Smith was first introduced to mindfulness meditation the practice of watching your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment in the second grade. “I wasn’t necessarily a troubled kid, but sometimes I had a lot of anger,” Smith recalls. “I remember being a little confused about it, like,
Why we gotta sit and be quiet? But with more consistency, I started to be able to observe myself and became more aware of what I was actually feeling, like,
You’re not angry you’re actually sad.”
In the fall of 2012, when Smith left her home in the south suburbs of Chicago for Indiana University in Bloomington, she suddenly found herself “running around every waking hour” as a science major, president of her university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and an employee at the financial aid office.