David is a returning guest. You might enjoy checking out his previous session — #365, #358, #333, #317 and #313 — in the archives.

ABOUT David

David lives with his family in Santa Cruz, California, where he works as an anesthesiologist and is dedicated to addressing physician burnout within their network of 1500 physicians.

He loves surfing, mountain biking, and playing any instrument he can get his hands on -- from piano to handpan to ukulele.

David is also a pancreatic cancer survivor.

As a physician, I knew the statistics, so facing stage three pancreatic cancer was terrifying. As I went through the process, I was also incredibly blessed to be inside the medical system with so many loving colleagues who made sure I got the absolute best and most swift medical care.

It was a harrowing experience; I had big procedures and I experienced setbacks along the way that felt devastating. (Even now, two years out, every time I get a CT scan, it's absolutely nerve racking!) All that said, I feel I am so much more the person that I was supposed to be because of this experience. In a weird way, it might have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

David practiced meditation for almost a decade by the time of his diagnosis.

In 2012, a few years after completing residency at Stanford, I began exploring meditation and discovered Shinzen’s audio series from Sounds True. Being a doctor, it was the title ”The Science of Enlightenment” that captured me. I listen to the series every year and I always get something different from it.

In my current practice, I use many of Shinzen’s techniques. For me, his approach to meditation is like the “whole 30 diet” is to my understanding of nutrition. It’s a guiding set of principles which allow me to deepen and understand when I branch out into other things. I am familiar with some indigenous ceremonies and I deeply studied Qigong with Master Mingtung Gu during Covid and my cancer treatment. I have explored practices by Sam Harris, Master Zhi Gang Sha and Sadhguru.

In 2021, David was all-encompassed by running his health network’s medical response for COVID, his father passing away, and receiving his cancer diagnosis. Simultaneously “magical things” began to happen in his practice.

A trusted spiritual friend shared that he repeatedly got the sense that Qigong would be a very positive path for me. I still have a phone message he left me saying, “when you're getting the chemo, just imagine it as healing light going into your veins. This is not poison. This is healing light, and we need to contact the healing light that is there for us.”

So, I would sit at the chemo center and do various meditations and imagine the healing light. I would be out on the center’s patio doing Qigong and I would have some incredible experiences -- brilliant brightness, speckles, and little bubbles popping in my vision. Meditating in the hospital after my surgery, I experienced crystalline white light, just like Shinzen described in his impermanence chapter of the audio series.

A recent unsettling health experience became what David described as “a wake up call to dive into practice deeper.” But, like many of us, he grapples with what making progress in his practice might look like now.