Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. My name is Thomas Mekonki. Thank you for joining us today.

I am digging season two. I'm really happy to be back and we've even gotten some comments from listeners that our sound has improved on our previous studio quality sound. So that is encouraging. I have a story for you today. If you haven't tuned into the podcast before,

this is a podcast about how paying attention in a particular way can help you live a more

happy and fulfilled life just by changing the way you pay attention. So I explore principles of mindful awareness,

meditation, human development. I often teach a brief concept, share a story, and then we go into

an actual practice. So we put these learnings into practice all in the same episode. That's what's going to happen today.

So the story, when you practice mindfulness long enough, you pick up stories along the way,

and some of them, I've got to say, are really good stories. I have fallen in love with

storytelling just in my 20 years of meditation practice.

And I couldn't believe I looked at the annals.

I looked at the record of season one.

I can't believe I never thought to tell this story.

This is one of the best ones I've come across.

And it comes to me by way of Shin Zen Yong, who's been a longtime mindfulness teacher of mine,

an incredibly gifted teacher, a pioneer in this area, a man I deeply love and revere.

We actually have an interview with him from season one.

If you haven't heard it, it's definitely worth checking out just to get acquainted with Shinsen the man,

Shinsen the legend, and his really unique body of work within the mindfulness tradition.

So Shenzhen tells me a story that I'm going to tell you. He is a science guy, so he has

science buddies. One of them is a bi guy, so he has science buddies.

One of them is a biologist, stem cell researcher.

This happened years ago, and Shenzhen was visiting his friend's laboratory.

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