Ryan L.

Ever since I started my college career, I've felt a dissonance between my self and my feelings. It has always been a facet of myself that I can't quite grasp. I tell myself and others that I lack the vocabulary/emotional intelligence to understand what's going on inside. Maybe I've just been trying the wrong approach. I don't think there's a mindfulness textbook that defines the way that mindfulness should work (there might be though, and if there is that's cool), it's different for everyone. This exercise was really freeing in that it showed me that there is no one formula for mindfulness, that it can even come in the form of constructing Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and running policy extraction, and that I shouldn't put as much pressure on myself to have this idealistic grasp on mindfulness. So thank you Josh and CS360 course staff for letting me learn a little more about MDPs and also about myself!