I discovered meditation in 2015 during my sophomore year of college. I had stumbled into a class on the history and psychology of buddhist meditation, and I was introduced to a way of seeing and being in the world that completely changed my life. There was a mysterious, but unmistakable sense of familiarity with the ideas I was uncovering, which made this time in my life feel more like a homecoming than a new discovery. Something deep inside me was beginning to wake up. The world shimmered with beauty, connection, and life, and the pull to explore this mystery more fully was so strong that I decided to spend that summer on my own sort of pilgrimage. I spent three months traveling to different retreat centers and monasteries, and what I thought would be a brief dip into another world was actually the beginning of a long journey of discovery.
With a background in Cognitive Neuroscience, I came to find that meditation, rather than the sciences, was actually the greatest tool I had for investigating the mysteries of being alive. And so, with the sciences informing and corroborating my contemplative explorations, I dove even more fully into the path of meditation, and the melding of these two disciplines has become my life’s work.
With over 700 hours of formal practice and 85 days on retreat, I’ve spent the last few years training at centers like Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, and the Monastic Academy. I’ve worked with a wide range of teachers, including Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Amaro, Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Kristen Neff, Chris Germer, Michele McDonald, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, Soryu Forall, and Loch Kelly but I consider myself to be primarily a student of Har-Prakash Khalsa and Shinzen Young.