I first discovered mindfulness meditation in 2016, during a free introductory course taught at my university. The teachings were well-timed. Only one year later I was to graduate, a period famously marked by questions like, “Who am I?” and “What is this life for?”

As I soon learned, these were the sorts of questions that mindfulness and meditation were well primed to answer. Why? Because they allow us to arrive at the only moment we have—this one—and see that below the clutter of our conditioning and day-to-day anxieties lies a truly wise and compassionate heart. If only we would sit down and meet it.

Throughout my training, I have largely followed the Insight Meditation tradition, a lineage rooted in the Vipassana teachings of Theravada Buddhism and the Pali Canon. I take some comfort in the fact that mindfulness and meditation do not come from the ether, but are practices born from a 2,500-year-old wisdom tradition, while still remaining open to those of all beliefs and backgrounds.

My daily practice has taken me from Boulder, Colorado, to Bodh Gaya, India; from parking lot meditations to multiple week-long silent retreats. Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of learning from teachers including Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach through their two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

A decade after that first meditation course, I now teach in university classrooms of my own. At Chapman University, I teach Mindfulness Rhetorics, a course that brings contemplative practice into the writing classroom while also critically examining the ways mindfulness has been adapted and debated in contemporary culture.

Beyond the university, I find joy in sharing what I’ve learned through meditation classes, retreats, and community practice. As the Buddha was told moments before he decided to teach, “There are beings with little dust in their eyes who are falling away because they do not hear [the teachings].”

I am no Buddha, of course, but I do believe that a life marked by the cultivation of presence and compassion is a life well lived.

So, let’s arrive there together.