I planted a compass in my mind many years ago. One simple instruction: find love, purpose, and freedom in the present moment, or accept that they cannot be found.
Not tomorrow. Not after the next retreat. Not once I've meditated enough, healed enough, read enough books, done enough therapy. But now. Love, purpose and freedom are here and now, or nowhere.
So I sat. I watched. I watched the way my mind searched for those three things constantly. In ideas, in future sensations, in future experiences, in the next version of myself. My mind was relentless. Always reaching. Always convinced that what I needed was just around the next corner.
But I kept bringing my attention back. Here. Now. This. Like cutting the line the instant my mind would become hooked by any temptation of a better future moment.
Over time, something shifted. Love, purpose, and freedom stopped feeling like destinations I was traveling toward. They became synonymous with now. Not separate from it. And once that became obvious, it became equally obvious that they could never be found anywhere else.
The Ladder Everyone's Climbing
Most of us are climbing. We don't even realize it. There's a subtle internal program running that says: I am not enough as I am. This moment could be better. I could be more. There must be a higher experience, a greater ecstasy, a deeper peace waiting for me somewhere above where I currently stand.
So we climb. We move from one spiritual practice to the next. One teacher. One book. One modality. Always ascending.
And the climbing feels productive. It feels like progress. It looks like commitment to growth.
But here's what the climbing is silently communicating: I am dissatisfied with what is.
And that dissatisfaction, no matter how spiritual it dresses itself up to be, is a subtle rejection of life as it is. A subtle rejection of self. A subtle rejection of other. A subtle rejection of world. This is why it feels scary to tell our partner what we want. We can sense it's a subtle form of rejection.
In our frantic rush for the top, we forget to breathe. We hold our breath and forget to inhale deeply—we forget to receive the majesty and magnificence of manifest existence. We refuse to receive the abundance of life on life's terms. We sit with our arms crossed in defiance and our noses in the air until life bends to our liking before we're willing to receive. Before we're willing to say, "This is enough. My partner is enough. I am enough."
I used to think the goal of spiritual practice was to fix what was broken. Heal the wound. Clear the block. Resolve the trauma. And that's useful. At a relative level, it works.
But there's a never-ending-ness to it. Because if your entire orientation toward life is "something needs fixing," you stay imprisoned in a conflict between opposites. Good versus evil. Broken versus whole. Light versus dark. And you fight that war internally and externally for the rest of your life.
But once you stop seeing things as broken—that every moment is utterly and disappointingly insufficient—then the very act of seeing them differently starts to create the healing you were seeking.
You stop trying to be something. You stop trying to fix something. And the loving awareness you bring to what is does the heavy lifting you thought you had to do.
It's paradoxical. When you stop seeing the world as broken, the world starts showing you its true Self—that it is already perfect, not perfect after you "fix" it.
The Lesson Nobody Can Teach You
In every meditative tradition I've studied, across every lineage and every culture, the highest practice is the same: a form of doing nothing, impeccably.
No instruction. No technique. No visualization, no mantra, no breathwork. Just this. Being. Fully. Here.
If I were to tell you what it is, it's not it anymore. The moment you make it into a method, it becomes something the mind can grasp, and the mind's grasp is precisely what corrupts the practice. The mind uses the practice as a tool to "fix" what it presumes to be broken, and thereby only leads to further dissatisfaction.
That might sound like a riddle. It's not. It's the most practical truth there is.
J. Krishnamurti once famously said,
What he meant was that true wisdom comes from perceiving reality directly, without the interference of judgment, bias, or past conditioning. It suggests suspending automatic mental labeling is required to truly understand "what is."
If you can observe your judgments and subtle rejection of what is, moment to moment, then you have what you need to begin.
If you can inhale and pull this moment closer, as if it were your lover, until there is no distance between you and all that is, then you have everything you need for a lifetime.
Love, purpose and freedom become not things to achieve, but qualities of your true nature to be realized.
You will always know how to practice. You will always understand purpose, love, and freedom at the level of truth: they cannot be found in any future moment.
It's called realization, not achievement, because you're not attaining anything new. You're recognizing what's already true.
What Happened When I Stopped Climbing
When I was younger, I was adamant that I knew what the world needed. I knew who I had to be. I knew how to help people. And I would bring my "gifts" into the world, forcefully, tirelessly, relentlessly.
It never worked.
The moment I shut my mouth, stopped telling the world who I was and what it needed to be, and started listening, surrendering, and trusting instead, the entire trajectory of my life changed.
I didn't know how I was going to build anything. Get clients. Get money. Create a life. I didn't put my attention there in the conventional way. I just said, quietly, to life itself, "I trust you. I'm giving myself to you completely."
And since that moment, life has always been there for me, taken care of me.
Twelve years later, I wake up next to the woman I love. I walk into my daughter's room. I sit down to write. None of it was planned. All of it was received.
The Invitation
Keep growing. Keep practicing. Keep learning.
And know that the love you're searching for is available right now, in this breath, in this body, in this imperfect moment. It doesn't require you to become anyone other than who you already are.
Love, purpose and freedom are here and now. Or nowhere.
That's not a philosophy. That's the direct experience of everyone who has ever stopped climbing long enough to realize they were already home.