An interview I did for my friends at Findresonance.com
Featured on: http://www.findresonance.com
“I was born in Tehran, raised in Hamburg and attended university in London. From my early childhood years I had an insatiable hunger for self-actualization. At 22, after a disillusioning three years of undergraduate school in Marketing and Advertising, I enrolled in a yoga /meditation teacher training in India. Driven by a deepened curiosity for human behavior, I came back to London for an MA in Social Anthropology and worked as a country reports producer around the world. Inspired by the notion of potential, I came to NY in 2009, and gradually discovered my professional calling. In NY, I encountered the path of Tibetan Buddhism and began studying under my root teacher H.H the 14th Dalai Lama. In 2013 I founded Neural Beings, my coaching practice, which is built on the foundation of Buddhist psychology and Western science.”
When did you start meditating?
I started meditating at the age of 22. That’s 11 years ago.
How do you incorporate mindfulness/meditation in your life?
Mindfulness, to me, is synonymous for awareness. It is a more acute intelligence that underlies all actions of body, speech and mind. Being mindful is the most systematic way of enhancing one’s quality of life and alleviating suffering for oneself and others.
As a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, the very preliminary practice of meditation is mindfulness practice – in order to stabilize the mind and nervous system and then go deeper into analytical mediations and more elaborate visualization techniques rooted in the 2,500 year old tradition that began with the historical Shakyamuni Buddha.
My intention is to be as aware as possible throughout the day, and to practice “listening” which is a skillful way of taming mental noise.
Mindfulness practice allows me to remain attentive to my subjective experience moment to moment, and also enables me to be present and relate more authentically with others. I believe that we ‘exist’ in relation to others, and therefore, the deeper we can relate to ourselves the more empathically we can relate to others.
Currently, I study at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science at Tibet House and practice yoga within the Vedic and Tibetan Buddhist traditions.