The Mindfulness Detour: My Unexpected Path to Understanding Consciousness

By Wilson Li - April 1, 2025

Wilson Li is a second-year medical student sharing an article about how he brings mindfulness to medicine.

On a seemingly normal fall day in 2018, while going for a slide tackle in a soccer match, I immediately felt a snap. My coach and teammates ran over to me, and I broke down. They didn’t know what I already knew, and receiving an X-ray, spiral fracture in my fibula, just put a name to the pain. Instantly, I knew that my future aspirations of playing competitively were over.

As a 16-year-old, it felt like my world had flipped upside down. At the time, soccer was what kept me sane. In recent years, my club team had captured three provincial titles and competed at three national championships. Each season, I was making improvements. I started to lift weights, watch game film, and implement those tools in-game. However, on that fateful day, none of that would matter anymore.

I remember my older brother calling me as I laid in bed, a few days after my injury. Our discussion about mentally dealing with the injury brought up meditation. My only conception of meditation was old bald guys in orange robes chanting, “Omm,” whilst closing their eyes. To be honest, I wasn’t very interested.

However, my brother explained that meditation had more to it than what meets the eye. He proposed that if I could meditate daily for a year, he would pay for a meditation app subscription. Since I had nothing better to do, I obliged.

Each evening, my mother supported my meditation practice by joining me. As a beginner, I started by focusing my attention on my breath. After a few breaths, boredom crept in and I’d think, “When is this going to end? When will my ankle be healed? I hate this. Oh right, I’m supposed to be paying attention to the breath.”

This cycle of distraction and frustration was essentially all I experienced for the first few months.

Progressively, I learned that my breath was supposed to act as a “reset button”. Whenever I started to become frustrated, sad, angry, or realize that I was derailed on some train of thought, I’d attempt to notice my breathing again. However, my attempts were wildly inefficient. I would stay stuck in my thoughts about the day, particularly dwelling over my past mistakes, brooding in self-judgment, and critiquing everything I disliked about myself. My odds of pressing this so-called reset button were as good as winning a stuffed animal from those rigged claw machines at the arcade. However, when I would finally recognize the breath, it felt like waking up from a dream. It was here, where I realized that my thoughts weren’t always an accurate representation of reality. They were more like passing weather—sometimes stormy, sometimes calm, but never permanent. Coming back to the breath is like recognizing that one is the sky and not the clouds passing through it.

When I got upset as a little kid, my brother would say, “You are not your thoughts.” This made a lot more sense now. Instead of being identified with my thoughts, I could try to observe them as an outsider and act afterwards.

Another benefit I started to experience was gratitude. More distinctly, I would notice my surroundings. I could feel the wind breezing across my cheeks, hear the birds chirping when I walked to my bus in the morning, and each muscle contracting and relaxing to move my body. I would think to myself “How beautiful”. In some ways, it was like being a child again, getting to experience all the simple moments in life for the first time.

Throughout the years, I tried to keep my practice going, even meditating 80 minutes a day during the lockdowns in the pandemic. I was also introduced to a different style of meditation, called mettā, meaning loving-kindness, and invoking compassionate thoughts for others and oneself.

At first it felt forced, but as it became a staple in my practice, my mind responded accordingly. There became a more concrete recognition that all beings experience suffering. This helped me understand that others who behave in maladaptive or even malicious ways are products of causative factors. One way of cultivating this perspective is by imagining someone as a baby. No matter how difficult someone may be as an adult (including yourself), they started life as a small, helpless infant, shaped by circumstances beyond their control. By picturing each other in this way, we can break down barriers of judgment and more easily generate genuine goodwill. As I integrated this insight into my life, I realized that one can be compassionate and forgiving, without being a pushover.

We all have thoughts and feelings that appear and disappear. These thoughts and feelings are conditioned by our past experiences, our childhoods, and our genetics. Having this perspective helped me realize that even during conflict, they are simply waves of emotions that will come and go, just like all other things. Everything is non-permanent. Understanding the transient nature of emotions bolstered my practicality. I could acknowledge momentary distress, but not let it hinder my decision making when tackling life’s problems.

In recent years, I have had the privilege of sitting on 2 week-long silent meditation retreats in Saskatoon. It was here, where my mindfulness skills were really challenged. Meditating for entire days, without talking to others, checking my phone, or having knowledge of the outside world pushed my mind to its limits. I will be attending my third week-long meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, located 45 minutes north of San Francisco, California in June 2025.

The days on retreat were long and difficult, and sometimes agonizing. There were moments, where I would rather have been literally anywhere else. I walked away from my first retreat thinking that meditation retreats were some kind of hell on earth, despite feeling rejuvenated afterwards. On my second retreat I eventually got so fed up, that during a private meeting with a meditation teacher, I challenged her on the legitimacy of meditation. She looked at me kindly and replied that I didn’t have to take her word on anything, but that meditation is merely about noticing direct moment-to-moment experience. She explained that meditation isn’t about being all blissed-out, with no worries in the world. She even said that if I wanted to take a break from meditation practice altogether, I was welcome to do so. After that, I asked her how to deal with all the aversion I was experiencing. One suggestion was to use mettā as a bridge to being present. I decided to give it a shot.

It was then, where I was able to fuse the tools of my regular meditation practice and mettā together. Because I was struggling with being present, I invoked compassion for myself. I placed my hand on my heart, and expressed my understanding that the days were tough. I promised to myself that I will always be there to support and love myself, no matter how difficult life gets. This was a touchstone moment for my self-compassion journey, as my internal thought patterns have been significantly kinder ever since.

Today, this level of self-compassion has subjectively felt more instantaneous than before. I recognize that self-compassion is multi-layered and is also fueled by my support system and loved ones. I am able to give myself self-compassion because others have fueled me with that capability. During my childhood and adolescence, I was sick very often and my mother would stay home to take care of me. She always encouraged me to try again when I failed, to be open-minded to different ideas, and to put myself out there despite my shyness. Her spirit of love, openness, and perseverance is a gift that I am privileged to share with the world.

My attempts to be present have revealed the transience of life itself. My mortality is not something I can ever hide from. In each moment, there is death. This moment will pass, and so will this lifetime. Whenever I recognize the transience of life, my mind eases and deeply wants to share love, laughter, and joy with others. I won’t be able to hug my friends and family forever, so I make sure to hug them now. I won’t be able to show my appreciation towards my loved ones forever, so I make sure to appreciate them now. Accepting all phenomena of consciousness, including the prospect of death, has enabled me to more fully engage with the life I am living.

Many years later, and I have discovered that a mindfulness practice doesn’t entail sporting any orange clothing or adopting any strange beliefs. In fact, my only orange shirt is from dressing up as a pilon for a medical school event. Meditation is about training one’s attention and awareness in a particular way, so that one can more meaningfully engage with moment-to-moment experience with greater emotional clarity and understanding. At present, I would slightly favor my “reset button” odds over winning the slot machines in Las Vegas, but my mindfulness practice is still very much a work in progress. School still stresses me out, failure and conflict still upsets me, and I still despise my assault bike workouts at the gym (they are brutal… and highly recommended). And now, I am a little better at accepting my flaws, still aiming to correct them, but loving myself in each step of the way.

Life moves fast—often too fast for us to notice the details. We get caught up in routines, in expectations, in the constant hum of thought. But every so often, something forces us to pause. Sometimes it’s by choice—other times, it isn’t.

In those moments of stillness, we begin to see life differently. The noise quiets, the distractions fade, and what remains is something simple yet profound: awareness. It is in this space where we can defy our temperaments, make amends, be bold, and begin again.

Here, everything, all at once, lies the canvas that is called life. We are the paintbrushes of existence, and can aim to create meaningful experiences for ourselves and those around us