Before coming to this path, I spent my life trying to figure out the rules of the world and play them well. I measured success by how well I could become the person I thought I was supposed to be: beautiful, accomplished, socially successful, athletic, and able to get what I wanted.
On the surface, I did a decent job of it. But underneath, I suffered tremendously. I was deeply insecure and self-conscious, constantly measuring myself through other people’s perceptions. I was always chasing some idea of who I ought to be in order to earn love and validation. I didn’t know how to ask the more fundamental questions: Who am I? What is actually true? What really matters?
The structures I had built my life around were like a house made of toothpicks. They might have looked fine from a distance, but they had no foundation in anything lasting. When life changed or something fell apart, I had very little inner stability to meet it.
For the past thirteen years, studying with Rama and Sunyata has been a journey of building that foundation. I have learned to recognize the fears, desires, reactions, and projections that had been running my life, and to use them as opportunities to become more conscious. Rather than trying to control everything outside of myself, I have learned to take responsibility for where I put my mind.
One of the most important teachings for me has been that what matters more than what happens is the state of mind I bring to what happens.
Learning to Come Back to Silence
I love to meditate, and I cannot imagine my life without the grounding and perspective it gives me every day.
For much of my life, I could barely distinguish my own experience from the perceptions and expectations of the people around me. During my first year on the path, Sunyata would ask me how I was doing, and I would answer by telling her how everyone else was doing. I was so absorbed in other people and my ideas about them that I could hardly locate myself.
Meditation has taught me to question the authority of my thoughts, emotions, and reactions. A simple question I return to again and again is: Is this Real, or is this just a projection of my mind?
I have learned that I do not have to believe every thought that passes through my mind. I can allow a reaction to arise without feeding it into a story. I can feel something fully and still let it go. I can return to the present.
Meditation has repeatedly been the way I find my way back.
Learning from Sunyata
I walked into my first workshop with Sunyata in August 2014, and I was immediately struck by something I had never experienced in quite that way before: Love.
I remember hearing her laugh with complete freedom and genuine joy. There was something about the absence of self-consciousness in that laughter that stopped me. I felt that here was someone who was free in a way I was not. I took myself very seriously and lived inside so many opinions and insecurities that I had forgotten what it felt like to simply be.
I also remember watching Sunyata embrace a woman who had shared that she had recently lost her husband and was struggling deeply with the loss. I assumed Sunyata must have known her for years because of the depth of Love I witnessed in that moment. In fact, they had only just met.
I wasn’t hearing a teaching about Love from a book. I was watching it happen in real time.
I knew after that workshop that I had found something I wanted to understand more deeply. I had met someone whose way of being showed me a possibility for my own life.
Over the years, Sunyata has taught me to look honestly at my conditioning without needing to blame anyone for it. She helped me see that reacting against my conditioning could bind me to it just as much as accepting it unconsciously. The deeper freedom was to become quiet enough to discover who I was underneath those patterns.
She has taught me to recognize insecurity, fear, anger, and self-doubt not as fixed parts of who I am, but as states of mind that I can become conscious of and move beyond. Her teaching has given me a framework for standing in my own strength without needing to prove anything to anyone.
Learning from Rama
I am also here because of Rama.
Through Rama’s teachings, music, talks, and the experiences I have had in places where his teachings have been practiced, I have encountered a dimension of consciousness that I had never known how to access before.
His talks have become a continuing source of learning for me. I can listen to the same material at different points in my life and hear something completely different, because I am different. As my awareness changes, the teachings reveal new dimensions.
His music has become another form of practice. Listening to it has taught me to quiet my mind and become sensitive to experiences that I cannot necessarily explain intellectually. It has expanded my sense of what is possible beyond the limited frameworks I used to live inside.
Over the years, I have also traveled with the community to places including the desert, Joshua Tree, Tahoe, Torrey Pines, Bandelier, New York City, and Mt. Tam. These experiences have taught me to encounter the teachings not just as concepts, but through meditation, nature, silence, music, movement, and community.
Why I Am Still Here
What keeps me here is simple: I have experienced something through this path that I have not found anywhere else.
I have experienced moments of stillness, Love, connection, wonder, and direct awareness that have fundamentally changed how I understand myself and my life. I have also experienced my own confusion, ego, fear, and attachment more directly than I ever did before. The path has given me a way to work with all of it.
I am not here because I have arrived at some finished state. I am here because I am still learning.
I am learning to get over myself and my self-absorption. I am learning to trust direct experience over the stories my mind creates. I am learning to feel deeply without becoming trapped in what I feel. I am learning to bring consciousness into ordinary moments and to choose Love and Unity over the endless demands of my own preferences.
Most importantly, I am learning that every part of life can become an opportunity to grow in awareness.
That is what Rama and Sunyata have given me: not simply ideas about how to live, but a practice of discovering for myself what is Real.
And there is still nothing I find more exciting, precious, or worthwhile than that.