Here is something the meditation industry will not tell you.
Most people come to the cushion the same way they come to therapy. Late. Under duress. After something has already gone sideways. The custody battle, the burnout, the relationship that’s fraying at the edges. We arrive at mindfulness not from a place of peace but from a place of quietly falling apart, hoping this will fix it.
And that’s fine. That’s human. That’s exactly how I got here too.
The problem is what we bring with us when we sit down.
For the first stretch of my meditation practice, my intentions were almost entirely about me. I want to feel better. I want to win this situation. I want to be seen as the calm one in the room. I want to be the guy who has it together. On the surface those sound reasonable. Underneath they are all ego. They are all small. And a practice built on small intentions will always eventually feel too small to bother with.
Lately I’ve been falling in love with this idea that the more tightly you grip your time, trying to optimize and extract maximum value from it, the more anxious and unsatisfying it becomes. The same thing happens with meditation. The more you meditate to get something for yourself, the more the practice starts to feel like another item on a productivity list. And we all know what happens to items on productivity lists.
We abandon them.
What actually changed my practice was shifting the question entirely. Instead of asking what can I get from this, I started asking what can this make me capable of giving.
Before I sit on my cushion every morning, I say a few intentions quietly. Not to the universe in some grand spiritual performance. Just to myself. Under my breath. Sometimes just in my head. But I say them every single morning.
May I have the courage not to run away from this moment.
May this practice help me be a clear vessel for my children.
May I be a light to others and serve them compassionately.
May I come to understand who I actually am beneath all of this.
May I be present. Fully here. In all of it.
Notice what is not on that list. Six figures. A calmer demeanor at meetings. A better brand. A more disciplined morning. Those things may come as byproducts and that’s fine. But they are not the reason I get out of bed at 5am and sit in silence.
I get out of bed because I genuinely believe that sitting down and being still makes me a better father to a 14 year old and a 4 year old who are both watching how I move through the world. That belief is not abstract. It is the most concrete and non-negotiable thing in my life. And so the practice that serves it feels equally non-negotiable.
This is the one thing nobody says in meditation videos. The quiet room and the consistent time slot and the breathing technique; those are all fine. But they are the furniture, not the foundation. The foundation is why you are sitting down in the first place. And if the answer is anything that lives inside your ego, the practice will always be fragile.
Find an intention that is bigger than you. Something that does not care whether you feel productive today. Something that would make you sit down even on the hardest morning. For me that something is my kids. For you it might be different. But it has to be real and it has to matter more than convenience.
That is what makes a practice sustainable. Not discipline. Not routine. Intention.
Yesterday I released a full video and podcast episode going deeper into all of this including the five specific intentions I set every morning and exactly why each one has made the practice feel worth protecting no matter what else is happening in my life. Both are linked below.