People often ask long-term meditators what they’ve gained from their practice. It’s a reasonable question, but it points in the wrong direction. After four decades of sitting, the more accurate answer is about what’s been lost.
The urgency to become someone. The running commentary on experience. The assumption that peace is a place you get to rather than the ground you forgot you were standing on. These aren’t things I decided to let go of. They wore away, the way a path wears into a hillside. You don’t notice it happening. You notice it has happened.
## The early years
When I started meditating in my twenties, I brought the same approach that had worked everywhere else: set a goal, work hard, measure progress. Meditation was going to be another accomplishment. I read the books, sat the retreats, kept a log of how many minutes I’d done each week. I was, without knowing it, trying to win at sitting still.
This approach does produce results, up to a point. Concentration deepens. The mind gets calmer. You have experiences that feel like confirmation you’re on the right track, moments of unusual stillness or clarity that seem to prove the whole project is working.
What I didn’t understand yet was that every one of those experiences, no matter how profound, was still something that came and went. I was collecting peak moments the way some people collect stamps. The collection was growing, but I wasn’t any freer.
## The middle years
My practice deepened through two traditions. Advaita Vedānta works through inquiry: Who am I? What is real? What persists when everything else is removed? I wrote about the text at the center of this practice, Śaṅkara’s Aparokṣānubhūti, elsewhere on this site. The method is rigorous and relentlessly subtractive. You don’t add anything. You take away what’s false until what’s left is what was always there.
Nyingma Dzogchen arrives at something very similar through a different door. Rather than stripping away the unreal, it points directly at the nature of awareness itself, already complete, needing nothing. When you sit with both long enough, the difference between removing what is false and recognizing what is true gets very thin. I spent about a decade thinking they were fundamentally incompatible before I realized they were having the same conversation in different languages.
## What actually changes
After decades of practice, the changes are not what most people expect. I don’t levitate. I still get frustrated in traffic. I still sometimes argue with my wife about things that don’t matter and then feel foolish about it afterward.
What has changed is subtler and harder to put into words. There’s a gap now between experience and the story about experience, and that gap has widened. Not because I trained myself to pause, not as a technique, but because the reflex to narrate everything has genuinely weakened. Something happens and there’s a beat where it’s just what it is, before the mind wraps words around it. That beat wasn’t there in my twenties.
That widening is real. But in the early years, and sometimes long after, it can tip into a remove — a watching from behind glass that looks like equanimity from the inside and registers as absence to the people closest to you. Practice eventually corrects this. But only if you notice it.
There’s also less fear. Not fearlessness, nothing heroic. More like a quiet settling that came from realizing the thing I’d been most afraid of losing, my self, my sense of being somebody in particular, was never as solid as I’d assumed. When you see that directly, not as an idea but as something you notice in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, the stakes of daily life get lower. Not because life matters less, but because you’re holding it more loosely.
The practice hasn’t made me a better person, at least not in the way self-help language means it. What it’s done is make “person” a lighter thing to carry. I’m still the same person. I just don’t grip it as tightly.
## What I wish I had known
That the goal is not an experience. I chased experiences for years, luminous states, deep silence, the feeling of dissolution. Every one of them arose and passed. What remains isn’t an experience. It’s what was there before the experience started and after it ended.
That consistency matters more than intensity. I’ve done long retreats and I’m glad I did, but what actually reshaped my life was twenty quiet minutes every morning, year after year, decade after decade. The retreats gave me glimpses. The daily practice gave me ground.
And that the title of my book turned out to be truer than I expected when I chose it. Nothing was ever in the way. The obstacles I spent years trying to remove were the practice. The confusion was the practice. The ten thousand mornings I sat there thinking I was wasting my time were the practice. All of it.
The full story is in Nothing in the Way, a memoir of four decades across Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen.