Jennifer is an experienced psychotherapist in the Atlanta area who has dedicated the past decade res
12/13/2025
🎄 12 days until Christmas 🎄
Twelve days to slow the pace and unplug.
Our house is already fuller with my kids home from college—and yes, louder and messier. Our son, the sax musician, providing a daily jazz soundtrack I didn’t know I needed. And missed so much!
I’m taking these days to remember that rest isn’t laziness. It’s restoration.
Today there will be baking—cookies, lemon squares, and what we lovingly call Christmas crack. There will be blankets, nowhere to be, and a very intentional Stranger Things binge with my beloved people.
This stretch before the New Year always feels like a time for contemplation. For slowness, examination, reflection and steadiness. And a tender goal planning vision board for what might excite me in 2026. I’m feeling dance classes, or maybe finally learning how to play “She Talks to Angels on the guitar??
And if this season is hard for you, if momentum is still required, or grief, loneliness, illness, or exhaustion are sitting right beside the tree, please know that you are allowed to go gently.
You’re allowed to rest in exactly the shape you’re in. And if ease isn’t available, kindness and connection still is.
May these next twelve days offer even a small pocket of deep rest.
Happy Holidays! From all of us here at Be Here Now! ❤️
12/08/2025
Neuroscience is confirming that our beliefs color, shape, and construct our reality. Our brain is a gigantic prediction machine, trying to keep us safe. This is wonderful. Except when it predicted wrong, or shaped a narrative that wasn’t entirely true. When we remember our past, it is not 100% reliable. Our memory changes, distorts, and shifts through signals we interpreted as safe or unsafe. If we are determined in our drawn conclusions, right or wrong, we adhere to a story that constantly revises who we believe ourselves to be. What fires together, wires together. This is why the psychological self can feel unstable under stress, loss, rejection, failures, or trauma. It’s built on a prediction based on a past event we recall through memory and then interpret, which all shifts over time. The constructed self is fluid. The good news in this is that we are not held prisoners of our past events; we can heal from them and walk forward in our lives with wholeness. But only if we get under this constructed self.
The fundamental self is not fluid. Beneath our thoughts and emotions lies a deeper stratum of self—the I AM. It is a sensation and somatic experience of self that can feel deeply spiritual. It is constant and not changing because it is not a story of self. It is not a role we played. It is a direct, raw experience of self, a pure perception of your existence itself.
If this piques your interest, and you would like to experience this reliable, stable, resilient and confident self, join me:
✨ Healing Ground: 6-week online course (9 Cont. Ed credits) Starts January 14th
✨ The Realization Process Retreat: An Immersive 4-day in-person somatic experience Jan. 29-Feb. 1, 2025
Both teach you how to inhabit the unchanging Self while moving through a changing world. And when people experience it, often they report feeling relief. They are no longer living through the brain’s simulation. And perhaps for a very, very long time, they are contacting the part of themselves that they believed they had lost, or was broken. It isn’t.
12/04/2025
Join us tomorrow for our last First Friday of the year! Friday, December 5, 2025
The cost is free but registration is required to get Zoom link.
Class starts promptly at 8:00 am Eastern
Please arrive a few minutes early to settle.
meditation realizationprocess
12/04/2025
Check out my new creative fiction short story! This story started as a joke about being “old and in the way,” and then, true to form, it turned into something more poignant. A life lesson for me to learn patience once and for all. If you are experiencing the sandwich part of the “sandwich generation,” this story might resonate. Family dynamics strangely carry loss, frustration, and responsibility all in the same pocket. And if you act like you’ve got it together, you will soon trip over the blatant evidence that you don’t.
I’m sharing the flyer below for my upcoming 2026 programs. These offerings support clinicians, helpers, teachers, coaches, and clients who want to deepen their work through somatic embodiment and trauma-conscious practice.
You’ll find the full flyer attached below with dates and details for the Healing Ground course (9 CE credits), the Realization Process In Person Immersive Retreat, and Healing Through Kintsugi: Certified Teacher Training (6 CE credits).
I’m also hosting my FREE First Friday this week on December 5th. It’s an hour practice session offered each month. There’s no cost to attend, but registration is required in order to receive the Zoom link.
If you’d like to join us, or if any of the upcoming trainings speak to you, you can find more details and register here: www.beherenowmindfulness.com , then head to the EVENTS page.
Holiday Code is good through December 25: HOLIDAY75
Warmly, Jen
P.S. Be in touch with your questions.
12/01/2025
I taught my teenage nieces Kintsugi over thanksgiving. I watched them lean in, steady their hands, and paint where the gold goes over the fractures. And it cracked something open in me.
I wanted them to feel, without me saying a word, that repair is the whole of it. That life inevitably breaks something in all of us but it isn’t evidence of failure. It doesn’t mean we did anything wrong. Life is suffering. But there is a path to end the suffering as well.
I told them it was a lesson I wish I’d had at their age: nothing about being human requires pretending you’re unbreakable or perfect. Things fall apart. Hearts get dinged. Confidence chips. But the repair within ourselves is where the strength actually lives. The gold isn’t a cover-up; it’s proof you didn’t stay shattered.
The moment spoke for itself. You can come apart and still be whole.
If even one of them remembers that the next time life hits sideways, every fleck of gold paint stuck to my craft room floor is of course worth it and exactly what it’s there for.
12/01/2025
If you haven’t read The Upside of Stress yet, here’s your nudge.
Most people treat stress like it’s black mold, something to avoid at all costs, or pretend it’s not there, and pray it doesn’t collapse the ceiling.
But Dr. Kelly McGonigal absolutely demolishes our myths about stress being so bad and evil with research that’s both empowering and… honestly, kind of relieving.
The gist of the book without spoiling…
Stress isn’t the enemy.
Your BELIEF about stress is.
When you shift from “stress is killing me” to “stress is my body rising to meet a challenge,” everything changes and we can work more collaboratively with our body and mindset around our current cultural context about stress.
She also challenges the oversimplified idea that our nervous system operates out of a three pronged decision chart: fight/flight/freeze…or fold, appease, collapse. She states when we reframe stress and bring our perception into the modern day and age (we are not in the wild being chased by tigers so therefore that analogy is useless to us today), we have so many more choices on how to ride the stress out and even use it to perform better and be at the top of our game.
The mindset of feeling something uncomfortable and collapsing turns to a mindset of feeling something uncomfortable and using it as motivation and drive. She uses the example of a climber of Mt. Everest wouldn’t likely get halfway up and feel stress and then say, “this is such a hassle. I’m so stressed out.”
This book is one of the few resources I recommend again and again because it matches what I see clinically and what I’ve lived personally.
Her work falls under the new emerging category of science called: mindset research
Your mindset can turn stress into a strength, into power vs feeling powerless. First by learning to work with your internal signals instead of bracing against them.
If you’re tired of feeling like stress overwhelms you, this is the one to pick up, or stuff in your stocking.
11/18/2025
Hello everyone,
I’m sharing a few upcoming 2026 programs I’ll be teaching, including Healing Ground, an immersive Realization Process retreat, and Kintsugi Teacher Training. All are centered on trauma-conscious care, somatic embodiment, and nondual awareness. If you or your clients are looking for training, support, or a deeper way of working, I’d love to have you join us.
Details are below—please feel free to share with your networks or pass along to anyone who may benefit. Or head to my EVENTS page at: www.beherenowmindfulness.com
Use Code: HOLIDAY75 Now through Dec. 25
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Warmly,
Jen
11/15/2025
This is the whole nut of psychology, finally explained.
Everything you were never taught about getting your freedom back—in one read. Why you keep tripping over the same internal reflexes, patterns, habits, and reactionary behaviors, and how to stop letting them run your life. One shift in embodied awareness, supported by quantum psychology, can change everything and break the cycle for good.
Or head to my BLOG at: www.beherenowmindfulness.com where you can also see current list of events and trainings.
11/13/2025
From my years on the frontlines of trauma, I’ve noticed a pattern that repeats itself across settings and generations. There are people who genuinely want to heal—and they do. And there are people who are attached, often unconsciously, to the familiarity of their suffering. They want the idea of healing more than the discomfort that real change requires.
I hear understandable reasons for hesitation: it takes time, it’s expensive, it feels slow, or “nothing seems to work.” And yet, underneath those explanations is a truth therapists know well—we cannot do the work for anyone. We hold the mirror, offer the map, and walk alongside. But the step forward has to rise from within.
I often tell people that what they gain in a four-day group retreat process is equivalent to a year of individual work. And still, many choose the slower path, grow discouraged by the pace, and eventually step away—right at the edges of their own breakthrough. It’s worth wondering what makes group spaces so powerful. Perhaps it’s the very thing we’re all craving: honest reflection, shared momentum, and the experience of not being alone.
Healing is possible—more than people realize. But it asks something real of us. It asks for participation, willingness, and a little courage. No therapist, no technique, no retreat can replace that inner decision. We can guide the way, but the movement forward must be yours.
Join my upcoming Realization Process Retreat
4-Day Immersive Realization Process Retreat In Person at The Heal Center 270 Carpenter Dr NE Suite 500-505 5th Floor, Atlanta, GA 30328
Small class sizes for cultivating a curated healing experience.
11/12/2025
To whoever was two cars ahead of me at the Woodlawn Starbucks in East Cobb this morning—thank you for buying my coffee. 🙏
Lately, I’ve been catching myself thinking that kindness has gone missing, that we’ve become too hurried, too divided, too self-involved to notice one another. And then a small gesture like this slips through a drive-through window in the form of warm coffee in a holiday cup and reminds me that goodness still circulates. Everywhere.
Benevolence, compassion, generosity are not extinct y’all.
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When your mind is with your body, you are in the here and now. And if you meet this moment of awareness with curiosity, kindness and non-judgment, You are fully alive.
Be Here Now Mindfulness is dedicated to inspiring, guiding and connecting anyone who wants to explore mindfulness through both science and experience to enjoy better health, happiness, more caring relationships, and a compassionate society.
Be Here Now Mindfulness is based in Metro Atlanta and Marietta, GA founded by Jennifer Chase Finch, M.A., LPC, NBCC, Certified Mindfulness Instructor. I see mindfulness as a unique, practical and profound approach to social change, and my dedication to teach others in the community as a social innovation initiative. My classes and workshops promote individual wellness, healthy relationships, and a more mindful and compassionate community. Mindfulness is entering the mainstream and this presents an historic opportunity to transform ourselves, our children, our communities, our world.
MY MISSION
Be Here Now seeks to help connect the mindfulness community, taking research from the heroic efforts of the leaders in the field to all those new to mindfulness who seek to learn more. This site offers personal stories, news you can use, links to cutting edge research, practical advice, and insights that speak to anyone from novice meditators looking for guidance to corporate managers exploring new ways to cultivate workplace engagement and fulfillment. My classes and workshops teach effective techniques for mindful living, and are based in current neuroscience and psychology that points to their benefits.
Be Here Now Mindfulness offers innovative programs for children, adults, families, schools and businesses in the Marietta, and Metro Atlanta areas. My mindfulness programs help students cultivate attentional training and emotional regulation that can lead to a successful and happy life. My professional development offerings help reduce burnout and promote more effective, creative and insightful resolutions to conflicts and struggles within the work environment. I teach parents how to parent from a calm and compassionate place even amidst the chaos of raising children and balancing all of life.
With mindfulness, we have the capacity to change how we relate to the present moment. We have the power to choose how we respond. We can embrace our reality. We can live mindfully and consciously, instead of reacting from an ego run on auto-pilot that is making decisions from a fear-based, scarcity mentality. In this powerful ability to pause, we become more aware of ourselves, more aware of others and we develop greater compassion. From this cultivated mindfulness, we bring a more loving, healthy, peaceful, joyful and kinder way to living our day-to-day lives.
“Jennifer is an excellent and knowledgable instructor. She taught me how to be kind and loving to myself first and now I can parent my kids from a calm and compassionate place, even when they are pushing all of my buttons."
