My meditation journey

From not being able to sit for 5 minutes to teaching thousands of people how to meditate.

Over the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to teach tens of thousands of people the art of meditation, and I'm frequently asked about how I got here. So here's the story.

I began my meditation practice in August of 2019. I was 22 years old and in my last year of college.

I actually started practicing meditation after watching a video of Kobe Bryant (my hero at the time) talking about the importance of his daily meditation practice. At the time, I knew nothing about meditation...I honestly didn't have very much interest in it at all.

But I remember thinking, “If Kobe takes time to meditate every day, it must be pretty important.” So I committed myself to start meditating every day.

The video that started it all (starts talking about meditation at 2:12)👇

I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that I would need a system to keep track of my daily practice if I actually wanted to stick with it. So I ordered a habit tracking journal, The Best Journal Ever, and it was a game changer. For the first time in my life, I was able to stick with new habits, including meditation, journaling, stretching, reading and sleeping enough.

As you can see I started slow, but that's why it I was able to stick with it. I wanted to make sure I could do it every day. I did miss a few days, but staying on track 90% of the time was a success to me.

I started by listening to a few guided meditations, but quickly started sitting on my own. I didn't like listening to other people very much.

I would go out to my front yard every morning, set my phone timer for 5 minutes, close my eyes and focus on my breath. When my mind wandered off, I did my best to notice it and come back to my breath.

This was not an easy practice for me. I could barely sit still. My mind would wander off constantly and there were many times where I felt like I was wasting my time.

After opening my eyes, I remember feeling pretty peaceful, and that the tree I sat in front of looked more alive and vibrant. But other than that, I didn't notice any lasting changes until a few weeks later.

About 2 weeks after starting my meditation practice, something interesting happened. I was getting out of my car to go to walk into work (I was working as a locker room boy at a luxury hotel at the time), and my thermos of piping hot coffee spilled all over me. Ouch.

I stood there for a moment, processing what just happened, and started laughing to myself. I was running late for work, I had hot coffee on my clothes, all over my car, and not to mention burning my skin - and I just stood there laughing.

After a few moments, I took some napkins out of my glove department, cleaned up what I could, and walked into work.

As I walked into work, I remember thinking to myself "That was kinda weird. Why did I start laughing?" Normally I would've gotten upset or at least a little bit annoyed. But I didn't even feel bothered in the least! "Could it be the meditation?” I thought, ”It can't be, it's only been 2 weeks and I've barely been sitting for 5 minutes a day."

But later that same day, one of my coworkers came up to me and said she noticed something was different about me. She said I seemed calmer and more at peace. I told her I’d been meditating and that it might be changing my life. 😂

That was the day I realized I was starting to change, so I made sure to continue my practice. The first month I sat for 5 minutes a day, the second month I sat for 10, then 15, then 20. As I continued to practice, things continued to change.

I began to see everything so clearly. For the first time, I was able to respond consciously to what happened to me instead of reacting compulsively and letting my environment control how I feel.

After a few months, my experience of life was completely transformed. I learned what it felt like to actually be present, my anxiety was gone, and I felt more clarity than ever. I knew that I wanted to share this gift with as many people as I could.

Another thing that pushed me deeper into meditation and spirituality were my experiences with the guests at the hotel I was working at. Being one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, I would meet and talk to billionaires and celebrities on a weekly basis. Through these encounters, I learned that many of these people who had "everything": the money, the status, the fame...weren’t actually happy at all.

This helped confirm that there was something much more important than external wealth and success. And through deepening my own meditation practice and reading books like The Power of Now, Tao Te Ching, The Surrender Experiment, Freedom from the Known and others - I began to find some answers.

As I continued learning, I began sharing what I discovered online - and I quickly grew a large following on tiktok. This was right when covid first started, and the world seemed to need this information more than ever. Isolated from family, friends, coworkers...people were forced to look inward.

So in the summer of 2020, I began guiding live meditations twice a day, every single day for free to my online audience. I hosted two sessions a day because I had many followers who lived in Europe and Asia and I wanted to make sure they could join at least one.

After a month, I brought it down to once a day as it was getting tough to guide two meditations every day. I still made sure to guide every day because it was important to me that I helped people stay consistent. I had everyone commit to practicing every day, so we called ourselves "the committed community".

About 3 months later in October 2020, I took a break from guiding meditations to set off on a cross country road trip. I bought myself a van a few months earlier right after graduating from college, and felt a calling to explore (inspired by the movie Into the Wild).

Those 3 months of solo-traveling across the country gave me some much needed clarity on life. I saw that mindfulness is what people needed more than anything, and that I was going to do whatever I could to bring it to as many people as I could.

Coming back home from this trip with a newfound sense of clarity, I continued learning about and making content around mindfulness and spirituality.

I started guiding daily live meditations again - and in the spring of 2021, I brought on some incredible volunteers to help. It was amazing to grow such an incredible community around what was most important to me, but I wanted to find a way to reach more people.

In November of 2021 while I was traveling in Portugal, a company reached out and offered to make me my own app to spread my teachings on meditation. I didn't take them up on it, but it was a fascinating idea that I began to explore.

I sat on this beach in Ericeira, Portugal while talking to them.

It was clear to me that the hardest part of teaching meditation was getting people to stick with it, so I wanted to create something that would help solve this.

That's when I found MindGarden.

It was late December 2021 and I was doing research on different meditation apps. I stumbled across MindGarden, an app that started doing something that no other app was doing.

It turned meditation into a game, where you grow your own garden as you practice and visualize your progress. I thought it was genius!

The app was brand new and still working out a lot of bugs; but the idea excited me, so I emailed the founder and introduced myself.

It turns out it was built and ran by one guy: Dante Kim. He was also on a mission to teach the world how to meditate after it helped him overcome his own mental health challenges in school. After a few zoom calls and a trip to Philadelphia (where he lived at the time), we agreed to partner together to build MindGarden.

For the majority of 2022, we both worked full time to make MindGarden what it is today. It was the most difficult, yet fulfilling challenge of my life so far.

Here’s a photo of me teaching a stranger to meditate in Denmark.

It's been amazing to see how much people have been enjoying the app and I'm beyond grateful that we've been able to give the gift of meditation to so many people.

So, that's how I got here (writing this in December 2022). Hopefully this story gives you some inspiration to pursue what you find meaningful in this life, or maybe even to start a meditation practice.

Writing this, I can see how much I’ve changed in the past few years, and that my meditation practice was only one (but important) part of my inner transformation.

So as I take a step back from MindGarden, I'll be focusing more on exploring different ways to express this inner freedom I've found. I'll be doing more traveling while I share my insights here on this site, in my upcoming book, and through the medium of music.

The quote I'll leave you with today was said by Steve Jobs:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

If you’ve read this far, thank you for being here. You can subscribe below if you'd like to get my new posts as I write them.

Helpful Resources:

Intro to Meditation - free video course on youtube for beginners

MindGarden - daily meditation made fun

Habit Tracking Journal (the one I used)

Books:

Mindfulness in Plain English

The Power of Now

The Surrender Experiment

The Tao of Daily Life

Sending love 🤍