心觉知Heartful Awareness

I founded Heartful Awareness in the spring of 2026. Now, it is midsummer.

I have been thinking all along: why, exactly, am I doing this?

Another related question is: what do I want it to become? But for now, I do not need to make that question too clear. I know that, beyond my full-time work, family life, and personal growth, I simply want to be able to more freely make some mindfulness offerings. Knowing this much is enough.

But as for why I want to do this — that is essential. I must clarify it honestly.

I wrote this blog post at the end of June 2026, on a train ride home to Connecticut after visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. My 38th birthday would be only a few days away. The day before, I learned that the MET was holding the first major Raphael exhibition in American history — an exhibition that had been planned for seven years, bringing together more than two hundred works by Raphael borrowed from around the world, including his drawings. I decided to make today a spontaneous solo trip to see the Raphael exhibition, as I had been dealing with some challenges in life for some time.

By coincidence, this was also the first time I truly learned about Raphael. Only then did I realize that this great master lived only 37 years.

Thirty-seven — exactly my current age. In just a few days, my life will have lasted longer than his…

Life. My mind keeps returning to this word when I think about why I founded Heartful Awareness.

First, my life was once saved by mindfulness.

When I entered Tsinghua University in my early twenties, I went through an existential crisis. I felt lost about my own life, and confused by the question of who I was. At that time, I read Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun, and fell into a predicament from which I could not pull myself out. I felt that death, loneliness and meaninglessness were the final destination from which no one, myself included, could escape.

Fortunately, however, I chose at that time to begin practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness redeemed my soul, and led me to decide that this would be the meaning of my existence in this lifetime.

Second, my life was given to me by my parents who first introduced me what “love” is. I became this individual in part due to my parents’ great love for me as their only child. Love in this life is both the origin and the result of Heartful Awareness.

Although my parents once seemed imperfect in my eyes — they had the typical Chinese parenting style of raising an only child; their own lives were filled with experiences that were almost traumatic, deeply shaped by poverty, exclusion and discrimination based on social class, and the violence and upheavals of their families of origin. All these larger social forces and smaller family conditions were reflected in the way they raised me. But understanding these conditions alone was not enough for me to be in a peaceful relationship with my parents. What really is needed is to feel their love for me and appreciate our relationship with heartful awareness. Human relationships, as I have increasingly discovered, cannot be understood by the rationale or emotional mind. It needs compassionate holding.

After practicing mindfulness for some years, my practice has come to feel more and more like an awakening of the heart to love. This process has not developed in a straight line, but I have experienced myself becoming more and more able to understand and accept my own life, my own fate. I have also come to understand more deeply what it means to transcend oneself. It requires a tremendous amount of patience to take “my” hindrances less personally. After all, they are not my own and I do not need to make them “mine”. Only if I am able to do that, I can see others more wholly.

“Your habits and patterns are surely a part of your earthly inheritance. However, when i speak of inheritances, I mean your deeper inheritance wherein lies all your inspiration, power and capacity to unfold.  We live in several worlds simultaneously. This earth plane is so all-encompassing that we forget who and what we really are.  And yes, this remembering is a shedding of an old, limited idea of self, just like a snake shedding its old skin.” My teacher, Saki Santorelli reminded me.

Third, I carried and gave birth to two children, Leo and Valerie. Both births almost costed me my life. The first time was because of a difficult labor. The second time was because of negligence by medical staff, which brought me once again to the edge of life and death during my post-surgery hospitalization.

In addition, between the two births of my children, I became pregnant with a fetus who could not survive because of a genetic defect, and I had no choice but to end that fetal life at three months. My grief has been held with heartful awareness.

I have created life, and I have ended life before its time. Now, as a mother, I am fully responsible for two lives on this earth. More and more, I feel that I must bring mindfulness to more people. Mindful parenting is not only about maintaining presence and loving-kindness with my children within my own small family — although of course that is very important. But if I can inspire more people to practice mindfulness, then naturally there will be a butterfly effect.

My children, everyone’s children; my family, everyone’s family — all of them may grow up in a better world. This is my vision.

Practice as if your life depends on it — and it does.

So said my teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn.

When I was grieving, I wrote about <Love>:

Love

We lost our daughter, Isabella (Izzy), at 14 weeks gestational age to Trisomy 18. She was cremated on the 7^th day after her death. Her ashes will be placed in Massachusetts and her spirit will unite with her grandfather’s. She is our second child, and she will be forever missed.

My love for her has grown stronger and stronger ever since I found out about her existence. And it has not been weakened after I knew about her illness. She died too soon. I wish she could live longer to let me love her and be her mother, in traditional ways, just like how I have loved Leo, who is three-years old and the sweetest boy in our world. I wish I could support Izzy to grow up to be a strong woman – much stronger than me and my mother and my grandmother. My grief and pain break my heart when I think of these broken wishes.

And then I ask myself, does my love for her have to be traditional parental love? Isn’t that limiting the definition of love?

She was a strong girl, as strong as she could be. I remember her strong heartbeat and strong kick with her leg from ultrasounds. With an extra chromosome in her cells, she lived the longest she could. She might have lived a bit longer, a few weeks, or months, and in extremely rare circumstances, years, but that would also mean adding pain to her life. We had no choice but to end her life and end our suffering. I could no longer tolerate the pain. I decided that it was for love that I had to end our suffering as early as possible. It was not my choice. I did not make a decision, even though I signed the medical form. It was my body wanting to survive and my mind wanting to heal. How long she has lived until her death does not matter to me anymore, because her life cannot be measured by how short it is. Fourteen weeks, forty weeks, forty years, or one hundred years – all too short to compare to how long this universe has existed.

“Set me like a seal upon thy heart. Love is as strong as death.” I have been studying and writing about bereavement in the past four years, but I have never understood bereavement and grief as I understand it now. I am learning that the only way to heal after loss is to feel love, give love, and believe in love. The only way for me to heal my wounds from losing my Izzy is to become a more loving person, by loving her, loving myself, and loving all.

How do I continue to love Izzy? I know I need to believe in the beauty of her being, as how she was. She is a beautiful girl not to be looked upon, but to be seen when I close my eyes. I see her planting a seed in my heart. My heart feels pain, but she said, “It’s okay, mama, something wonderful will grow here”. And she smiled. She left, but I have the seed in my heart.

<Love After Love> by Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Note: After my family got settled in a new house in 2023, we brought Izzy’s ash back from Massachusetts. We held a family ritual by planting a Japanese maple tree in our garden and Leo helped put Izzy’s ash near the tree’s roots. The tree is growing strong and is part of our family in Connecticut. About half a year later, Valerie came to our world. I named her Valerie because when I was pregnant with Izzy, I watched the movie <Amsterdam>. Valerie means “healthy and strong”.