The Gist

• I offer meditation guidance. Online and in person.
• I also teach classes at schools and offices. Reach out to book me.
• Certified mindfulness meditation teacher, by
• I'm a new dad.
• I write code sometimes.

Deeper

My parents raised me like a lot of Chinese kids—"do it or else you're punished."

But I had all sorts of questions.

I wondered over and over why I needed to follow the butt grooves of society.

[sarcasm] Hey, let's all go get good grades so we can go get fancy careers so we can buy houses and cars and have children. And then ... die happy? Or just die?

Adults always had answers, and those answers always amounted to "keep quiet and stop asking so much nonsense."

So after a while, I stopped asking out loud.

I thought I was crazy.

Why didn't anyone else see that nothing made sense?

Why isn't anyone asking questions?

How is everyone just OK with the way things are?

I thought:

Maybe they don't have the answers. Or maybe the answers are out there, and you get them after being smart at a top-notch university and getting a baller ass job then buying a baller ass car. Those guys (the people in the TV) look happy. Maybe they have it figured out. Maybe they know something I don't. I mean, they're adults—they're my parents and teachers, fgs!

I ended up trying what they wanted of me. After years of struggling to do pretty much everything, I eventually slugged my way through a degree in Computer Science and got a job. I also got married and bought a car.

And you know what? I could finally say the saddest "I told you so" ever. It didn't make me any happier. None of it felt right.

...

In 2015, I went through a divorce.

My sense of identity broke down, and I started meditating as a way to hack my own brain—you know, be a "better" version of myself 😂.

I wanted to be more productive, and I also wanted answers to life's questions—the ones I asked when I was a kid. I got the productivity, and some of the answers, even, but mostly, the questions just kept asking themselves.

But I did find something, though.

I remember standing in that big hall at 1440 (Multiversity, a retreat center in the Santa Cruz foothills), looking around at the 300 other teachers-in-training and Jack and Tara (our teachers), and I remember thinking:
Huh. I wasn't crazy after all.

I had found them: the others who hadn't stopped asking. And they gave me the permission to be who I already was but had forgotten, the curious kid I'd always been.

I tried what the system wanted. And turns out it wasn't for me. It turns out a lot about this world is strange and messed up.

Another Way

Meditation didn't fix me. It helped me reconnect to my own body and helped me see the anxiety, pain, and anger inside. It's also given me ways to reconnect to other people and the world.

Life is a damn interesting experience; I'd forgotten how to pay attention to it.

I teach because I really do believe in it—I think we'd all be better off if we meditated. With mindfulness, I think we can learn to live better together.

Teachers