Inspiring Conversations with Joanna Gates of The Mindful Mind

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joanna Gates.

Hi Joanna, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The Mindful Mind and the programs I have created through it are much more than a business to me—they are the culmination of my life’s work.

My journey began long before I ever imagined becoming a helping professional. As a child, I survived cancer and experienced firsthand the profound physical, emotional, and psychological impact of illness and recovery. During that time, art became an unexpected and powerful companion in my healing process.

I discovered that creating art gave me a way to express things I did not always have the words to communicate. It gave me space for reflection, imagination, curiosity, and self-discovery.

Art became a way of looking inward and making sense of my experience. In many ways, it helped me reconnect with a sense of possibility at a time when my world had been defined by illness and uncertainty.
That experience stayed with me.

As I grew older, my curiosity about my own healing evolved into a deeper question: What helps human beings heal, grow, and transform?

That question ultimately became my life’s work.

I wanted to understand not only what had helped me survive, but also what could help people move beyond simply surviving toward a greater sense of self-awareness, purpose, and possibility. That curiosity led me into the study of psychology, depth psychology, counseling, mindfulness, expressive arts, holistic wellness, and other approaches to human development.

When I began this journey, expressive and therapeutic uses of art were not nearly as mainstream or accessible as they are today. There were fewer established educational pathways, fewer programs integrating these disciplines, and far less public understanding of how creative expression could support emotional and psychological well-being.

So I became a student of many worlds.
I pursued formal education, sought out teachers and methodologies, studied psychology and human development, explored mindfulness and somatic practices, and continued learning wherever I could. I began connecting ideas that were often taught separately and asking how they could be brought together in a way that felt practical, accessible, and meaningful for real people living real lives.

In many ways, I had to build the bridge I was looking for.

The Mindful Mind grew out of that process.
It represents years of blood, sweat, tears, study, experimentation, reflection, and—perhaps most importantly—doing my own work. I have always believed that if I am going to ask another person to look inward, become more self-aware, or make meaningful changes in their life, I need to be willing to do that work myself.

That has become one of the central philosophies behind my approach: I have done much of the hard work of exploring, learning, integrating, and simplifying so that others have a clearer path to begin their own journey.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Building The Mindful Mind from the ground up has been one of the most rewarding—and challenging—experiences of my life.

For many years, I have essentially worn every hat that comes with being a sole proprietor. I have been the practitioner, educator, program developer, administrator, marketer, content creator, bookkeeper, website manager, and everything in between. While my heart has always been in the work itself—helping people learn, grow, heal, and reconnect with themselves—I have also had to learn how to build and sustain a business around that mission.

And the business landscape has changed dramatically along the way.
I began this journey before social media became the powerful force it is today. Suddenly, building a business meant learning an entirely new language of digital marketing, social platforms, online visibility, websites, content creation, and constantly changing technology. I have had to continually reinvent how I communicate what I do while trying to remain true to why I do it in the first place.

There have also been some hard lessons.
I have trusted the wrong people. I have invested time, money, energy, and hope into people and opportunities that ultimately did not serve the vision I was trying to build. Those experiences were painful, and some were expensive. But they taught me lessons that no classroom could have taught me—about discernment, boundaries, contracts, protecting my intellectual property, choosing collaborators carefully, and most importantly, trusting my own instincts.
Then came COVID….
Like so many small businesses, The Mindful Mind had to navigate an unprecedented period of uncertainty and disruption. I had to adapt, rethink how I delivered my work, and find new ways to stay connected to the people I served. It was another reminder that building something meaningful does not mean the path will always be predictable.
If anything, my life has taught me how to navigate the unpredictable.

I am a survivor. I am tenacious. And I am an optimist.

I have learned that resilience doesn’t necessarily mean never falling down. Sometimes it means allowing yourself to stop, regroup, grieve what didn’t work, learn the lesson, and then find your way forward.
I have had plenty of moments when I questioned the direction I was taking or wondered whether the path I had chosen was too difficult. But somehow, I always come back to the same place: my mission and my purpose.

That has become one of the greatest lessons of my entrepreneurial journey. I don’t have to have everything figured out to keep going. I simply have to remember why I started.

And every time I return to that purpose, I find my footing again.

The obstacles have become part of the education. They have made me more discerning, more resourceful, more adaptable, and more compassionate toward anyone trying to build something meaningful of their own.

Most importantly, they have reinforced something I learned very early in life:
I can go through difficult things without allowing them to define the rest of my story.
That is the spirit I bring to The Mindful Mind— and ultimately, to the people I serve.

We’ve been impressed with The Mindful Mind, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The Mindful Mind brings together mindfulness, expressive arts, psychoeducation, holistic practices, and depth-oriented approaches to create opportunities for people to slow down, become curious about themselves, and develop practical tools for navigating life.
At the heart of the work is a simple belief:
Healing is not about becoming someone else. It is about becoming more fully yourself.

I believe that each person already carries something valuable within them: creativity, resilience, curiosity, imagination, lived experience, strengths, and the ability to learn and adapt. Sometimes we simply need the right tools, encouragement, environment, or perspective to recognize what is already there.

That is where my work begins.
My mission is to support people to empower themselves to create positive change in their life.

My motto has always been:
“Self-help starts with the Self.”
Whether I am working with a child, a young adult, or someone approaching fifty and wondering what comes next, I want people to experience themselves as active participants in their own lives—not passive recipients of someone else’s answers.
Life can be difficult. But I don’t believe everything has to feel harder than it needs to be.

One of my favorite metaphors comes from Mary Poppins: sometimes a little “spoonful of sugar” helps the medicine go down. I believe the same can be true of personal growth. When we can make the process engaging, creative, experiential, and even enjoyable, we are often more willing to participate in it. When something feels meaningful and accessible, we want to come back to it.

That philosophy is at the center of The Mindful Mind.

Art Was My First Teacher:
Art saved my life—not necessarily in the literal sense of saving me from illness, but in the profound sense of helping me find a way to process, express, and understand my experience.

I have drawn, painted, written, sung, danced, imagined, created, and explored for as long as I can remember. Creativity has always been one of the ways I make sense of the world.

As a child and later as an adult, I discovered that creative expression could give form to experiences that were difficult to put into words. Images, colors, symbols, movement, writing, and other forms of expression could become doorways into reflection and self-discovery.

That experience became one of the foundations of my professional work.
My curiosity about why creative expression was so meaningful to my own healing eventually became a lifelong exploration of human behavior, development, psychology, mindfulness, and expressive arts.
I wanted to understand the process—and then find ways to make those discoveries useful to other people.

Experience-Based Learning:
One of the things that distinguishes The Mindful Mind is my emphasis on learning by doing.

I am a mental health and wellness practitioner, educator, life coach, and mentor, with decades of experience in education and extensive training in human behavior and development.

My academic background includes a bachelor’s degree focused on mental health and human services and a master’s degree in counseling psychology with a depth psychology focus. But I don’t believe education has to remain inside a textbook.

Some of our most important learning happens through experience.

That’s why my programs incorporate expressive healing arts, mindfulness, reflection, symbolism, imagery, movement, writing, experiential exercises, and hands-on activities. Rather than simply talking about change, participants have opportunities to experience themselves differently.

A drawing can become a conversation.

An image can become a doorway into a memory.

A movement can reveal something words couldn’t.

A written reflection can transform an abstract feeling into something we can actually look at.

A simple mindfulness exercise can create enough space between a person and their immediate reaction to allow a new choice to emerge.

These experiences can connect mind, body, emotion, memory, and imagination in ways that make learning more personal and memorable.

My role is not to tell someone who they should be. Instead, I create opportunities for them to discover what is already within them and who they are—their strengths, values, creativity, needs, purpose and ability to create positive change in their lives.

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
Perhaps the hardest person for me to give credit to is myself.

I have always been much more comfortable acknowledging the people who helped me along the way than recognizing my own role in becoming the person I am today. When I look back, however, I realize that both things can be true: I have been fortunate to have wonderful people and positive influences in my life, and I have also had to do the work of becoming who I am.

My character, values, and many of the qualities that have carried me through life were shaped in large part by my parents and the positive role models who surrounded me. They gave me examples of resilience, responsibility, compassion, perseverance, and the importance of doing what you believe is right. Those early lessons became part of my foundation.

But as I grew older, I had to decide what I would do with those lessons.
Life has a way of testing what we are taught.
I have had to develop my own voice, make my own choices, learn from my mistakes, recover from disappointments, and discover which values I wanted to carry forward. Some lessons were given to me; others I had to earn through experience.

So perhaps the credit belongs to both.
I am grateful for the people who helped shape me, encouraged me, challenged me, believed in me, and sometimes simply showed me what was possible. I carry pieces of those people with me in the way I approach my work and the way I try to show up for others.

But I also want to acknowledge something I have sometimes found difficult to say:
I deserve some credit, too.
I kept going.
I remained curious.
I continued learning.
I took risks.
I started over when necessary.
I turned experiences into lessons and lessons into something I could share with others.
And I kept returning to my purpose, even when the path became difficult.

Perhaps that is one of the most important lessons I can offer: we don’t have to choose between gratitude and self-recognition.
We can honor the people who helped us get here while also honoring the person who had to walk the road.

I am deeply grateful for my roots, my teachers, my mentors, my family, my experiences, and the people who have crossed my path. But I am also learning to look at the woman who emerged from all of those experiences and say:
You did some of this, too.

And maybe giving ourselves credit isn’t arrogance.

Maybe it is simply another form of gratitude.

Pricing:

• Hourly
• Sliding Scale
• Payment Plans
• Group Rate
• Special Events

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mindfulmindla.com/
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/MindfulMindLA
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheMindfulMind
• LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/joanna-gates-a8a4b639
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMindfulMind