When I first got sober and was told to meditate and pray, I didn’t know how to start. So, I tricked myself into it by doing pushups, which eventually segued into breathing exercises and some prayer.
Prayer and meditation go hand in hand when we understand the mind and learn to step outside of it, becoming the observer.
I was 14 years old when I began doing 10 pushups several times a day to push away cravings for sugar and cigarettes. It worked—I stayed away from both as a result.
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Twelve Step Recovery's Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood It, praying only for knowledge of Its will for us and the power to carry that out.
At 16, newly sober through 12-step recovery, I had no real concept of what Step 11 truly meant. I was too young to grasp its essence. I practiced regular prayer and meditation, but I failed at meditation every time. I was cynical, restless, bored, and easily distracted. Meditation often triggered more anxiety than doing nothing at all. But I persisted, though on poorly informed terms.
I didn’t understand the importance of breathing or its connection to mindfulness. Mindfulness was beyond my grasp because I was too young, and there weren’t good teachers for people my age, at least not where I was from.
To the young people out there, especially those of you who struggle with your thoughts and find living in your mind, face, and body really tough—I remember those youthful obsessions. I hated myself—I was scared and shy around people. I lacked confidence.
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I was insecure about my pimples, my clothes, and especially my nose. Looking back, it’s fascinating to realize how obsessed I was with these things. It took me nearly 40 years of self-discovery to understand that these obsessions were really just distractions—ways for my mind to avoid confronting deeper anxieties and fears, my core issues.
By the time we’re adults, every human being develops what I call "core issues." These are the primary traumas and painful events that shape how we experience anxiety as grown-ups. They’re an intriguing part of our ego structure. For simplicity, you can think of this part of your personality as a separate entity—an inner child who is just old enough to understand that something is happening inside them, something caused by the events of their childhood that makes them focus on themselves and find fault.
This self-critical focus is a natural tendency of the human mind. When we’re young, we lack the mental strength to appreciate simple things, like just being able to breathe and be alive as a source of gratitude. Instead, our minds fixate on imperfections because that focus drives us to push harder in life.
It seems evolution has designed us to be a little neurotic by the time we’re 10 years old, motivating us to strive and become something. If we receive proper nurturance, this neurosis doesn’t have to turn into harmful behaviors. But it often amplifies as we grow older, becoming part of our baseline habits.
The main concept here is recognizing that there is a higher self within us—a part that can observe our ego as it thinks. This higher self is not something you grasp immediately; it takes time and effort. One helpful exercise is to imagine a fictional character, a superhero version of yourself, who is pure but in human form, with energy fields arcing off them. This visualization can help you connect with your higher self.
This representation of consciousness should not be bound by the laws of gravity or limited by any temperature in the cosmos. It's a metaphorical depiction, not a literal one. Imagine this being as pure light—without a defined texture, eye color, or pronounced facial features. The shape of the body is up to you; it could be fat, skinny, muscular, tall, short, wide, long, or flat. It might have some gender characteristics, but these should be subtle.
This idea reflects the fact that the human psyche contains both feminine and masculine elements, as we are influenced by both in our societies. However, depending on the interactions with our caretakers, a person’s psyche might lean more towards the feminine or masculine. But for the purpose of envisioning a universal being, it’s important to let these traits be more fluid and less defined.
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It may also be helpful to try locating where this entity, this consciousness, resides within your body. Is it in your head, your arms, your solar plexus, your lungs, or your stomach? Or does it encompass your entire being? This is a valuable focus for meditation. Try to visualize the energy pulsing through your body as if you had the ability to see spectrums of light beyond human perception. Imagine seeing the heat that radiates from any living creature, including yourself. What else do you notice emanating from your being? If nothing, make a note of that—at this moment, you perceive nothing beyond the possibility of heat and water vapor rising from your skin, gradually merging with the air around you, traveling up into the sky, connecting with the atmosphere, and eventually becoming part of the cosmos.
This process is continuous. The energy and matter from your body move into the universe, traveling at the speed of light, interacting with the environment, and potentially returning to Earth. It might descend back through the clouds, into the rain, and into the mouth of a panda bear. The panda, absorbed in its instinctual behavior, might not notice any flavor or lingering energy from this source, but something is there—perhaps purified of all karma and past influences, so pure that it carries no essence of any conscious being. Yet, it might still have a subtle flavor or flair, a trace of something beyond.
This metaphor reflects how you break down and reassemble every day in a slightly different way. You are constantly absorbing atoms and molecules—carbon, oxygen, zinc, calcium, and so on—and influencing this vast, inhabited planet. It’s challenging to know whether what happens on Earth affects the broader universe. Sometimes it feels as though we are contained within a bubble, and our energy fields can’t extend beyond it to shape the cosmos. But perhaps that’s not the case. Perhaps it’s only here, within the realm of consciousness, that we create the manifest universe, and in turn, it creates back—a dialogue of existence. No one knows for certain.
I find it quite humorous when genius physicists, who have memorized all the great names in their field, every law that has been discovered, and every particle they study, believe they truly understand what’s happening in the universe. You have to laugh at the thought, because even with a trillion lifetimes, we wouldn’t grasp a trillionth of the universe’s mysteries. We can only make guesses and create theories—many of which will eventually be disproved or built upon.
Even the most profound theories, those that seem to bring us closer to the heart of the universe and its workings, will eventually encounter new mysteries that push us backward, as if we’ve learned nothing. No human can definitively say that we are anything more than atomic elements assembled by chance—by forces of biology, chemistry, evolution, dust, blood, dirt, water, fire, and air. No one can confidently assert that we aren’t just a miraculous outcome created by an unthinking, unconscious nature—beautiful to us, miraculous in its own right, yet entirely the result of chance, cause, and effect given enough time to work itself out. Life and consciousness seem like inevitable outcomes somewhere in the vastness of the universe.
But life and consciousness are not obvious outcomes that exist everywhere in the universe. Despite our intelligence, we’re struggling to find even a single trace of it elsewhere. The ironic part is that we don’t even know where to look—we’re just launching spacecraft and heading away from the planet, searching blindly. It’s almost a fool’s journey.
If I were funding space travel and technology, I’d focus on setting up a sophisticated base on the moon. I’d send large groups of people there who were prepared to live in a monk-like state, awakening their minds while still being able to connect with their families occasionally. They would document their lives and journeys in journals but ultimately surrender to the forces of the universe. They’d have meditation chambers where they could safely sit and gaze at the cosmos, meditating for hours on end.
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Perhaps, just a guess, they wouldn’t have to travel far to discover things that are invisible to the anxious human mind.
They would need to transmit their findings back to us. It’s likely that each of them would realize the mistake we’ve all made: not simply sitting on a rock in nature, looking up at the stars, and understanding that we are actually sitting on a rock in the vast cosmos. We rarely do this because we’re so caught up in the minutiae of the world we’ve created—a world shaped by our families, society, and the inherent nature of the human mind.
If we take a moment each day to observe ourselves, our consciousness begins to expand in profound ways. We start to realize, for instance, why we should focus on the life around us rather than seeking it in the dark void of space. Why search the cosmos with flashlights for life when we often overlook the beauty right here on our planet?
We are led down these paths by people who can’t see the beauty of life on Earth, who are pursuing ego-driven dreams. Instead of judging them harshly, we should encourage them to slow down, meditate, and connect with the present moment. However, we must be careful not to come across as judgmental, as this could drive people further away from self-discovery.
That’s the nature of the human mind. The human mind is designed to think constantly, with its primary objective being to never stop thinking—continually generating thoughts to keep the body alive. For most of us, it does a great job. Unfortunately, for some people, the mind can be "broken" in the sense that there are disorders affecting how it functions. Just like any other part of the body can be defective at birth—such as a stomach that doesn’t work properly or a limb that doesn’t function as intended—the brain can also have dysfunctions.
The good news is that, in most cases, it’s not the brain itself that’s causing the problem, but rather the lack of proper nurturance during childhood. A child needs consistent love and protection from traumatic, startling experiences to develop a healthy mindset. If a child does encounter such experiences, it’s crucial for caregivers to provide comfort and help the child relax from the naturally occurring anxious states caused by perceived dangers.
Human beings don’t have obvious behavioral instincts hardwired from our genetic material. Instead, our behavioral instincts are programmed into us through life experiences. The subconscious mind stores these behaviors, and the conscious mind draws on past experiences to react to situations. However, we do have some primal instincts in the background. For example, a child has an instinct to detect abandonment. As a survival mechanism, an infant feels terror and fear of being alone and cries out to draw the parent back in. This is the only tool available to an infant who lacks words and logic. Evolution, in its brilliance, designed the human child to produce a high-pitched, irritating cry that compels the parent to jump into action.
A child is completely dependent on a caretaker to meet its every need, and like you, a child requires something almost every minute of the day. Given that there are so many minutes and days in the first 20 years of life, it’s no wonder that our psyches often suffer damage. If you’re lucky, most of your childhood seconds and minutes were bearable. But many people suffer from anxiety, indicating that they didn’t have a balanced childhood filled with love and relaxation.
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When you meet people who don’t show symptoms of anxiety, addictive relationships, or self-destructive behaviors, it’s likely they either had phenomenal nurturing or have done significant work on themselves. The point here is that we need to meditate, to see the open sky, to breathe fresh air, and to get more oxygen into our bodies and brains. We need to allow time for the central nervous system to relax.
I’m sorry to say, but this relaxation won’t happen if you’re drinking alcohol late at night. While alcohol might put you to sleep, it disrupts your chemistry so much that in the morning, you’re left feeling more burdened by your thoughts and the weight they impose on your consciousness. It becomes difficult to control your breath, your thoughts, and to stay relaxed when your physiology is out of balance.
Some people have become so desensitized, so accustomed to their body’s chemistry being out of homeostasis, that it feels normal to them—they don’t even realize what I’m talking about.
They have no way to detect this because they have never been pure enough. To test my theory, consider how connected your body and mind are. Let’s say today you’re feeling bloated and uncomfortable, perhaps wanting to lose a few pounds. You feel heavy in your midsection and lack strength in certain areas of your body where the muscles are weak. Now, imagine you deliberately stop working out for a year and start eating as much junk food as you want. Binge on pork chops with applesauce, gallons of vanilla ice cream, chocolates, cakes, cookies, candies, and fast food—just gorge yourself.
It would probably take less than a week before you start feeling terrible in your body and find yourself in a negative headspace. What you’ve proven to yourself is how deeply the body and mind are connected—an intoxicated body creates an intoxicated mind.
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Now, imagine if you could clear up the intoxication by even 50% from where you’re at right now. Picture how much better you would feel. The initial relief might be euphoric, but as your body and mind clear up, old feelings might surface—feelings that were previously pushed away by your addictive behaviors.
We often addictively push away our feelings. We eat certain types of food because they help us avoid obsessive and painful thoughts, temporarily containing our anxiety—even though these foods ultimately intoxicate the body and create more anxiety. When we engage in these habits long enough, we lose sight of the patterns and can’t see how many addictions we have developed. These addictions prevent us from being with ourselves without judgment, hatred, love, resentment, or some kind of worry constantly pulsing through our pain. This is the old way—the unconscious way of living.
The fact that we’re reading this right now means we’re already on our way to a new way of thinking. This new way involves becoming the observer of our thinking mind within our living body. We can achieve this by creating quiet time, which can be challenging but is essential. We start by laying a towel on the floor of our living rooms instead of watching the news at night. We Lie on our backs, play some soothing frequency sounds that don’t evoke strong feelings or experiences, and focus on breathing deeply through our noses. We practice observing the thoughts that come to distract us. We notice if there’s any positive sensation from taking a deeper breath, and be patient. If we don’t feel it right away, it’s not because it doesn’t work. There isn’t a doctor, chemist, physicist, or philosopher on the planet who would argue against the fact that deep breathing helps the central nervous system relax.
Your mind naturally resists relaxation, so it takes practice to bring it along on the journey to calm. It's up to your higher consciousness to guide the mind, reassuring it that relaxation will be beneficial. A relaxed mind can accomplish more, even leading an entire nation, than a stressed one. Tell your mind this because the mind thrives on such ideas—it’s how it’s wired. You can trick your mind, like coaxing a child, into relaxing by convincing it that it will benefit from not obsessing or worrying. A relaxed mind uses energy more efficiently and supports a longer, healthier life by reducing stress and limiting the constant release of cortisol and adrenaline.
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With each breath, reinforce this truth in your mind. Instead of feeding into cynical views about breathing, remind yourself that you’re doing the right thing—you’re taking deep breaths and enjoying the moment. As you breathe deeply, listen to the sounds around you, open your eyes to see what surrounds you, and notice how your skin feels. Take another deep breath, and with each one, expand your awareness to the world around you, to your body, and to the vastness inside your consciousness. This awareness is divine—not in a religious sense, but in the sense that it’s inexplicable, miraculous, mysterious, and profoundly useful in the present moment.
One of the most important lessons to learn at a young age is understanding the timeframe you are meant to live in. Consider this: would it be effective if we were designed to constantly relive past moments, or would it be valuable to always look into the future, knowing everything that’s coming and manipulating events to our benefit? If we were to live entirely in the future, trying to control every present moment to achieve our desired outcomes, what would be the purpose of life? What would be the purpose of consciousness?
If we could predict and manipulate everything, there would be nothing to learn, no mistakes to make, and no growth. Life would lose its meaning, and consciousness would have no purpose. This moment—right now—is the highest reality because it’s the only time when everything exists and is happening. Everything that happened before is gone, a memory in time, and everything that will happen hasn’t occurred yet. The future has no energy, no mass, no matter; it’s just an abstract concept. The only true reality is this present moment.
We know how to step into the future when necessary, but our focus should be on the present moment. The mind often resists this because it doesn’t like what’s happening now or what happened yesterday, and it perceives the present as a repeat of the past. The loop between past, present, and future—along with the mind’s obsessions—creates a turbulent, roller-coaster-like experience. It’s so chaotic that it’s a wonder we don’t all lose our minds by the time we’re 50.
Imagine a universe where intelligent creatures like us didn’t figure out how to maintain their sanity, and their cause of death was insanity by age 50. We have a lot of work to do to keep ourselves sane—not just because of all the experiences we must process, but also due to our lack of knowledge, fears, and the complexities of our design and mortality. The key to changing our trajectory isn’t in figuring out life; it’s in figuring out ourselves first. Understand your own addictions, dysfunctions, defenses, and character flaws. Start with yourself. Start by writing everything down. Every day.
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Figure out the patterns in your mind and the states that bring you happiness. Describe yourself to yourself in writing—what are you about? What textures do you enjoy feeling? What tastes do you savor? And as you reflect on these answers, ask yourself: are they compassionate?
Compassion is a profound concept, one worth meditating on. Not because it’s spiritual or promises a place in heaven, but because, as Bob Marley said, heaven is now. Compassion is the highest frequency of human intelligence—perhaps even greater than love. I believe love is the pathway to compassion, which is just another word for love. When you focus your mind on love, you lead yourself toward all the positive things that love creates: forgiveness, healing, and positive emotions. Hatred, on the other hand, brings pain, resentment, and violence.
The conclusion is that there’s much work to do in your life to improve your mind, body, and skills. But let’s not be overwhelmed by this. Instead, let’s embrace the journey, recognizing that it’s exciting, even with its difficult moments. Let’s be purposeful and try to minimize wasting time on unnecessary things.