The room I couldn’t find, so I’m building it.
Vernon Ross
I spent more than twenty years inside a Fortune 500 company before I found this practice — or before it found me, in 2020, when the world stopped and I finally sat still. Mindfulness gave me a way to be with everything that year carried. It still does.
I built More Mindful Studio because I kept looking for a room where people who look like me were learning this practice together, from the beginning, without the price tag and without the performance. I could not find enough of them. So I am building one.
I am completing my teacher certification with Mindfulness Exercises — an internationally accredited program — and I have spent two decades facilitating rooms from boardrooms to classrooms: Advanced Learning Institute conference chair and lead facilitator, adjunct professor, and author of Master Your Message. Every practice here is invitational, trauma-informed, and yours to make your own.
Trauma-informed, from the very first sit
Our teaching is grounded in trauma-sensitive mindfulness, adapted for communities where racialized stress is part of the social context, not a footnote. Six commitments hold every session:
Invitation, never instruction
“If it feels right for you” — never commands. Eyes open or closed is always your choice, stated out loud every session.
Choice and agency first
Posture options, permission to stop, opting out normalized without explanation. Long silence is introduced gradually, never imposed on beginners.
Ground before you go inward
Feet, seat, sound, sight — orienting practices come before any extended body work, because attention turned inward can amplify distress before it soothes it.
Honesty about what we carry
We acknowledge the weight people bring into the room, including racialized stress, without ever requiring anyone to relive or narrate it to belong. The practice is a resource, not an excavation.
Community as regulation
Sitting together is the point. A welcome ritual, optional sharing, and never — ever — cold-calling on participants.
Knowing the line
Facilitation is not therapy. We keep referrals visible and normalized: Therapy for Black Men, Therapy for Black Girls, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
One booking funds a hundred seats.
Mindfulness was never meant to be a luxury good, and the people carrying the most stress deserve the most access. Every corporate workshop we deliver funds free memberships and weekly practice sessions for our community. That is the whole model. That is the point.