I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 24 and put down the guitar and fantasies of being a rock star.

Then, I wanted to write philosophy — like the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and the literary critic Frederic Jameson. Now, I just want to make people feel the way I feel when I read Tara Brach, Natalie Goldberg, David Deida, Martin Luther King, Jr. — open, urgently alive, in touch with my deepest intentions.

Figuring out how to do that has become an obsession. I’ve read John McPhee’s Draft №4, a masterclass on structure. I’ve written a blog post every week for over two years now. I’ve started a podcast to sharpen my ideas. I’ve outlined three potential books.

But if I’m honest with myself, I’ve never figured anything out — well, anything that truly matters — by taking in more information or planning the future.

All the big stuff, the tectonic shifts in my life, the changes in course, the revelations, have come from practice. Specifically, meditation practice.

Meditation is the opposite of figuring things out. It’s accepting that we’ll never figure out this mind or this wild, ever-changing experience we call “life.”

There’s really only one thing we can ever figure out: how to relate to our mind and life. In every single moment, we have only two choices: either we react to what’s happening, or we respond.

Reacting is me shooting back a short, passive aggressive email a few days ago in reply to a message from a colleague who questioned my communication style. Responding is me taking a day to ask for advice from friends and get in touch with my true intentions before replying to her understandably angry follow up email.

Like Facebook and Twitter, email sucks us in to being reactive. Luckily, we have meditation, the simple practice of sitting, watching our breath, feeling our body, listening to sounds, and otherwise doing nothing. We get to rest as the fully awake, consciousness that witnesses everything else without having to do anything — without reacting.

The only response is to accept whatever happens. Accept the sounds of the room. Accept the slight pain in our back. Accept the emotions swirling in our chest.

Most importantly, we accept, rather than believe, our thoughts. We get to see them as they really are: temporary distractions from the fullness of living in our senses. Sometimes useful — I need to be there at 3:00pm; I should brush my teeth — but mostly useless.

Most thinking is replaying the past or worrying about the future. All thinking narrows our experience and takes us out of the present moment.

But we need thoughts to write — what else would we put down?

The truth is, we never stop thinking. Meditation isn’t about “clearing the mind” and “blissing out.” It’s about getting to know the mind by finally just watching it rather than believing or trying to control it.

The mind, according to Zen meditation teacher and writer Natalie Goldberg, is the “writer’s landscape.”

She writes: “Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of its hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive.”

We have to get to know that beast, its patterns, tendencies, voices, personalities. Only then can we channel it on to the page in words that approach communicating the energy and aliveness of life itself — words and sentences and paragraphs that other people actually want to read.

This morning, the connection between meditation and writing slapped me in the face once again. I pulled from my shelf Zen meditation teacher and writer Natalie Goldberg’s Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Path.

I’ve read all of her books, and Thunder and Lightning two times already. But somewhere during all the blog posts and articles and opinion pieces I had forgotten the connection between this practice that I love and this occupation, writing, that pays the bills.

Her message is simple: if you want to be a writer, then write. But she also teaches a way to do it, a practice that frees us up from making decisions so we can use all of our energy on the writing itself.

Pick a word, phrase, or question. Any word, phrase, or question. Set a timer for ten minutes. Keep your hand moving if you’re using paper or your fingers moving if you’re on a computer. Be specific with details. Don’t cross anything out. Go wherever your mind takes you. Use whatever genre and style. Feel free to write the worst stuff ever — this is a practice.

After reading a bit of Thunder and Lightning, I wrote the word “Retreat” at the top of a fresh page in my notebook and got to writing. I want to write a how-to book about starting a daily meditation practice, and I figured writing about my first meditation retreat could gin up some wisdom.

Here’s what came up, after a bunch of random stuff that I’ll never read again: “My first retreat, with meditation teacher Hugh Byrne, is what allowed the seed I had planted years before to sprout from the ground and begin to be nurtured by the light of practice.”

It’s not literary gold. But it’s getting at something underneath how I think about meditation retreats — that the path I’ve taken to meditating every day has been a journey with help from many others, and I should probably talk about that journey and those people in my book. It also got me thinking about my childhood best friend Matt, who first turned me on to philosophy and thinking deeply.

Goldberg says that while doing this writing practice, we should stay connected to the senses, like in meditation: “The hum of the refrigerator, the aroma of hot toast wafting in from the kitchen … The senses make memory vivid. Often when I write I hear something far off, as if through a fog, and I go after that call in the dark.”

If you’re writing an email, just get to the point, but if you’re writing something you want people to read, sensory details about particular times and places will help you connect with the reader. Not only by including them, but also because, as Goldberg says, they get you to “some emotional truth” you wouldn’t otherwise have located in the process of writing.

So, go, write, now. Do ten minutes. Then do ten minutes tomorrow. Work your way up, all the while digging deeper under surface level thinking to the reveal the stuff that’s truly shaped your life. That’s what people want to read.

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We’ve all experienced that ahhhhh, that peaceful feeling after working out, connecting with a close friend, having great sex, or finishing up work for the day.

It feels like a switch has been flipped deep inside, resetting our stress level to zero, at least for a few hours.

What if I told you there’s a way to flip the switch at any moment, regardless of the conditions?

When I’m feeling stuck and stressed out, I take a break and meditate. As soon as I can, I find a quiet room or park bench and sit for 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes I even just sit in my car in a parking lot.

But if I don’t have time or can’t find a quiet place that feels safe, I turn to a quick practice called “soft belly meditation.” Here’s how the late meditation teacher Stephen Levine described it:

“Taking a few deep breaths, feel the body you breathe in. Feel the body expanding and contracting with each breath. Focus on the rising and falling of the abdomen. Soften the belly to receive the breath, to receive sensation, to experience life in the body.”

Just 30 seconds to a minute. That’s all you need. You can do it when you’re driving, sitting at your desk, walking down the street…almost anywhere, at any time.

Even if you forget the specifics, try to take in and remember the concept: your body, especially your stomach, is a shortcut back to the present moment.

If you’re like me, someone who tries to think my way out of all my problems, you often forget that you have a body. Right now, as you read this, you probably don’t feel your shoulders tensing up or your feet on the floor or your back on the chair.

Bringing attention to the body reverse-engineers our minds into being “mindful.” It pulls us out of our tendency to think about the past or worry about the future — the mind’s “virtual reality,” meditation teacher Tara Brach calls it.

As self-help guru Tony Robbins says, if you’re in your head, you’re dead. Dead, as in, not tuned in to what’s alive right here, right now. As 10% Happier author Dan Harris says, you’re reacting instead of responding.

Now, don’t expect meditation to solve all of your problems. Deep trauma, which we all carry, requires working with someone who you can trust enough to make you feel safe enough to unpack it.

As I’ll keep saying over and over again, meditation is not therapy. Or politics, for that matter. It won’t give you a magical power to communicate in a healthy way with your boyfriend, or change how powerful people in society keep us divided, like racism.

But soft belly meditation can help with everyday ups and downs. Your manager calls you in for another shift. Someone cuts you off on the way home from work. You get the flu.

The next time you feel stuck — which will likely happen sometime today — try breathing into your stomach. Or at least ask yourself the question: “What does my body feel like right now?”

Training yourself to ask this question in the midst of stress is a massive first step towards living the life you want to live — that is, one in which you’re actually, truly alive.

As Levine wrote in his book A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if it Were Your Last, “Soft-belly is the practice that accompanies us throughout the day and finds us at day’s end still alive and well.”

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Odds are, you’re a “spiritual bypasser.” You probably think your meditation or yoga practice is helping you grow as a human being, in your work, and in relationships. I’m the same way.

But you need to be careful. Meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices aren’t therapy. Yes, they do help us grow — yet they tend to also enable us to overlook our deeper emotional problems, a phenomenon called “spiritual bypassing.”

As the recently deceased psychologist John Welwood defined it, spiritual bypassing is the “use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

In other words, it’s pretending — often unconsciously — that your spiritual practices and beliefs about universal truth mean that you don’t have to deal with your own particular, relative neuroses.

Put yet another way: meditation might be letting you off the hook from dealing with your shit, which pretty much always leaves someone else to deal with it.

The obvious example is the Catholic priest who preaches about God on Sunday while sexually abusing boys the rest of the week. But you probably know someone who raves about finding their “true self” through yoga, yet they’re manipulative and abusive in their relationships.

Or that person who took mushrooms one time and thinks that if we just got rid of labels — Democrat, Republican, racist, etc. — everyone would get along.

I have a therapist and yet still exaggerate the power of my meditation practice. At times, I’ve attributed miraculous changes to being more mindful: changing careers for more meaningful work, getting closer to my mother, getting back on my feet after a big breakup.

I don’t blame myself for that. When I first started going to meditation teacher Tara Brach’s Wednesday night classes, I hadn’t yet even entertained going to therapy. I inherited a working-class distrust of it from my parents. Therapy was for rich people and hippies, not the rest of us who deal with our problems by saving money and working harder.

I was wrong. Well, not exactly. Therapy is expensive, which is yet another reason we need #MedicareForAll.

But back to the point: meditation has helped me grow, just not by itself.

I’ve been stuck so many times now, applying that same hard-working attitude to my problems, except with more meditation practice. I’ve felt lost in a “successful” career that wasn’t satisfying me at all. I’ve been withdrawn in a relationship that actually mattered to me.

Each time, meditation helped me with that all-too-important first step of growth: recognizing that there’s a problem. Then it helped me accept that I was suffering. Therapy (and friends, mentors, and community) helped me with the dirty work: investigating what was causing the emotional traffic jam.

We can be mindful of what’s coming up inside of us, the constant flow of thoughts and emotions. We can start to recognize the habits and patterns we’ve adopted to chase the feelings we like and avoid the ones we don’t.

That’s the universal truth of the present moment: that whatever is happening right now, we can be with it.

But we need help understanding where our habits and patterns come from. We need help healing the relative wounds we all get from childhood, relationships, and living in a violent and individualistic capitalist society.

I want to be as clear as day: meditation is not therapy. It’s a tool that can help you start dealing with your shit, but it’s not therapy.

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Listen to the podcast version with more content

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for everyone but the 1%. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More