Meet Peggy Zielinski. Peggy and her husband Rob have been married for five years. Peggy is the owner of Our Inward Journey which is a company focused on helping people to get back in touch with their own authentic selves, by teaching powerful methods to slow down and get back in sync with their life purpose. Peggy explains, “Too often, we feel overwhelmed and stressed on a daily basis; we aren’t doing what we love, and (as a result) we aren’t able to give much of ourselves to others.” This is why she has started teaching others about Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and offering personal conscience coaching. We want to thank Peggy for sharing her passion for helping others emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. Thank you, Peggy, for sharing your expertise to help benefit all of your neighbors in the Golden Strip Community.
Q: What inspired you or led you to your current career?
A: Mindfulness saved my life. I was in a really dark place in my life and I had a lot of personal challenges and struggles like bankruptcy, loss of family through deaths and dying, and a lot of stress. I had tried to take care of that all by achieving and getting things done; and then I came to stillness. When I came to stillness, I found a way out of all of that. So I’m very passionate about mindfulness and what it can do for people. So that was the beginning of it and that probably began about 10 years ago when I was what the Spiritual Community would call The Dark Night of the Soul. I was at the bottom of my life and in a very challenging time in my life.
Q: How long have you been in this career?
A: It’s taken me about 9 years to actually decide to launch a business doing what I love. So I’ve only really been doing this for about a year as a business.
Q: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
A: The potential it has for changing lives. And how surprised people are that they have what they need within themselves in the spaces.
Q: Describe the strangest or funniest incident you’ve experienced in your business?
A: Teaching anybody how to still is amusing. Even doing it myself is amusing. We are in a culture where we’re told that busyness is the way to be. We multitask and it’s rewarded to be doing a whole bunch of things at once. And so I think it’s just amazing to see what happens when we stop. You know, when we stop the chaos and the craziness and we find out how busy it is on the inside, too. So I don’t know that I would say it’s amusing but it’s amazing how hard it can be to just sit still for even 10 minutes.So it can lead to some pretty comical experiences with people.
Q: What did you do prior to this career?
A: For the 8 years or 9 years that was in between when I started meditating and opening my business, I was a Pharmaceutical Rep for big Pharma marketing diabetes medication to doctors.
Q: What is your favorite restaurant in the Golden Strip, and what do you love there?
A: Carolina Olive Oil. We really love it there. They have music and entertainment and great appetizers. They have quality food and really it’s an unexpected surprise because it’s an olive oil place. You can go in the bottom level and buy different types of olive oil. Rob and I are members of their wine club.
Q: How long have you lived or worked in the Golden Strip area?
A: I moved down here in 2011 to begin my career as a Pharmaceutical Rep. Rob and I actually met here but he has been here longer. I believe since 2007?
Q: Who is the most interesting person you’ve met here in the Golden Strip area ?
A: One of the things that I found most interesting is that the Golden Strip area is really getting more holistic and their mindset. They’re really looking for alternatives to traditional medicine and health care. There is a man by the name of Odiri Igbeyi he is a pharmacist at a place called Connected Health Pharmacy. He is a Holistic Pharmacist who looks at your medications and gives you advice on whether or not they are causing problems with each other or causing bad interactions, and he gives you holistic alternatives to the medications that you’re on. So if you’re looking to try to reduce your medication load with other natural options, he’s an amazing guy from Nigeria and a very, very interesting resource as well for the community.
Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would it be? And why?
A: A couple years ago, I went to India for 3 weeks and it was fascinating. I would love to take Rob and go back and explore some more. There’s so much value in going to a third world country and understanding and appreciating what we have here. Seeing how simple their lives are and yet they can be so peaceful and happy. You find out that less is more and I think it’s a really valuable life lesson.
Q: What is your favorite movie?
A: Eat, Pray, Love. It changed my life. I was fascinated by the meditation part of that movie. It just kept calling to me. When I started to meditate, I came out of that scenario and reconnected with my Higher Being (whether you want to call that God or the universe, I reconnected with that source).
Q: What advice would you give a crowd of people?
A: Listen.Take it in. Stand still. Tune into all of your senses and experience it instead of moving through it without noticing.
Q: What is something on your bucket list?
A: An Alaskan Cruise.
Q: What is your favorite music/ 3 bands you would like to see (dead or alive)?
A: I love all types of music, but I really love the music that Rob plays. It’s more Classic Rock. I really love the oldies and goodies like Queen and Eric Clapton sprinkled in with a little bit of Country like The Zac Brown Band. You know, feel good music.
Q: Choosing anyone alive and a non-relative: with whom would you love to have lunch? Why?
A: The Dalai Lama. He’s just the picture of peace. That’s what my life journey has been about… searching for and uncovering peace. I actually had breakfast with Ram Dass, who is a spiritual teacher in Maui. Just to even be in the energy of somebody like that. It’s amazing how powerful that is and how it can just shift you into seeing the world through different eyes and and paying attention to what really matters. Because I think we go through life with our head down and we just plow through and we miss so much.
Q: What is your favorite thing or something unique about the Golden Strip area?
A: You know I live in Mauldin, but to be honest I’m not as familiar with that community as I am with Simpsonville. What I love about Simpsonville is it has its own Community feel to it. There’s something that aligns people in Simpsonville with each other. Whether it’s the different festivals or how Simpsonville has its own activities and groups of people, I just love that you can get what you need in Simpsonville without having to go to downtown Greenville.
Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 to 10 years?
A: I would love to bring mindfulness fully into the Golden Strip area. To really help people understand how powerful that is, and to empower people with that tool of meditation and mindfulness to fully enjoy their lives and reduce stress and become healthier. I would love to be the face of that movement in this area. This mindfulness idea is pretty new to Greenville. I mean, it’s in the pockets. There are little pockets of meditation around but I think there’s some sense in the community that they’re competing somehow with Christianity because meditation is kind of rooted in Buddhism. I think people have a little bit of an aversion to it originally, they kind of feel like they’re somehow being unfaithful, but that’s not true. Meditation is the other side of prayer. I think to get rid of that stigma, and to help the community realize that this is a very spiritual thing and it can deepen their relationship with God. It isn’t something that takes them away, it brings them present. The Bible says, “Stand still and see the salvation of God.” They don’t have to sit in a particular position. They don’t have to put their fingers in mudras or any weird shape that doesn’t make sense to them. They don’t have to chant. They just need to be open to what God would have them know and learn.The interesting thing that I learned when I was at the Omega Institute last week, which is a holistic studies place, my classes taught out of Brown University. It’s a legitimate college course, when you take the eight week it’s not some fly by night thing. It’s very trauma sensitive and addresses really important issues. What I noticed is, there are certain parts of the country that really get it, they really understand mindfulness and it’s being brought into companies as well as part of their wellness program. It’s being brought into schools, it’s being brought into hospitals to help the staff manage the stress of the day to day, but not so much here yet. I would love to get into the Prisma Health Center, and bring these courses in as corporate wellness options. You know, why wouldn’t you give your employees an option of an eight week mindfulness course? Let them select it if they want to do it, as long as they realize it is a commitment. You take an eight week course. You meet once a week and you are asked to meditate every single day. So if you don’t do it, you don’t know. I guess it’s almost like I can tell you all about India, but if you haven’t been to India you really don’t know India, right? It’s he same thing with meditation. I can talk all day about the benefits of meditation; but if you aren’t doing it, you’ll never know. Research has shown that in eight weeks of doing this, it will change your brain and how your brain looks at fear and anxiety and focus. It changes you physiologically. The research says 35 to 45 minutes a day but I say start with 10 minutes and work your way up. It’s not some woo woo, left sided idea. It’s a true scientific fact.
Q: Tell me a little bit more about your business.
So because of my background in physical fitness, I spent a large part of my life working on the outside making it look a certain way. When you’re in bodybuilding, it’s about what you look like you’re standing on stage, it’s not about what you can do. It’s about how you look. So I spent a big part of my life focusing on the outside, which led me down into the dark part of my life. Now coming back up through meditation, I started realizing the importance of looking at the inside and really doing the inside work. Because if you don’t, it’s basically a nice house, nobody home, right? You look great, but there’s no foundation, there’s no depth. So I started doing that work, the inward work after watching Eat, Pray, Love. So my business is about helping other people do the same thing. Helping them go kind of against that curve because the curve tells us go, go ,go, and do, do, do. We are human beings, not human doings. And so Our Inward Journey was created to hold space for people to learn how to do that work, to bring that practice into their lives of doing that work, and not just to become good meditators, but to be mindful in life. To use meditation as a tool, so that they can go out into the world and be more mindful, be more present, have more present and attentive communication with the people they care about. How often do we sit and listen? We pray and we ask God to do things for us, but we rarely stop and listen to what God wants us to do, right? Meditation is the way to hear that; so I’m passionate about that. So between teaching mindfulness and bringing patients into mindfulness, I found out that patients have a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of stress and anxiety in the world. I did two things to to kind of help with that. I’m now eligible to teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which helps people. It’s an eight week course that helps people tune in to their own gifts of mindfulness and to hone that tool through meditation.; so that’s one thing, one aspect of my business. And the other aspect is bringing in CBD oil as a treatment for patients who are having a hard time calming down enough to meditate. What I found was the tool for them to get to a place where they needed to be to hear what they needed to do next, which typically comes from the inside. So it’s kind of a two pronged approach. The CBD oil being a tool to use to get them to be better able, which is where their answers really are. Nobody can tell them what they need to do next. They really know. and just can’t hear it. There’s too much noise. There’s too much outside influencers, too many people telling them what they should do. We don’t realize how much power we have in here to find our own answers. That doesn’t mean that ideas and suggestions are a bad thing, because we should tune into those resources; but in the end, we’re the only one that’s living our life, right? If we can’t hear our own voice on the inside, then we’re lost. I spent a lot of years lost. When I discovered meditation, and mindfulness, I was found. So you talked about home earlier. I feel like I’m home every time I come back to stillness. Home is there; and for me that has been life changing, and life saving. I just want to share that with others.
Q: (Even for friends or family), what is something interesting that most people don’t know about you?
A: That’s really funny. I have had many careers in my life and very diverse careers. Everything from being a Competitive and Champion Bodybuilder, to being a Probation Officer for Domestic Violence, to being the wife of a farmer who plucked chickens in February. I’ve been so all over the place in my life that my story reads like a novel.
Q: What 3 words or phrases come to mind when you think of the word HOME?
A: I just wrote a haiku about that on Facebook when I got home from my last trip because I also love to write. Home is a place to land. It has a whole lot more to do with the people in your life than it does with any place. You also carry it with you, and I think the transportability of Home is pretty powerful. Home is “being still”.
Q: If you had a full time staff member that was fully paid for, who would you choose? Chef, Housekeeper, Driver, Coach, Physical Fitness Trainer, or Nanny?
A: I would choose a Business Coach. You know somebody that can do the marketing and all the things that need to be done to run a business so that I can just teach meditation and mindfulness.
Q: Do you have a charity or organization that you are passionate about? Do you do any volunteer work for it?
A: I’m very passionate about Hospice of the Upstate. I’ve volunteered for Hospice for several decades, and I have a passion for being present to people who are leaving this life.
Q: What do you like to do in your spare time?
A: Rob and I love to hike, so we love Paris Mountain and all the hiking opportunities that we have close by. I love to read..primarily personal development things. I’m big into being a better person every day, more than I was yesterday. I love to write… especially poetry.
Q: Do you have any pets or cute pet stories to share?
A: We have Sadie, and then Sedona who is named after our Anniversary trip to Sedona. We found her to be like the colors of the mountains in Sedona, so she was named after that. Then there’s Karma, who through her own Karma, escaped the streets in Spartanburg on a rainy night and got picked up by us and taken care of. Then we have Cleo the cat. She’s awesome. The funniest one out of all of them is probably Karma. She’s probably about 5 lbs and she has small man’s complex. She is the toughest, roughest most intimidating little dog. She’s the littlest being in our house but yet she kind of runs the whole show.
Q: Who else would you like to see nominated as a Face of the Golden Strip?
A: I would recommend Dr. Lacey Qureshi from the Spa at Arya Place. It’s this beautiful zen-like building right off Main Street in Simpsonville. They do facials and massages, but primarily she is a very talented Holistic Chiropractor. There’s just something about the energy of that place. You can feel it as soon as you walk in the door. It’s such a hidden gem.
