I asked my six-year-old if he knew a calm, quiet place inside him.
He said yes. Immediately, zero hesitation, no asking what I meant.
Zach is six. He hasn’t done a ten-day silent retreat. He doesn’t sit crosslegged with a straight back, ignoring his throbbing knees and numb ankles with heroic equanimity. He doesn’t try to suppress his monkey mind. He has no idea any of that exists, and if I told him about it he’d assume I was telling one of my dad stories.
And yet he knows the place.
I bring him up because it tells you something crucial about that inner quiet place of Good. It’s natural. You were born with it, same as he was. And if something is natural, it cannot possibly require effort to get back to.
But so much meditation is not that. There’s this idea that a practice is only worthwhile if it’s hard. That the hardship is the point: the discipline, the denial, the sitting still through discomfort, the rigorous doing-without. Worthy and good and righteous.
So much baloney.
The whole idea rests on an idea that’s wrong from the beginning. Your mind is the problem, it’s out of control, and what it needs is a firm hand.
But. You’re not overstimulated, you’re undernourished.
A busy mind, the inability to focus or be present … that’s a symptom, not the thing itself. Your mind is looking for something, and the only place it knows to look is outward: into relationships, into achievements, into ticking off our culture’s collective boxes of what a good life is meant to look like. It keeps coming back empty and it keeps going out again.
You cannot fix that by managing the noise. You can’t quiet a hungry stomach by telling it to calm down.
So all that disciplining and denying and forcing into stillness, that’s wrestling with the symptom while the treasure sits underneath, unnoticed. Which is why so many find meditation such hard work, and why so much of it doesn’t hold.
Your mind doesn’t need disciplining. It doesn’t even need changing. Honestly, you can leave it alone. It’s not the problem.
Now, it’s easy to think Zach gets it because life hasn’t had a chance at him yet. That you’re the corrupted one, too far in, too much water under the bridge.
You’re not corrupted, not one bit. Your mind has picked up some habits, and you get lost in them, and getting lost in them feels like being them. But that’s all it is.
The way back doesn’t require gritted teeth, or working through the layers of the onion, reliving every painful and shameful episode you’ve collected. It’s peace, man! You just need a way in: a door, not a fight.
That’s what I teach, and it’s why it looks so different from most of what’s out there. Most meditation and mindfulness works on the surface, because the surface is where it assumes the problem lives. It gets people calmer, which is worth something. But it doesn’t know how to get beneath the noise to the well underneath.
And that’s where the prize is.
Do you remember that place as a kid? Or those moments as an adult, the ones you come back to as highlights?
They’re real, and having more of them is the whole point.
What if it could be that simple?
Go well!