The Transformational Shift I Underwent in How I Meditate
What happens when awakening stops being the goal
About two years ago the way I meditated underwent a huge transformation. For about a decade I approached meditation with a goal in mind. I was either trying to calm my mind, feel better, or reach awakening states and enlightenment. I remember getting up in the morning with the goal of “being more productive” and sitting down to meditate, hoping that I would have more breakthrough ideas for my startup at the time.
It was well-intentioned but I realize now that I fell into the trap that many people fall into of making meditation a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The result of this was lots of striving and ignoring the real patterns in my life that needed attention and healing.
There are a couple of big events that started to change my perspective on this. It’s a bit nuanced but I’ll try to explain it simply. The first is the breakdown I had during the pandemic which left me unable to work for several weeks. Even though I was meditating daily and had gone on several retreats, I still found myself in a very dark place. It didn’t prevent me from getting PTSD either. Up until then I had assumed that meditation would make me resilient (along with fasting, keto, ice baths, all the other “optimization” tools). I saw it as mental training that would make me psychologically bulletproof. So when I fell apart, I was confused. Meditation hadn’t delivered the goods as promised. In fact at times it made things worse because I thought I was supposed to be beyond all this. This was before I really had a grasp of the darkside of meditation.
The second event came later, after I had done some therapy and started to realize meditation didn’t have all the answers. But still, I was still obsessed with relieving my suffering in any way possible, so I went deeper into the rabbit hole. I sat longer. I entered deep absorption states called jhanas. I was reading the Buddhist texts, counting progress, tracking states. Eventually I reached what’s called “stream entry,” the first stage of awakening according to classical Buddhism.
I don’t know if it was the achievement itself or something else, but after that experience a big layer of craving was gone. The desire to “achieve” something in meditation was greatly reduced. It was like some part of my system exhaled. But the aftereffects were intense. Surges of energy through my body, sudden jolts, weird spontaneous releases. I’d read enough about kundalini and awakening to know this wasn’t just me going crazy, but it was a lot. And while I could sit for two or three hours and have a completely silent mind, my life outside of meditation was still a mess. I was still reactive, still isolating, still rushing through my work, still shutting down in important conversations with my partner. And my nervous system — the PTSD — was still there, running the show underneath. So if all this meditation hadn’t fixed that, what was I really doing?
When “Awakening” Isn’t Integration
That realization took a long time to settle. It didn’t come from one big insight but from the slow dawning recognition that something fundamental was off. I wasn’t ready to integrate the so-called awakening experience. My body was flooded, my system overwhelmed. I don’t recommend that path, honestly, at least not until you have created safety in regulating your own nervous system and healing attachment wounds.
Meditation is very good at creating bliss states and dissociative states, which can feel alluring to the parts of our psyche that crave peace. However, temporary peace is not the same thing as healing. While it’s not true for everyone, it’s common for meditation to become a bypass for the real work that needs to be done.
My perspective started to shift in layers. The first layer was realizing that healing and awakening are not the same thing. “Just sit and observe” works to a point, but it’s kind of a spray-and-pray approach. Sitting there long enough might quiet the mind and open you to glimpses of your true nature, yes. You might have moments where you feel completely free, like everything is made of light. But if the patterns in your life — fear, control, avoidance, shame — are still running, it doesn’t matter how much light you’ve seen. You’re still living from those patterns.
So healing for me meant something different. More focused, more intentional, and often softer. Sometimes it meant going for a walk instead of meditating. Sometimes it meant therapy. Sometimes it meant crying. Or just admitting that I was tired. In meditation, it meant turning directly toward the stuff I was ignoring. The insecurities, the stories, the guilt, the small dishonesties that kept repeating. Instead of observing them away, I started meeting them with care.
I realized that most people come to meditation to heal. They say “I want to wake up,” but what they really mean is “I don’t feel whole.” I did too. I had just replaced drugs with meditation. It felt healthier, but the energy was the same — chasing, grasping, trying to fill the hole. The point is that if you come to spirituality believing you are broken, happiness will always stay one step ahead of you. It will hide in the next retreat, the next teacher, the next psychedelic, the next deep breathwork session. It’s endless.
The Lotus in the Mud
The shift was using life itself as the teacher. The lotus blooms from the muddiest water. All the mud, all the noise and mess — that’s the material. Instead of sitting down to feel calm or focused, I began looking at the moments where I felt resistance. The arguments with my partner, the fear of money, the feeling of not being enough. Wherever I was unkind or contracted, that’s where the practice was.
Some teachers like Cory Muscara call this “subtractive” meditation. You start with the premise that you’re already whole and complete, and that there’s nothing to achieve. Meditation isn’t about reaching enlightenment or optimizing your brain; it’s about subtracting the layers that keep you from realizing what’s already here. Every time a pattern softens, every time a part of you is met with love, something unclenches. The light underneath shines through a little more. (Oh, and if any of this is cringe-worthy, then it’s a good sign to lean into it).
The incredible part is that this is a much more fun and sustainable path to waking up. I remember an Eckhart Tolle video where he said “all paths point to Zen,” and this approach is very much in that spirit. Whenever you do take the stuff of life and meet those patterns with love, you don’t stop there. When that pattern softens or melts, it directly leads you to a certain quality of experience if you allow yourself to feel them – flowing, fluid, changing – and then eventually to a place that feels totally complete, nonseperate, loving, open, and peaceful. The connection with true self, true nature, presence, essence, God, the universe. The pain itself is transformed and gives you access to deeper and deeper depths of reality.
By the way, this is where therapy and spiritual practice diverge; therapy will stop with emotional healing, like “okay you have been seen/heard and are unraveling this pattern,” whereas spiritual practice can continue from here using this thread to deepen your connection to more subtle layers.
Some people have a hard time believing the premise of this approach, which is that we are fundamentally good and whole, and that we just need to “subtract” our patterns to reveal our goodness. I like to use the analogy of the Buddha statue covered in clay that is hiding a solid gold Buddha. With each layer of armoring that is released, we reveal the light that is already there, rather than adding something new to it. You can experience this for yourself – when you take a few minutes to listen to yourself without judgement and meet your experience with kindness, there is always something underneath that reveals itself. That thing might still be heavy, but the more you sit with it, the more it reveals the lightness that is underneath. I think it can be hard to remember this when we are living in fight/flight/freeze mode, and find ourselves chronically disconnected from our bodies. But it really doesn’t take long, an afternoon in nature, a good conversation with a friend, a meditation session where you open up to the truth of the moment, to realize this underlying presence of goodness and completeness.
This is where meditation gets flipped on its head. If you are already whole and perfect as you are, then the work becomes exploring all the ways you feel you are not — deepening contact with those places and becoming more intimate with your experience.
Now this doesn’t mean you’re passive. On the contrary, this requires an active approach to clearing your patterns. Instead of sitting every morning trying to get to some state or to feel better about myself, I take the stuff of my life as the focus for meditation. In fact, I rarely sit down just to “meditate” anymore. Whenever something comes up, I try to pause right then and look at it directly.
For example, I had a big insecurity pop up with my partner a few weeks ago, one I’ve been working with for a while. Instead of pushing it aside, trying to meditate it away, telling her she should change, or forcing myself to be grateful, I came at it with as much love and compassion as I could. It took about an hour of simply sitting there, letting those emotions be heard and flow through me, before they softened into a gentle warmth. It’s been a few weeks now, and that sense of insecurity has dissolved. What’s left is more acceptance, attraction, and a sense of ease and fun in the relationship.
Another example: Someone reached out wanting to collaborate on an event. My gut reaction was no. I felt resistance. But why? I could have trusted that gut feeling — and sometimes I do — but I’ve learned that every point of resistance has something to teach me. So I brought it into meditation, and later into some one-on-one work with a spiritual friend. What surfaced were old patterns around judgment and dismissiveness that I was projecting onto this person, echoes of how I had related to my parents. Once that cleared, I felt compassion for myself and for them — a total okayness with the situation — and even a bubbling curiosity to collaborate. Along with that came the wisdom to set a healthy boundary: try it once, see how it goes, and take it from there.
When people ask me about long meditation retreats these days, I usually steer clear of recommending them. Instead, I ask what they’re really looking for. Most people say they want peace or clarity or an answer to a problem. Then I ask if sitting in silence for ten days is really the best way to find that. Sometimes it is, but often it’s not. There are other ways — turning toward what’s difficult in a safe setting, at your own pace, without forcing yourself into a rigid system that might do more harm than good.
I don’t think we need to disappear for weeks or months to find what we’re looking for. Retreats can be beautiful and deeply restorative, but life already gives us everything we need to practice. Every conversation, every frustration, every small act of courage, honestly it’s all part of it. These days I don’t worry much about how long I sit or whether I’m doing it right. Life keeps giving me enough chances to wake up. That’s more than enough retreat for one lifetime.