I was born in the late-1970s as a second and a half generation Singaporean from Chinese immigrants. To be exact, my mom was from Hainan （海南） and moved to Singapore with her parents when she was seven. My dad was born in Singapore to parents who moved from Chao Zhou （潮州）. My parents attended Chinese-medium school and met through a common Chinese Teacher. Growing up in the 80s where Singapore was going through rapid transformation from a developing to developed nation meant that both my parents had to work very hard to keep up with the advancements while leaving their children to the care of our grandparents. My two older brothers stayed at home under the care of my dad's parents. As the youngest child (and the 'extra' child beyond the 'stop at two' birth control policy), I was raised by my maternal grandma. I was really fortunate in that way as I remember my grandma telling me that my paternal grandmother dislike girls, which I understood it to be true as I grow up with more stories about her and learning about the explicit role of gender biasness in feudalistic societies. My grandma seemed to know clearly such biasness from her own inability to receive education as a girl (despite being a highly intelligent being), and the shame and later on joy for having conceived a male child in her late 40s to continue the family line, and would not surrender to any of such inequality in her life within her capacity. This is why I found it a blessing to be raised by her. She fed me really well despite the poor living conditions and taught me all the things she could possibly teach, including her grit, fearlessness and her handicraft skills. The only regret I had was not picking up her cooking skills.

The days living with and following grandma like a shadow everywhere she goes was perhaps the reason why I developed a sensitivity towards social justice early on in life, from standing up for a female classmate I perceived being bullied by another boy when I was five (and ended up being punished by the teacher in class), to chastising my uncle who often compelled grandma into giving him money to feed his gambling and drinking habits, and witnessing my natural compassionate response whenever I see helpless old ladies in the modern society.

My sense of social equality was perhaps honed further in education environments. As Singapore went through a massive period of resettlement from village dwelling to public apartments ("HDBs") in the early 80s, grandma and I moved to live with my family on my dad’s side in a three-bedroom apartment in Ang Mo Kio. The house was crowded but it was lively. I enjoyed my time in a neighbourhood primary school and did surprisingly well to enter a well-known Catholic missionary girls' secondary school that was rooted in Chinese cultural values with quite a number of notable alumna well-established in various fields. I grew up with values such as “德、智、体、群、美”， “入的厨房、出得厅堂” on top of the other Chinese values my parents have inculcated in us such as 尊师重道 and 四维八德. Being values, it takes a while to truly live by them. Sometimes it takes experiencing missteps as a human being to reflect upon these values in order to understand them, and fully embrace them. Such reflections which happen out of regretful actions happen frequently as I looked back into the way of life I had in my 20s. Experiences of setbacks from education, feelings of rejection from my mother, losing my grandma who was my pillar of support, and entering the rat-race of competitive Singapore with the need to prove myself to others resulted in a period of disconnection with my core nature. Or perhaps it was deluded times like this that would evoke the arising of our innate goodness to nudge us back to inner connection.

My penchant to excel in life landed me to doing my post-graduate study in a prestigious ivy-league university in upstate New York on Singapore Government scholarship. One day, my Asian-American classmates told me about a meditation course held on-campus. I ended signing up just because the benefits of resonated with me. At that time, I was going through depressive symptoms from an indecision to leave a marriage and had visited the counselling centre every week to no knowledge of any friends and family. I did not know what was really going on with my meditative practice that supported that difficult period, but somehow, something seemed to click from within. This curiosity subsequently nudged me to actively explore meditation since I return to Singapore. I explored meditation practices of various types (including Insight and Loving-Kindness), in various Buddhist traditions, as ‘secular’ mindfulness was unheard of then. I took various Dhamma classes at the monasteries and Buddhist centres and went on several silent meditation retreats with monastics in the Thai Forest tradition as I lived through a hectic consulting work-life and healing from my divorce.

The long hours at work and perhaps the unconscious dissonance with the consulting work I was doing despite being lauded as a star achiever eventually took a toll on my well-being. For more than two years, I experienced physical health symptoms that Western medicine could not explain, and a deep sense of lack of meaning. In early 2012, I resigned from work and took an 8-month sabbatical. I spent a couple of months as a volunteer in Cambodia-Siem Reap, went on silent retreats with my monastic teachers, became an accidental Yoga teacher, and found myself immersing in yogic teachings that bear resemblance with the Dhamma teachings I was practicing. My sabbatical upended after I accepted a job offer from my ex-firm rehiring me back into the US head office.

As I moved back to the familiar Florida office and doing somewhat similar kind of consulting work, and reported to my CEO, I encountered moments of revelations towards the nature of consulting work, and towards the company’s leadership philosophy that I found to be running against my ethical values. I reckoned that those values had become clear within my consciousness seeded by the contemplative practices over the years, especially during the sabbatical. I also realized how my body had surprisingly self-healed from the old physical symptoms from the yogic asanas and perhaps from the way of life I adopted. I knew that staying back in the kind of opportunistic consulting work was no longer the way of life for me. I made my slow exit from consulting and transitioned first into yoga teaching, yoga therapy and associated healing modalities originating from India.

However I knew internally that there was something beyond yoga that I was meant to do. While I had thoughts of returning to school to do a PhD, I could not bring myself to apply for a business-centric PhD even though it would have been relatively easy to get into with my academic profile. The PhD search, however, brought me to chance upon the vast research work on mindfulness meditation and well-being. This blew my mind as I mapped those findings with my own healing and transformation journey, and see the immense potential in helping many others through this path. As I kept abreast of the mindfulness development work in the UK – which was at the forefront in its application at the societal level (in parliament, healthcare, social justice, education, and workplace and later released the first Mindful Nation UK report in 2015), I eventually made the decision to retrain as a contemporary mindfulness teacher with several US and UK institutions, teaching evidenced-based Mindfulness-Based Programs such as the MBSR and MSC and Workplace Mindfulness. I became one of the pioneering teachers in Singapore.

My under-fulfilled curiosity of the impact of mindfulness on individuals and society eventually brought me to embark on a professional doctorate research program at NTU. The issue of the lack of contemplative approaches in education – from my own lived experience through the competitive Singapore education landscape prompted me to begin the work on educators whose wellbeing had been overshadowed by the national pursuit of students’ academic achievements and national/international rankings. Despite the conviction and knowing that it was going to be a long journey, little did I know that I would encounter a painful experience of the suppression of research freedom from my own Education ministry in conducting a mindfulness intervention for public school educators. Till today, I carried that deep pain and learning experience, but still glimpse of hope in the adoption of contemplative approaches by education institutions across the world, hoping that soon one day, my home country will open its hearts in embracing the beauty of vulnerability natural in such practices that would lead to true holistic education of heartminds in social justice and equality.

There is silver lining through difficult moments in life, as so I learned through my own experiences. The pandemic lockdown, tough period in the completion of doctoral study, and facing health challenges of mom and myself in the last three years was another valuable experience in this human life. Life continues to offer its beautiful moments if the practice was to simply notice and to remove that little dust that sometimes separate us from our true nature, and connecting with and living in harmony with our true selves, with others and mother nature.

My practice continues to encourage me to inquire about the bigger questions about life, to live with the questions that cannot be answered right now, and to share my life’s gifts with others. As life calls for, the road ahead would be to teach and practice what I know best, which is contemplative education, and to support others in their own journey, to be part of a community or to build one that aligns our practice in the spirit of what the world needs right now – mending the division and separation within ourselves and the outside world. The world needs voices and compassionate actions, and perhaps that’s the silver lining from the narrative work I was called into, from not getting my (old) way in my research.