I grew up in a tradition where meditation was a practice in my culture, in my family history, in my ancestors. However, I ignored it during medical school and only when the stress of internship and residency started to get to me.

Did I begin the practice in earnest in my early 30s?

And as soon as I picked it up, I knew this was the key to physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.

In medical school, there was a lot of stress in the early years of my practice and I recalled growing up with these ideas of being mindful or just asking myself am I aware and then bringing

awareness to anything that happens on the screen of consciousness and I'm just

witnessing it without preferentially focusing on it, but just

allowing it to come and go and then looking at all the other things happening in awareness

at the same time. And I also have a kind of a mantra

I can stop while I'm in activity and mentally ask myself, am I aware? And then just allow whatever comes across the screen of my consciousness to be there or not

and you'll find that nothing actually stays on the screen of awareness. It's like a television program on your television screen. It's not still, it's constantly moving as the TV program is moving,

but the screen of course, is not affected.

Another analogy, I think of space in a room

and all the furniture and the people in the room,

and they are moving about, and you're shifting the furniture and people and

objects are moving in the room but the space itself is not tarnished by

the turbulence of the movement of the furniture or the people.

So to the space of consciousness, which is who we are, the infinite space of consciousness, the non-local space of consciousness, the timeless space of

consciousness, the formless space of consciousness is not tarnished by any thought, by any feeling, by any image, by any sensation that drifts across it and arises and subsides as a modification of awareness,

while the awareness itself remains independent and free. Remember the real you is

intrinsically free of any thought or emotion unless you choose to identify it. Try practicing

witnessing your thoughts and see what happens. You stop classifying things

and then your mind automatically become silent and quiet.

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