​Mindfulness is an integral part in my own self-care practices. I learned its value years ago during a family dinner at a friend’s house. As we set in the garden at sunset, I smelled an amazing fragrance enveloping the air. “That’s my Queen of Night,” my friend explained pointing at the alluring tiny white flowers in the corner of her garden. Those enchanting flowers release their special aroma with every sunset. “They seem to send a gratitude message to the Divine at the end of each day”, my friend told me. “They remind me to send mine,” she added.
The following day, I accompanied my daughter to her weekly karate class. I sat in the club’s playground reading a book as I was waiting for her to finish. The sun was setting and with it came this enchanting fragrance again… I looked around me and there it was, the glamorous Queen of Night!
Suddenly, it occurred to me that I have been sitting in this exact spot, at the exact same time every week for the past 4 months. The Queen of Night has always been there, sharing its beauty with whoever was mindful enough to receive it; sharing its Divine gratitude reminder with whoever is aware enough to remember. I simply wasn’t.
Mindfulness is intentional conscious practice. It differs from self-awareness in that it involves both internal and external insight. You are not just aware of your inner feelings and thought; you are also fully aware and engaged with your surroundings. I guess I was too involved in my inner environment that I lost touch with my outer setting. 

    In 2013, when I first came to Canada I was introduced to Dana, a Libyan Canadian lady who had a project in mind. Dana wanted to gather ten Arab women and help them write their stories. She wanted to collect stories of immigration, living in a new culture, leaving the homeland, feelings of homesickness, stories of hope, loss, pain and gain, and stories of helplessness and bravery. Her aim was to publish the stories in an ‘Arab Women’s Notebook’ for the world to know more about those women’s dreams, hopes, pains, and struggles, for women around the world to see their own stories in those ten women’s narratives and reshape their own stories of hope and survival.
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     It was a long journey, and for me, it came at exactly the right time. My chapter was entitled ‘Journey of Self-Discovery’. I wrote it during a time of my life when I was wondering who am I? Where do I belong? And where am I heading? What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? I wrote my story at a time when I had lost my grandmother, my only anchor in the world, her loss created a vacuum that seemed never to fill up. I wrote it at a time I lost my homeland, not by migrating away from it, but by it drifting away from me. I chose to leave as the land wasn't my land and the country wasn't my own. I was forever a stranger as I witnessed the collapse of the values, morals, and ethics I grew up with.
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      The book, An Arab Women Notebook, was published in 2016. At the book-signing event, we, the authors, met many women who told us how they found their stories in ours. They told us how our stories helped them heal and empowered them to re-shape their own narrative.