From Microsoft to meditation – Why I became a mindfulness teacher | Part 1

Lighting up and flaming out

When the clock struck midnight to welcome 2017, I counted my many blessings. I had a good job with a supportive team, a loving partner, a cozy home in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, dreamy adventures in faraway lands, and an abundance of friends to play and connect with.

Beneath the surface, though, something was amiss. I’d had severe insomnia since high school or earlier, and needed drugs to reliably fall asleep. I tensed up from simple activities like cooking, driving, and social interaction, leaving me frequently exhausted and grumpy. I was constantly self-critical, and struggled to make any decisions. Life had become a series of problems to be optimally solved instead of a mystery to be explored or an adventure to be enjoyed. Often I would need to get high, turn the lights off and ambient music on, and lay on an acupressure mat for an hour or more just to unwind and reset. To most of the world I appeared chill, but internally my nonstop worries kept my nervous system on a constant high alert, and when my stress burst to the surface it could take hours or even days to pass.

But the truth of all that hadn’t sunk in yet.

Meanwhile, I was considering guiding meditations again for the first time in five years. As homework for an online Masters in Education I needed to design a short curriculum, and there was only one subject that I wanted to teach: mindfulness. My interest in the practice had been jump-started by a free ten-day silent Vipassana retreat I’d attended in Canada two years after college. I didn’t expect much from it – after leaving the orthodox religion of my youth as a Penn sophomore, I was highly skeptical towards anything spiritual. But two close friends from college had told me how meditation helped them, and I figured that I might finally learn how to sit on the ground comfortably.

Something much more magical happened instead.

After the first two days of focusing on the breath (through the increasingly intense pain in my stiff legs), I found that I could focus like never before, able to stare for minutes in total absorption at a leaf outside between sessions. As we began to scan through the body, I discovered a whole world of sensations inside that I never knew existed. And as we learned how Buddhist psychology explains that suffering is caused by attachment to and aversion from experiences that are by nature impermanent, I found myself able to sense inside and release inflammation in my sinuses that had caused frequent illness since childhood. Another afternoon I felt a huge wave of disgust rippling through me as a fly landed on my arm, then heat as the energy dissipated, and then a gentle tickle as I allowed the fly to hang out – for the first time in my life.

For the next month after, my whole body was buzzing with energy, joy, and love for the world. I started leading meditations for my friends in New York and asked my favorite professor, Adam Grant, if he could connect me with researchers looking into how meditation improves performance. I figured that empirical research could convince more people and organizations to try and experience this magic.

Then, however, was not yet my time. Those leads fell through, a short but intense relationship that I had begun ended sadly, and the buzz was wearing off – my plans to dedicate my life to meditation were put on hold. For the next five years I meditated on my own, often reactively to get through stressful days and long sleepless nights.

Check back next week to read about my return to teaching in Part 2: Opening hearts and minds