Search Inside Yourself featuring Chade Meng tan. This evening's event will inaugurate mindful USC, our new comprehensive, university wide, multidisciplinary mindfulness initiative. And I'm so grateful to the many departments and divisions that serve as leaders for mindful USC, especially the Office of the Provost, the Undergraduate Student Government, the Graduate Student Government, the Academic Senate, the staff assembly, the Angelman health center, the Center for Excellence in Teaching, the Lebbon Institute for Humanities and ethics, the Center for work and family life, the Institute for Integrative Health, the Office of Religious Life, and USC spectrum.

And I'm especially grateful to all of you for being here for this very auspicious event. When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester living in a Buddhist monastery in Bodhgaya, India, a small village where the Buddha was enlightened 2500 years ago. That's where I first encountered mindfulness meditation, and I eagerly embraced it because more than anything else, I wanted to levitate and walk through walls. That never happened, but I'm still trying so if anyone has any advice, please let me know that can be another university initiative. Instead, what I did experience with my mindfulness practice were positive health and learning benefits, less stress, more focus, better sleep, increased creativity.

Over the last 20 years, millions of Americans have also developed a mindfulness practice and like yoga. Mindfulness has moved away from its spiritual origins and is now considered a mainstream secular practice in the United States.

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