IN ONE OF HIS FINAL BOOKS, Walking Each Other Home, Ram Dass writes: “The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back. We are all just walking each other home.” 

I love this quote as it beautifully describes my own beginnings in yoga and meditation. It began in chaos as our family’s center fractured due to my mother’s battles with mental illness. Everything around us was very unpredictable. The atmosphere at home would swing from hyper-vigilance to tremendous conviviality, sometimes within days. When my mother was sick, everyone took turns with the household chores, and our father’s immense resilience held us all tightly together. 

Navigating all this in my teen years, I learned to graduate from “watching for danger” to “witnessing with love” through the kindness of my siblings, who introduced me to yoga and showed me how to care for our dear mother compassionately. In those years, I got my first lessons in walking each other home with care and compassion. They remain with me decades later with joy and gratitude.

Her mental illness also propelled me to study physics and mathematics, and I became a physicist and yoga teacher as time went on. I fell in love with physics and its ability to create order through some of the most profound disorders in the material world around us. In fact, disorder is enshrined in the second law of thermodynamics, where we declare that the “disorderliness” or entropy of the universe is always increasing. It is so fascinating to observe that while one can shatter glass, one cannot reverse time to put the glass back together. When applied to our human minds, this seems hopeless. The most remarkable discovery for me is that, whilst this is true of the material world, human minds can be made whole through meditation. As my meditation teachers often point out, “We are already whole. We are already perfect”. There is tremendous logical beauty in this view of the world. Physics taught me that concepts such as duality, unpredictability, disorderliness, and chaos underlie what we take to be fixed and immutable. Our fractured pasts are also impermanent.

I began teaching yoga twenty years ago on weekends. My approach to yoga has always been to combine physical postures with the deep awareness of the bodily sensations in each pose. This combination arose out of my experiences as an early meditator. I was fortunate to begin my meditation journey as a Goenka Vipassana student in my late 20s. Teaching yoga as a service to my community has been very rewarding over the years, from helping folks recover from surgeries to improving their posture and physical well-being. It is also clear that we need to incorporate more meditation into our yoga classes to support their mental well-being.

In 2016, I first encountered teachings by Mingyur Rinpoche when I took an online course on love and compassion meditation, in essence, the Joy of Living Level 2. Although I have read and followed several Tibetan Buddhist masters, his teachings on love and compassion felt so personal, intimate, and liberating. Practicing these teachings methodically, I found myself opening and closing several cracks and layers within me. I felt I was given a microscope with which to see inside myself, with curiosity, and then take that lamp to see others around me.  Most importantly, I understood why my mother’s journey helped me build my own resilience. 

As Jack Kornfield writes, “Wisdom is knowing that we are interconnected. Compassion is the natural response of an open heart to that interconnectedness. Together, they are the two wings of a bird-you need both to fly.” Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings have helped me build this bird and provide the lift it needed to fly. I have waited several decades to find what Patrul Rinpoche would describe as “My Perfect Teacher.” He says blind faith is a logical error. As I took Mingyur Rinpoche’s courses over the years, I felt that all the disparate strands in my own life were so strongly intertwined. The wings were there all along. All I had to do was recognize it and use it to fly.

I decided to enroll in Tergar’s Meditation Teacher Training program in 2025 and began my training in September. The teachings on how to connect and braid awareness, love, compassion, and wisdom are profound ones as we go about our busy daily lives. There is such strength in these teachings, which come from a deep sense of optimism and kindness. I am like the traveler who found a lake in the oasis and wants to hasten to share it with the world. The warmth of these teachings is such an antidote to a world withdrawing into its own cold nationalistic cocoons. 

My yoga students, friends, and family are looking forward to my sharing some of my own learnings with them. We are all going to walk each other home. As Ram Dass writes, “The only thing I have to offer you is my own work on myself. I can’t ‘fix’ you; I can only sit with you while you fix yourself. We are all just walking home.”

2026