The mind is a bizarrely dangerous place. It sounds wildly anti-evolutionary, but the mind is full of thoughts that want to hurt you. Compulsive and addicted behaviors that have the potential to kill you. Self-doubt and pain to the point of suicide. Lots of us are mentally ill, and even more of us are poorly adapted to the world. At a minimum, nearly everyone is often afflicted with uncomfortable thoughts that cause suffering – inordinate concern about what people think of us, thoughts about what we wish we had done differently, second-guessing about our every move. 

And we’re all moving through the world, acting normally, like we’re not constantly under assault from inside our own skulls. If we could see the angst-ridden turmoil nearly all of us are laboring under nearly every day, the veil would be lifted, and we would understand that what’s all in our heads is just part of the human condition. Would this empower us to see a way out of this brain-induced suffering?

Short of getting to experience your consciousness, the only way I’ve found to relieve my own suffering is experiencing my own consciousness. I had lots of experience with being swept along by my consciousness, in the roiling floodwaters of depression, anxiety and addiction. What mindfulness meditation offered me was a way to step out of the flood – to stand on the banks and be fortunate, for just a moment, to be safe from the desperate struggle to keep my head above water. Like any gratifying moment when you could be drowning, I am grateful for each breath as I meditate. 

Time and again as I meditate, I experience what it’s like to have a thinking mind. The thinking mind is wound tight enough to snap. It is frustrated to the point of tears or rage. It is a relentless barrage of self-doubt. I can experience this because now I have something to compare it to. Before I meditated, I didn’t know it was possible to experience the mind as something other than the flood.

With a ton of practice, I made space for the breathing mind. The breathing mind is open, accepting, at peace. As I meditate, thoughts inevitably pour in. When I “catch” myself thinking, and return to the breath, I step out of the flood. The relief is instantaneous. The relief is total. To spend even a moment on the banks is life-changing – for once, to not feel under constant existential threat. The mind being what it is, I’m usually only on the banks for a few breaths, and the trickling thoughts are back to flood stage again. But then I’m aware again, and it’s back to the banks, to total and instantaneous relief. 

Feelings want to kill me. They can’t unless I let them. I don’t have control over what you do, what my boss does, what the climate does, or what Donald Trump does. The only thing I have control over is what I’m thinking about. I didn’t even have control over that, until mountains of practice changed my relationship to my thoughts.  

It takes a long time to re-architecture a brain that has been working the same way for 40+ years. I meditated every day for a year before I was sure it was making a difference. That took a lot of faith. I acted “as if” it would work, and eventually it did. I had to just trust the practitioners and neuroscientists who said it would work, despite personal experiences that said this stuff was hard, and woo-woo, and wasn’t making a difference. There’s a saying in AA: “Don’t quit before the miracle.” I saw little glimmers of hope early on, just enough to keep me meditating. I had no idea how much change it would really bring. If you told me that I could be 10% Happier, or have Joy on Demand, I was deeply skeptical for a long time. I’m so glad I didn’t quit before the miracle. Because it really is a miracle to be free from suffering, even if only briefly.