People imagine that a long-term meditation practice looks serene. That after forty years you float to the cushion at dawn, settle into effortless stillness, and rise with a quiet smile. I can see why they think this. The books and teachers tend to describe the destination, not the commute.
Here is what the commute actually looks like.
## The Morning
I wake early, usually around five, sometimes earlier. Not out of discipline. The body has just adjusted over the decades. The house is quiet. I make tea. I sit.
The first few minutes are almost always the same: a settling. The body adjusts its position. The mind, which was busy with dreams a moment ago, starts to slow down. I’ve learned not to rush this. The transition from sleep to practice has its own pace and doesn’t respond well to being hurried.
Some mornings, the sitting is clear from the start. Attention turns inward easily. The sense of a separate self thins, and what remains is a quiet awareness that doesn’t need to be directed anywhere. These mornings are a gift, and they are not the norm. Maybe one in five, on a generous estimate.
Most mornings are more ordinary. The mind is busy. Thoughts about the day ahead, about something someone said, about nothing in particular. The practice on these mornings is the same as on the clear ones: I turn attention toward the sense of “I” and let inquiry do its work. The difference is that I have to do this again and again. The mind wanders. I come back. It wanders. I come back. After forty years this still happens, though the leash has gotten shorter.
## How Long I Sit
About forty-five minutes to an hour most mornings. Some days longer. Some days I get up after thirty minutes because the sitting is flat and I know the difference between perseverance and stubbornness. I stopped using a timer sometime in my forties. After enough years, the body just knows.
In my twenties and thirties I was rigid about it. I set a timer. Exactly one hour. If I stopped early, I’d feel like I’d failed. That rigidity was useful at the beginning because without structure the mind will always find reasons not to sit. But the rigidity softened over the years. The practice became less like a discipline and more like a part of the day, like eating or walking the dog.
## What I Actually Do on the Cushion
This has changed over the decades. In the early years, my practice was primarily Vedāntic self-inquiry: turning attention toward the “I” and investigating its nature. This was the core for nearly twenty years, and in a sense it still is. But it’s been refined and simplified to the point where the formal question rarely arises anymore. What remains is more like a habitual turning inward, a relaxation of the outward-moving tendency of attention.
My later engagement with Dzogchen added something different. The Dzogchen practice of trekchö, resting in the natural state without fabrication, has a quality that’s distinct from inquiry. It’s less active, more spacious, and on some mornings the sitting naturally gravitates there. On other mornings it’s more in the inquiry mode. I don’t decide in advance. I’ve stopped trying to control which practice shows up.
I should also say: there are mornings when neither mode is really available. When the mind is thick or agitated or simply flat. On those mornings I just sit. I don’t try to force clarity. I sit with what’s here, even when what’s here feels like nothing much. I’ve come to trust, after enough years, that even these sittings matter. The practice works underneath the surface. You can’t always see it.
## The Rest of the Day
One of the things that’s changed most over forty years is the boundary between formal practice and daily life. In the early years, the two were separate. I’d sit in the morning, then go about my day, and the day felt largely unrelated to the cushion.
Now the boundary is thinner. The inquiry doesn’t stop when I stand up. It’s there in conversations, in moments of frustration, in the simple act of walking from one room to another. I want to be careful not to oversell this. It’s not continuous enlightenment. It’s more like a quiet undertone, a background sense that the separate self isn’t quite as solid as it presents itself. Sometimes this undertone is vivid. Sometimes it’s barely perceptible. But it wasn’t there in the early years, and it’s there now.
The test of the practice, I’ve learned, is not how the sitting feels. It’s whether the people closest to you feel met — whether there is a presence that extends toward them, or simply a quietude that has turned inward.
## The Difficult Parts
After forty years, the hardest part isn’t what you might expect. It isn’t the restless mind or the stiff knees. Those become manageable fairly early. The hardest part is showing up.
Even after decades, there are mornings when the last thing I want to do is sit. The bed is warm. The mind says there’s no point. The practice feels stale. Some part of me rebels against the routine. This has not gone away. What’s changed is that I no longer wait for motivation. I sit because sitting is what happens in my house before sunrise. Motivation, when it shows up at all, arrives during the practice, not before.
The other difficult part, which I wrote about in “What 40 Years of Daily Meditation Actually Changes,” is what practice strips away. The illusions about yourself. Stories you’ve been telling for decades. Comfortable identities you’d rather keep. Practice doesn’t add anything. It takes things away. And some of those things, you were quite attached to.
## Why I Continue
People ask me this sometimes, and the question has started to feel strange. It’s like asking why I continue to eat breakfast. The practice isn’t something I do in addition to my life anymore. It’s the structure my days are built around. Without it I wouldn’t know what to do with the hours before dawn, and that’s not a figure of speech.
But if I had to point to one thing: it’s the moments of recognition. They’re not dramatic. No light, no bliss, no mystical visions. Just a quiet seeing that what you’ve been looking for has never been absent. That the awareness in which all of this appears has never changed, never wavered, never been touched by any experience. These moments are worth every flat morning. Every year that seemed to go nowhere.
If you’re starting out, see How to Start a Meditation Practice. The full story of this practice is in Nothing in the Way.