You know that you've been studying mindfulness and practicing meditation for a long time.

Was there an event in your life that led you towards learning about those things and seeking those tools?

Or was it something that just kind of gradually over time something that you found

interest in and then you moved further and further into.

Absolutely.

The, well a couple of events.

One is like you, I'm a meditator but also a musician long before I was a meditator.

So when I was in college I had two passions.

One was for jazz. I was going to potentially be a jazz piano player

and the other was for philosophy and I remember making what I thought of at the

time as the pragmatic decision to become a philosopher because I thought that was a better career

path which is hilarious in retrospect but anyway I did

end up getting a PhD in philosophy and teaching as a professor at the end of my PhD program so about 10 years into that whole process, two things happened.

One was I was just starting to burn out.

I mean, graduate school was so incredibly intense. starting to The other is that I had a pretty serious bike accident.

I ended up getting a pretty severe concussion.

And for the first time in my life experienced

really intense anxiety and depression and the combination of those two led me to

this realization that even though I was reading all these amazing texts and

I was asking these big questions as a philosopher,

I wasn't actually gaining any tools for managing my own mind. Right?

Like there was a way in which after all of this training,

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