724. Living Her Own Story, in the Moment

Natalie Creeden

“Granted, you’re probably not going to go from being an analyst to being an astronaut overnight, but I do think there are possibilities and that the real change can be created when we change our mindset about things.”

Natalie Creeden has been practicing and studying the art of mindfulness, meditation and yoga since 2002. These modalities improved her life so much that she decided to study for over 18 months to share the power of these practices with others. Natalie trained as a Primordial Sound Meditation Instructor with Deepak Chopra at the Chopra Center for Well-Being in Southern California. She is also a certified Kundalini Yoga and Meditation teacher and says she will forever be a student of the mind and the mind-body connection.

How Did You Start Using Your Talents?

“After a couple of years in Wachovia Bank’s world-class associate program where I got to work in different business units and with all kinds of people with different roles and responsibilities—all the things they don’t teach you in school—I decided I didn’t want to climb the corporate ladder. As luck would have it, the operations manager in our family business retired after almost 30 years in the business. I thought long and hard about it and realized there wouldn’t be another position like this opening up for a long time. I accepted the job, and put so much of what I had learned in my college studies and in my internships and other training programs at Wachovia to immediate use.”

The Most Impactful Turning Point?

“The summer before my senior year of college at UNC, Charlotte, I had a splendid opportunity to intern at Wachovia Bank. My supervisor encouraged me to go around and talk to as many people as I could in the department to ask if they had any career advice that might help me along my journey. I learned that a lot of people were not at all sure what they wanted to be when they grew up. They were still trying to figure it out. That feedback was very interesting to me and helped take a lot of pressure off that I was putting on myself at the time to figure it out, that I could take a breath, relax and know that the first job I took was not going to necessarily be the end all, be all.”

The Most Powerful Lessons Learned?

“Some friends took a transcendental meditation training where they learned how to meditate on their own, and they loved it. I took the course and it was the most wonderful thing I had done for myself because it gave me the power to sit and quiet my mind, in essence to cleanse my mind. After reading “The Power of Now,” by Eckhart Tolle, the idea began to take shape in my mind of what a wonderful job it would be to actually teach meditation. A year or so went by, and then in 2016 I decide to embark on teacher meditation training.”