"Later, when I came to the West, I heard a number of psychologists compare the experience of 'mind' or 'self' to watching a movie. When we watch a movie, they explained, we seem to experience a continuous flow of sound and motion as individual frames pass through a projector. The experience would be drastically different, however, if we had the chance to look at the film frame by frame.
"This is exactly how my father [Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche] began to teach me to look at my mind. If I observed every thought, feeling, and sensation that passed through my mind, the illusion of a limited self would dissolve, to be replaced by a sense of awareness that is much more calm, spacious, and serene. And what I learned from other scientists was that because experience changes the neuronal structure of the brain, when we observe the mind this way, we can change the cellular gossip that perpetuates our experience of our 'self'."