About

What I offer to you is my perspective as someone who has finished the practice of mindfulness. That is to say, someone who has fully realised the nature of our human mind.

 

Finishing your practice also means beginning a new life of mindful living. It’s the end of one journey in life that can be filled with confusion, and the beginning of a new journey filled with clarity. The Buddha described the practice as a boat to get across a river. Once you get to the other side – and complete the transformation of your mind – then you’re ‘finished’ with the boat. Then you live your life in this new land on this side of the river. 

 

My role is to help you build your own boat/practice, and guide you across the river. Given that I come from the other side, and cross back and forth regularly, I can offer you the most efficient and effective route there.

 

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I finished my practice in 2002, while living in London. I was ostensibly there to study baroque opera, but in actuality, I spent a year meditating (aka wrestling with my psyche) in the city’s beautiful parks. This was the culmination of events set in motion about 2,500 years earlier. 

 

The Mallas family (rulers of the Mallas kingdom) were students of the Buddha, and over the generations continued to teach and practice what he taught. This has created an epigenetic (changed brain structures) ‘meditation culture’ effect that runs in my family. Every generation, an elder will identify one or two people particularly suited for the ‘internal’ life of the mind. I was identified early on as one of these people.

 

My parents were the first generation of my family to move from a traditional, Indian centric lifestyle to a more globalised, modern life. They moved from India to California in 1970, when I was 3-months old, to do their PhDs in microbiology. The three themes of my adult life were there from the beginning:

 

Science – Parents’ professions

Music – Mom’s family culture

Meditation – Dad’s family culture 

 

When I was a kid, music and meditation were part of my daily life. Mom was a singer, and dad was his own version of a ‘modern monk’. They were both scientists. I was always deeply involved in singing (choirs, school musicals, etc.). When I was 5 years old, an uncle in India recognised me as one of the ‘internal’ type people, and I started practicing.

 

I would meditate with my dad for short periods, which increased as I got older. Visiting yogis and monks from India, or trips back to visit family involved more immersive practice and input from my uncle and other long-term meditators. 

 

As I got older, my practice became more structured, and included meditation, yoga and pranayama (breathwork). My practice partner was my father. A regular day started at 4:30am! We didn’t really talk about the practice much, but he clearly expressed the spirit of it in how he lived.

 

Practicing mindfulness for me was never an intellectual exercise. Whenever I had questions, the typical response I’d get, especially when I got too philosophical and ‘thinky’, was to ‘sit with the question’. Usually, after some time, the question itself would dissolve. Meaning, as I continued to practice, and got more clarity around the situation that led to my question, my understanding and thinking about it also changed, and I no longer had that particular question anymore.  

 

I followed in my parent’s footsteps, and studied science at university, focusing on evolutionary biology. This perspective – how our brains evolved – forms the foundation of our MoMoJo Mind Model, which informs the whole practice. But before I ever worked as a scientist, I went in a very different direction. 

 

A lifelong passion for music and singing led me to change course. I left the science world and jumped into the music world. I got a full-scholarship to a music conservatory and moved from California to New York City to study opera singing. I eventually found my niche using my breathwork, yoga and meditation skills to coach elite performers in how to use their bodies and minds to breathe, sing and perform better. Which is how I ended-up in London. 

 

In the year prior to finishing, I found myself in the middle of a major personal crisis. I was done with the music world, in the same way that I had been done previously with the science world. They weren’t for me. But what in the world was I supposed to do now?! I was 31 years old, and hadn’t trained for anything else. I was at a dead end, with no options in sight. 

 

At the same time, I became aware of a strong, internal pressure to go deeply into my meditation practice. Something wasn’t working right in my life. How did I get here? I sat with this existential struggle over many, many months. I had been practicing my whole life, but never in such a necessary and personal way. I had no more options on the outside, I simply had to find one on the inside. 

 

This, of course, was the fulfillment of what my uncle had picked out when I was 5 years old. My path was to be the internal one, into the life of the mind. This year of intense practice eventually led to my ‘finishing’, and the freedom of mind at the end of it. 

 

Then everything started over. My life, my story – the one you’re reading now – didn’t mean as much. ‘I’ didn't matter. And things were immeasurably better for it. I recognized what was happening from my family background and the stories of monks and yogis who had finished, but I managed the transformation on my own. Doing my own version of what some monks/yogis do, I changed my name for a year to the Sweet Diamond Love Machine, a carefully chosen description of the state I was in (aka in touch with our deepest nature). 

 

It had never occurred to me that I would make the practice the focus of my life, but at this point it was the obvious (and only!) choice. But I didn’t have a clue about what that was going to look like. I certainly didn’t see how I could teach the practice in the way that I had learned it, through a quiet, daily practice over many years. Soon enough though, sharing my experience with the people around me led to informal discussions and teaching, and it’s been growing ever since. 

 

After London, I moved to Melbourne and started a family. Practicing at a local yoga studio led to teaching there, which led to me opening my own yoga and meditation studio. 

 

At this point, still trying to work out how to best express the practice I had grown up with, I came across the term ‘mindfulness’, and realized that it was my lifelong meditation practice rebranded. With an example of how it was being taught in a modern way, I began crafting my own method of teaching that was true to my understanding of the practice, but was also suited for our contemporary lives and timeframes.

 

After many years of teaching and development, I offer this to you as the Modern Monk Journey.