The Whole Again Podcast: Mindfulness and Resilience through Kinstugi Wisdom airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with Pause Breathe Reflect Microdose Meditations, Growth Mindset and Mindfulness Tips, to help us transform our scars into healing and resilience.

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What if the secret to a resilient relationship isn’t control…but giving each other room to evolve?

Relationships change over time — because people change over time. In this heartfelt anniversary reflection, Michael shares three powerful lessons learned over 32 years of marriage that apply not only to relationships, but to living a more mindful and meaningful life. From taking risks and honoring your values to loosening your grip on who people “should” be, this episode offers grounded wisdom for anyone navigating love, growth, and change.

• Learn why putting yourself out there is the first step toward creating meaningful connection and unexpected opportunities.
• Discover how shared values — not just chemistry — help relationships survive life’s toughest seasons.
• Understand why letting go of control and allowing people to evolve can deepen love, resilience, and emotional freedom.

Press play to hear Michael’s mindful reflections on marriage, growth, and the surprising ways resilience is built over time.

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With Whole Again: Mindfulness and Resilience through Kintsugi Wisdom, listeners explore mindfulness and resilience through personal stories of trauma, scars, and injury while learning to overcome, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and perfectionism with self-compassion, self-love, and self-worth. Through insightful discussions on building resilience, fitness, and stress management, as well as mindfulness practices and digital wellness, the show offers practical tools such as breathwork, micro-dose meditation, grounding techniques, visualization, and daily affirmations for anxiety relief and stress reduction. Inspired by the art of kintsugi, the podcast embodies healing as a transformative process, encouraging a shift in perspective from worry and overwhelm to gratitude and personal growth. By exploring the mind-body connection, micro-dosing strategies for emotional well-being, and

 Hey there, it's Michael. Welcome to Whole Again, the show that's here in support of the person you're becoming and your quest to live a meaningful life. And this week we have some celebrating to do. My wife and I celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary, which is awesome sauce. Now, I'm not a marriage therapist or a relationship therapist.

I am no Esther Perel. But over the 32 years, there are a few things that we've learned along the way to bring mindfulness into a marriage and to keep a marriage resilient. In this episode, I wanna share three things with you that can help you in your relationships, but I also think these are concepts that can help us live a meaningful life and step into that person we're becoming.

So here's the first one. I've written about this. You can find the blog post on my website, which is MichaelOBrienShift.com. But I met my wife through a personal ad in the Washington, DC city paper, and this is before the internet, my friends, as we know it. This is before Match.com and Tinder and all the other dating apps.

And back then, I actually have no idea if the city paper is still in circulation or not, or if it's gone completely online, but back then the back section had personal ads. And what was common for us 20-somethings was to read them on Thursday or Friday or over the weekend after maybe a few drinks and wonder, like, "Who puts these ads in?"

So I got curious, and I decided to put an ad in to see who would respond. It is by far the best ad I've ever created, and my wife answered on the last day it ran. Now, at the time when I placed the ad, I wasn't looking for a girlfriend or one day the person I would marry. I was simply looking for another friend, someone I could go out with, go to concerts with, that type of thing.

And here's the lesson. If you wanna meet someone, if you wanna create a ripple effect, you gotta put yourself out there. Nothing's going to happen in any aspect of one's life without some action by us. We have to take a risk. And back then, putting a personal ad in a free newspaper was a little, well, a little cringey, maybe even a little creepy.

Like, who does that? I think her mom felt it was really quite iffy. But you know what? It's worked out 32 years later. It's all worked out. So lesson number one, after 32 years of marriage, if you want something to happen, if you want to create a ripple effect, you need to put yourself out there. No one is going to do it for you.

The second thing I'll share with you is that wedding vows are real. We had traditional wedding vows. I know nowadays many people write their own vows. So we had the one in sickness and in health, and boy, was that tested in our relationship. When it comes time to say them, it's easy to blow past them.

Right now, I'm thinking of The Princess Bride, and marriage brings us together today. And Prince Humperdinck is basically saying, "Say man and wife, man and wife. Let's get on with it." And so it's easy to get past the vows, say them without really embodying them, to get to I do, and the big kiss, and then dancing and cake.

What's not to love? But those vows, whatever vows you happen to recite, those are real. Those are the values that your marriage will depend on as guideposts to work through things that you need to work through. Dating is the easy part. Marriage becomes tougher, especially if you decide to have kids. You have your career.

You also have parenting your parents one day. You have so many different factors. So every good relationship, every good marriage needs a set of values, a set of values to lean on when things get tough, and you need to find a way to stick it out and come together. And the third thing I'll share with you, and this is the last one, because three, after all, is the magic number.

This is what I learned from Schoolhouse Rock. And this comes from the practice of mindfulness and indirectly from one of my teachers, Jeffrey Goldstein, that nothing should be clung to. Because when we cling to things, that's when we create suffering. So now in our late 50s, we're different in some ways than when we first met.

Different careers, different ways of looking at the world. And if we cling to that initial version when we were dating or when we first said I do, and I see this happening in a lot of relationships We don't allow enough freedom for people to change. Now, if someone changes in a really remarkable way or dramatic way, they become a white nationalist, if you will.

Well, that's a different kettle of fish and that's a different conversation. But when we hold onto things loosely, that we don't cling to things, and when we don't go through life trying to control things with white knuckles, like we're grabbing a steering wheel ever so tightly, that we don't want things to change, then we can ease any potential suffering.

We give it a relationship, a career, really almost anything, space to change and evolve. In my coaching with executive leaders, many of them who have been at their company a long time, a decade or more, sometimes cling to the way the company used to be. And the thing is, they've changed over 10 to 20 years, and so has the company that they work at.

And it's not uncommon that the company and the person changes in different ways or at different rates, and it's no longer a fit. But we cling to how it used to be, and that creates the suffering we feel. And it's hard because we want to control things, especially when the world feels so uncertain. I don't want anything to change ever.

I don't want you to change. I want you to be exactly how I've always seen you. And I think that can create a lot of tension in a relationship and in a marriage. So my advice is ease your grip. Allow both of you enough space to change and evolve. And the cool thing is that when you do so, you get to fall in love all over again.

I have fallen in love over and over again with my wife over the last 32 years. At her core, she's the same gal I picked up for our first date of enchiladas and margaritas, but she's changed in many fantastic ways, and so have I. And when we give each other grace to evolve, to change, then we can bring more mindfulness into a relationship, as well as more resilience.

Because things will happen. Life will be lifing And we have to figure out a way to get through those muddy moments. Trying to control it doesn't work. Easing our grip, not clinging to things. I think that's a better pathway to who we're becoming and a life of more meaning. Of course, I've learned more than three things over 32 years of marriage, but we'll leave it at three for today.

But if you have a tip or some wisdom that you'd like to share in keeping a relationship vibrant and healthy, I hope you'll share it with me. Maybe I'll collect everything I hear and put it in a post to share with other people.

And as always, thank you for being here. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated with you, I hope you'll share it with someone you know. Maybe they need a few tips to make their relationship stronger. And I hope you'll check out the new series I'm doing, A Perfectly Imperfect Union, about reflections on America as she turns 250.

The next episode is tomorrow. And be sure to catch the next growth mindset tip I have for you, number 19, on Friday. But until then, let's remember to celebrate our scars as golden symbols of our strength and resilience. And don't forget to have fun storming the castle.

And if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, michaelobrienshift.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You've got this and we've got you.