I am in the last months of the internationally renowned two year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certificate Program taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield; I will be graduating in February, 2027. Visiting teachers in the program have included Sharon Salzberg, Kazu Haga, Frank Oskaseski, Gabor Maté, Rick Hanson, Anne Cushman and Lama Rod Owens.  

My grandmother used to often say “God works in mysterious ways”. All these decades later I think how true this statement is, though perhaps I would say “Life works in mysterious ways”. There are so many things that happen over the course of a lifetime that we cannot explain. My grandmother was a nurse during and after WWI by the time she was eighteen years old.  She met her husband (my grandfather), while he was in a hospital bed, recovering from the Spanish Influenza, she lived through WWII when her street was bombed during the Blitz, she emigrated from London after the war ended to settle in Carmel, California (a place she’d never heard of in her entire life until her daughter, my mother, fell in love with an American foot soldier), and held joy and gratitude at the centre of her heart for the rest of her life. Her belly laugh still rings in my head and her name was Alice. 

My own definition of God is a creative, cosmic, inexplicable and ever-present, force greater than human consciousness. After all the personal suffering she experienced during her lifetime, I like to think we are in agreement about God.

I came to teach mindfulness meditation later in life, after a decades-long journey of never finding what felt right for me.

Combined with a series of challenging and life-threatening experiences, I never guessed  becoming a mindfulness meditation teacher is where I would land. And yet, I cannot imagine a more suitable path for me. One day a few years ago, I opened a marketing email from Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, inviting me to apply to their two year Meditation Teacher Training Certificate Program. I immediately knew this was for me, that I could help others at a time of tremendous suffering. I know  about suffering and trauma from my own lived experiences, and realized these were my blueprint to offering compassion and loving kindness.

I first came to meditation growing up in the 1960s in Carmel, CA. The era was a time when yoga or meditation, acupuncture and Chinese medicines or exercises such as karate or even vegetarian diets were judged very esoteric by some and embraced by others away from mainstream culture. My piano teacher introduced me to the mystic side of life when I was very young, about nine, showing me what meditation was and how to sit in a contemplative position and what that was, not that I understood much at the time. She gave me books such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha when I was fifteen, Eugene Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery when I was sixteen and a few decades later, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Over the years, meditation came and went from my life until it became a solidified practice sending me into this magical discipline that changed my life for the better. Nine Lives Meditation  is an offering that life does and can change, no matter any age, and we can have some say in how we approach it.