Individual Awakening Connections

My upbringing growing up in the small bubble of expat communities of Nepal, Haiti, and Vietnam set the stage for an early existential crisis that erupted upon moving to Seattle in my 10th grade. My happiness up to that point had been entirely built on external validation. I had no internal resources to navigate my psycho emotional life. Unable to stand out in this strange new environment as I was accustomed to all my life, a profound disillusionment threatened to entrench itself deep in my core .

As the pillars of my life quickly crumbled, I sought nourishment from the Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. One line in that book changed the course of my life, stating, "just as you create your suffering so too do you create your own happiness."  That was the moment I took responsibility for my misery, and realized only a major transformation of heart could ensure the rest of my life would be fulfilling for myself and beneficial to others.

I ran away from home at 16, (my parents and I unable to communicate amidst all the upheaval), to deepen my initial explorations of meditation at a monastery in central-eastern Thailand. There, in the quiet grove that surrounded the meditation hut they had given me, I experienced for the first time a total acceptance for the way things were. In the absence of the nearly continuous obsession with pursuit of a goal, or   self-improvement, or out performing others, a quiet peace I had not known before flooded my heart, and there I knew was the essence of what I had been looking for.

For the next 12 years I dove deeper and deeper into the world of Buddhist meditation, primarily through the tradition of Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka. Over that time I spent more than a year accumulatively in silent retreats at meditation centers and by myself in the woods, as well as many months immersing myself in service to support others on their retreats.

On one retreat in particular, my heart grew very quiet and my sense of self nearly completely dissolved. As subject-object perception collapsed, I realized that what I thought was me, was only the flow of consciousness arising and passing at stunning velocity- and none of it was personal. If I could release all identification with this flow, I knew I would be free of suffering. Then and there, I knew it was my life's purpose to be free of suffering and to help others be free of suffering.

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The effects of the retreat on my daily life were entirely transformative. Deeply ingrained patterns of self-deprecation, comparison with others, neurotic self-analysis and many more had disappeared, allowing for entirely new and clearer ways of thinking. The profound release of anger, and sadness, and fear that had occurred on the retreat, had left my heart in this mesmerizing, paradoxical place of grounded tenderness, where kindness, compassion and peace, of an order I had never known possible, seem to infuse every moment.

For many years, I followed the guidance of the meditative tradition, to sit longer and longer meditation retreats every year, to serve as much as I could, and spend the rest of my life fulfilling my societal duties. It was a recipe that for me, not only led to a gradual erosion of my meditation, but also deep fissures in my personality- ones that only became clear upon leaving the tradition in 2019.

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What I was beginning to realize was that the deep feelings, both painful and joyous, as well as the refined states of consciousness that I was experiencing while sitting, did not have a place in our social construct, and so were confined solely to retreats and my daily meditations. I had considered becoming a monk many times but something felt off about removing myself from humanity in such a stark way.

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A year after leaving the tradition, I finished my first year as a nurse, which for me represented a foothold in society. It was also the point I'd promised myself since deciding to be a nurse, that I would fully open myself to life and its purpose for me.

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A week later my now wife, and childhood friend, called me asking me whether I would come to Mexico and help her through a difficult period. 

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Connecting with me