The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on July 24, 2026.
Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.
Introduction
At the heart of the Buddha’s teaching is a surprisingly simple insight: as long as we believe peace lies in something other than this, the mind keeps seeking. And in that seeking, there is suffering.
In turn, a question to ask ourselves is “do we feel deeply at peace or contented in our life?”
If the answer is “no,” take a close look at what that’s about. Usually it’s that we believe there’s some problem that needs to be solved — a health issue, a financial issue, a relational issue, an existential or emotional one, among others.
I remember a period in my mid-20’s where I felt a real lack of purpose. I ran a business with a friend selling used electronics, and had enough free time to pursue a variety of wholesome hobbies. However, I spent most of my time alone, didn’t know what I was doing with my life, and often struggled to get out of bed.
To put it simply, I was seeking something other than this. While I may have been relatively happy in a conventional sense, I was not deeply at peace.
If we can answer “yes” to feeling deeply contented, look closer still. Is that peace completely unbroken, second after second, from waking to sleeping?
Usually, if we are honest with ourselves, we find moments of discontent — someone’s rude to us and we get triggered, we stub a toe, we discover tree roots cracking the foundation of our house and causing a huge mold infestation (true story!), or we’re just moving through a long to-do list with a foggy brain, wanting the day to be over already.
Big picture or microscopic, it’s a real insight to see the seeking at work — to see that some part of us says this is not okay, that something needs to be different before we can be at peace.
Meditation As Another Quest
Whether people realize it or not, they often turn meditation into another quest, hoping to spend some time in stillness and come out the other side more peaceful, relaxed, blissed, or insightful. When it doesn’t happen, and the sit is full of sleepiness, scattered thinking or nothing special, people tend to get disappointed.
This disappointment is rooted in the seeking paradigm itself.
In contrast, I think of meditation not as getting somewhere in the future, but as a practice of learning how to be present with this — dropping the quest altogether.
Whatever the technique — breath, mantra, body scan, open awareness — can it simply support being with this, relaxed and allowing? If we sit down grumpy, heavy, and scattered, can we just recognize, it’s like this
What if the key to our deepest well-being wasn’t achieving the fruits of the quest, but being deeply at peace with this? That’s not a thinking exercise — it’s an experiential one. Which brings us to the heart of it:
A Direct Taste
Right now, I invite you to take one deep breath.
[Inhaling]
[Exhaling]
Allow your forehead, jaw, shoulders and tummy muscles to soften. Rest into the felt experience of being here.
Take a moment to wordlessly notice: body sensations are happening.
[Inhaling]
[Exhaling]
Likewise, sounds are happening. Sights are happening. Maybe, more subtly, thoughts and urges are happening too.
[Inhaling]
[Exhaling]
All of it is just the tapestry of this moment. The body may feel tense or tight, or open and spacious — either way, it’s still just this.
The center point of this whole exercise is that there’s some strange capacity that notices all of this, in real time.
For just a few more seconds, really let yourself relax into this noticing awareness, even if you’re not totally sure what that means. Just relax, rest, receive.
Notice that from this place, there are no problems — just things tingling, pulsing, shifting, changing.
When The Bubble Popped
You really understand the secret to peace when you realize that it doesn’t come in the future after you get the thing you were seeking. That’s an incredibly hard lesson to learn.
My answer to that blah feeling of my 20s was to get really into meditation. I’d go on retreats, have big experiences, and then watch it all crash back into the mundaneness of selling televisions and laptops on Craigslist.
So I figured I needed something bigger. That search eventually led me to a two-year meditation retreat in Myanmar.
My teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, downplayed big meditation experiences like enlightenment or deep concentration.
But he talked endlessly about “continuous awareness” — so that became my new object of seeking. Without quite realizing it, I believed that if I can just achieve continuous awareness, I’ll finally have what I’m looking for.
After about a year of full-time intensive practice, it happened. The thing I pointed to above became my default mode, running effortlessly all day, every day. It was mind-blowing — a backdrop of peace and ease I’d never known.
And yet, most of the things I didn’t like about myself kept showing up anyway. I could still feel apathetic, grumpy, irritable — still not want to do my chores, eat another oily meal, or meditate through a cloud of mosquitos.
I was also spending more time with U Tejaniya directly — eating meals together, going on outings — and it was dawning on me that he was human too. He still got grumpy. He handled it wisely, but you could tell his good mood from his bad mood. Basically, he wasn’t perfect.
At some point, the bubble popped. I’d expected awareness to lead somewhere different — a place where I felt good all the time, a perfected version of myself. And yet, here I was, still just me.
At first, that disillusionment was incredibly disorienting. But, as the dust settled, it allowed me to more fully embrace what awareness actually was. Seeing the apathy or aversion clearly meant it no longer defined me, no longer cut as deep. I didn’t need to solve it to be at peace.
The deeper peace that then set in wasn’t the result of spiritual achievement. It appeared when the seeking finally relaxed.
A Dozen Years Later
In the dozen years since, I’ve felt every emotion imaginable — joy, awe, bliss, despair, anger, shame, and on and on.
I’ve disappointed people I love and touched others with real kindness. At various points, I’ve had my body not cooperate, my house cause endless troubles, my bank account look a bit grim, and still some periods of wondering, “what am I doing with my life?”
But what’s really stuck with me is just how insubstantial all of this turns out to be. Yes, these things may feel intense at times. And they may even trick me temporarily into believing them.
This past year, after the tree root crack and the mold infestation, when I found out my house also had asbestos contamination, I got tricked for about 12 seconds — I clenched my fists, growled with exasperation, and then with a flash of present moment awareness, I burst into laughter at how I got fooled, yet again, into believing that peace would come after the issue was resolved.
If you’ve practiced even a little, you’ve likely had glimpses of this — a moment of genuine okayness with what’s happening now, pleasant or not. Maybe you got one in the exercise above.
Upon receiving these glimpses, what usually happens next is a part of us convinces us we can’t really be at peace until the current problem is solved — that it’s either peace or non-peace, missing the third option entirely: awareness noticing the non-peace, which is its own deep and genuine peace. Sit with this a moment!
This Is It
Can you see meditation not as a means to some better future, but as learning how to meet this with awareness?
On the deepest level, peace isn’t the absence of problems, but the absence of seeking.
Even a one-second glimpse of this can be huge. And it’s not as dramatic as you may imagine. Perhaps it’s as simple as walking around the block and, for a moment, waking up from the fixing, scheming and problem solving. You’re just walking. Tension or frustration may be here. But, for that moment, you touch into something that notices the tension and frustration, as well as the birds, the trees, the footsteps, and the tingling, and on and on.
Oddly enough, from this place, we still fix the cracked floor, clean up the asbestos, apologize when we’ve misstepped, care for the body, and take loving actions. The difference is that we are no longer asking those things to complete us.
In brief, the more you realize this is it, you see that peace is not waiting on the other side of your life.
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