About Me
How I Started
I started meditating around 2013, when I was an international student in the US. At the time, my motivation was pretty ordinary: I thought meditation might help me become cooler and improve my social skills.
Not long after that, during a Co-Active coaching class, I had what you might call a spiritual experience.
For a period of time, I felt an overwhelming sense of unconditional love for the classmates around me. They seemed incredibly lovely. The usual judgmental thoughts in my mind were simply replaced by warmth and loving thoughts. It felt very different from personal love or attachment. There was something larger and more impersonal about it.
That experience started something in me.
Soon afterward, I came across the teachings of David R. Hawkins, A Course in Miracles, the Diamond Sutra, Zen, and other spiritual traditions. I read a lot, learned a lot, and spent years trying to understand what all of this meant.
When Knowledge Wasn’t Enough
But knowing these teachings intellectually did not make me immune to suffering.
In 2024, I was diagnosed with moderate symptoms of depression and anxiety. On the surface, it seemed largely connected to an intense architecture job that kept me apart from my wife and son in another city, as well as a particularly difficult relationship with a superior. Looking back, though, I also began to see something deeper in myself: a longstanding sense of lack, anxiety, and not quite being okay.
From the spiritual perspective I had been learning from, I started to see that period not only as something going wrong, but also as an opportunity for old, suppressed material to come to the surface and be met differently.
At some point, I simply became tired of struggling with myself.
Instead of reading another book or trying to think my way out of how I felt, I decided to actually use what I had spent years learning. I sat down and stayed with the difficult feelings and thoughts for about two hours.
Something shifted.
The problems did not magically disappear, but afterward I felt noticeably lighter. That sit became an important turning point for me.
Finding Unified Mindfulness
Around the same time, something in me said: check out Shinzen Young again.
I was already familiar with Shinzen’s work, but when I looked again, I discovered what had developed into Unified Mindfulness.
Finding Unified Mindfulness became another turning point in my practice.
For me, the system was unusually comprehensive, precise, and adaptable. It gave structure to many things I had encountered across different traditions, while bringing everything back to something very concrete: practice.
It probably accelerated my own learning more than anything else I had encountered.
I became eager to train seriously in the system and eventually became a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.
A Simpler Life
Life also changed around me. I left the job and the difficult working relationship that had contributed to a lot of stress, changed jobs, and moved back to my hometown.
My life now is much simpler.
I go to work. I take walks with my wife. I play Nintendo Switch with my son. I see my parents most weekends. I meditate, write, teach, and continue learning.
It is not an extraordinary life, but increasingly, I find it a fulfilling one.
I also co-teach a Chinese online meditation community of more than 500 members alongside a more senior Unified Mindfulness practitioner. In our own small way, we are gradually helping to build a Unified Mindfulness community in China and bringing Shinzen’s teachings to the birthplace of Zen.
My Life Is My Monastery
For a long time, though, I still had one spiritual complaint.
Because of work and family responsibilities, I could not easily disappear for long residential retreats. Part of me felt that this meant my life was somehow less suitable for serious practice.
Then, during an online retreat with Julianna Raye, I had a simple realization:
Wait. My life is my monastery.
Maybe the practice is not only about finding more opportunities to leave ordinary life.
Maybe the game is also to bring more and more practice into ordinary life.
That realization has become one of my main interests: monasticizing the day.
How do we bring practice into walking, commuting, working, parenting, eating, waiting, conflict, anxiety, pleasure, disappointment, and all the tiny unnoticed moments that make up a life?
Have I completely resolved that old sense of lack?
No.
Have I brought mindfulness into every moment of my day?
Definitely not.
I’m still on the way.
But this is where much of my curiosity and passion now lives: learning how practice can become less separate from life, and how a very ordinary human life can itself become the place of practice.
And, If You’d Like Some Personal Support With Your Mindfulness Practice
I offer 1:1 mindfulness coaching as a certified Unified Mindfulness teacher/trainer.
The coaching can help you deepen your practice, correct misunderstandings, or better understand how mindfulness works. We will also design ways to bring the practice into your actual daily life, not just your meditation sessions.
If you’re interested, feel free to book a connection call. We can talk about your goals, your current practice, and how mindfulness training might help. We can also see whether working together would be a good fit.
You can send me a DM or email me at miaosimuse@qq.com, and I’ll send you my availability for a call.
P.S. Want to Learn Unified Mindfulness on Your Own?
I also have a resource that can help you learn the Unified Mindfulness (UM) system in a more structured way.
I taught a comprehensive 8-week course called Unify, and you can watch the first class here:
The first class introduces the three core attention skills and Unified Mindfulness’s signature See Hear Feel technique.
If you’d like access to the full 8-week course, just send me a DM or email me.
The price? Pay what you wish.
I want this invaluable body of knowledge to be available to as many people as possible, regardless of what they can afford.
With all my relations,
Muse
