [00:01:00] podcast about equity, neurodiversity, mindfulness, and student engagement.

There’s a lot that needs to change in our education system. The good news is teachers have the power to make these changes now.

All right, so the. The mind, I’m gonna call it a mind practice that I wanna talk to you about today is, well, it’s acceptance, but it’s more than that. It’s self-acceptance. So if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I am a meditation teacher. I have, I, I went through a two year program to obtain my certificate to teach meditation.

And so you would think that I would be super, you know, [00:02:00] dedicated to some sort of, you know, practice is what they call it in the. World of meditation teachers, a practice, and you, um, and I right now am just going through a lot. I am. Moving, I, we just sold our house, uh, in the Bay Area, and my husband is quitting his job, his last day is May 7th, and we are moving our 11-year-old kid to a Spanish speaking country.

And we don’t speak Spanish. We want to, it’s one of the reasons that we’re moving to Uruguay is how English speakers pronounce it. That is not how people in Uruguay pronounce it or Latin America, and I’m not gonna, I’ll try and pronounce it at some point in the future when I feel like I’ve nailed it, or maybe I [00:03:00] should just try it right now and just practice self-acceptance right now and just say it in the way that I.

Think you’re supposed to say it in Spanish. So here, here it goes. I’m just gonna do it. I’m just gonna say this country’s name that I am moving to in the way you’re supposed to say it in Spanish and I’m gonna love myself no matter how bad it sounds. Okay. Are you ready?

So the U is pronounced U, and sometimes I’ve heard it where the G is not even like you can’t hear it, but I pretty sure you’re supposed to say the G. So U uru, I’m moving to Uru and. This whole process has taken, uh, over a year of figuring out how to make all of this happen and it’s happening. We also have a dog and a cat that we’re moving [00:04:00] with us as well, and we have an Airbnb.

We’re staying in an Airbnb for. A few months when we get there. We have someone who’s helping us. We hired him. He’s a local, he’s wonderful. He’s been helping us for months and months and months now. Get all of the documents we need to become permanent residents, and we have appointments coming up in June that we have to go to.

It’s a lot. It’s so stressful and I, I probably sound excited and happy and I am, I’m so excited and happy about this change. But, um, it’s also been extremely stressful and hard and scary. So scary and, but I’m okay. Like, people keep asking me like, how are you doing? And I can’t believe you’re doing this.

And sometimes people will say, you’re so courageous. And that freaks me out a little bit more. [00:05:00] Than I’d like, you know, because sometimes I like to think, well, no, I’m not courageous. I’m just, you know, we’re just doing this and, you know, we could always come back if, if, if it doesn’t work out. You know, I try and maybe minimize the, the, the large bigness of this life decision.

Um, but I think that what’s really helped me through all of this. Chaos and stress has been just self-acceptance. Accepting who I am and accepting the feelings that I, that I have, the, the, the complex feelings that I have about it all. ’cause they are complex. One moment I might feel, you know, really excited.

And then the next moment I feel panic. I’ve been, you know, sleep has been hard because I wake up thinking of all [00:06:00] the things we have to do. We’ve had pages and pages of, of lists of things that we have to get done, like selling our cars. We haven’t done that yet, and our plane ticket, we’re leaving. We have a one-way ticket, May 19th, 1:00 AM we’re flying out and it’s, it’s all just.

It’s so hard, and we have a community, we have friends and we’re trying to spend time with them. And I just, I, and have I been meditating through all of this? I’m gonna say yes and no. So sometimes I don’t and, and sometimes I feel guilty about that and sometimes I think. Wow. You should, you should really slow down, Amanda.

You should really like, you know, do some of the self-care practices that you know, you’re, you should be doing that you know are good for you. And yet I resist them and I sort of throw a little temper [00:07:00] tantrum in my own head about how much I have to do and I don’t have time for that shit, you know, like, I just like, and that’s okay.

I can accept all of it. I can accept how stressed I am, stressed I am. I can accept the part of me that rejects meditation right now, and I can still take a moment to breathe. Even though I’m not maybe meditating that day, and I can still benefit from meditating another day. And I have meditated, actually, one of our rooms in our house is totally empty.

There’s nothing in it except my yoga mat. Have you ever meditated in a totally empty room? It’s pretty weird. Um, and sometimes I just go in there and I lay, lay down, um, flat on my back. And sometimes maybe I’ll like stretch, stretch and listen to a podcast at [00:08:00] the same time, because that’s just what I feel like I need in the moment.

Um, right now I’m recording this episode in my car because my house is so eco echoy. And you know, this episode is supposed to come out tomorrow, so I’m recording this. It’s, it’s, uh, April 24th. And it’s gonna come out tomorrow. So I, I was supposed to record this days ago, but I didn’t have time. So I, I guess the tip the, along with sharing all of these wild things that are happening in my life right now with you, I also wanna share that, you know, maybe you’re going through some wild changes.

You all are, you’re teachers, you’re, it’s the end of the school year, you know, how do you. Navigate that. You navigate it with self-acceptance, you navigate it with feeling and what is self-acceptance? It’s, [00:09:00] it’s accepting your quirks. It’s, it’s, it’s not beating yourself up. And I, I think that a lot of women and teachers, that habit is something that’s ingrained and they don’t even know, realize they’re doing it.

And so, I’m telling you right now, just be aware of it. Think I am aware right now. I am aware my life is very chaotic. I am very stressed. I have a lot that’s going on and I see that. I’m aware. I’m aware. And that’s what you could just say, that I am aware. I’m aware, but I still accept myself. I still, and I’m, I’m actually right now you can’t see me, but I’m putting my hand, both my hands.

On my heart and I’m just,

you can take a breath with me right [00:10:00] now if you want. Like any moment of your life, no matter how stressed you are, you can always take a breath.

I notice it.

Things are hard. Things are changing. Things are overwhelming. I am eating very unhealthy lately. I can barely keep up with my podcast lately

saying these things is making me feel like crying. After this episode, I might go and cry a little bit, and guess what? That’s. That’s okay. It’s okay. I can cry actually. It’s quite healthy for me to go and cry. So that’s what I’m gonna go do right now. ’cause I do feel a lot of emotion [00:11:00] bubbling up as I’m talking to you about all of this and I just, I really, I’m thinking about you.

Thinking about all the teachers in the world, and especially in the US where we’re wrapping up our school years, you’re wrapping up your school years. Things are just changing rapidly. Every day is something new and exciting and sad and scary. And the world of politics is the same. It’s, you know, everything is just, it’s all.

Changing really fast, and so

I just got goosebumps thinking about. You listener, taking these deep breaths with me right now. We’re gonna be okay, aren’t we? Thank you so much for listening and hopefully I’ll be back with another episode next week, but if I do miss a few weeks now, you know why. Okay. Thanks for listening and if [00:12:00] you enjoyed this episode, if you found it helpful, please share it with someone else that you think would also find it helpful.

Thank you. Bye-bye.