All the Things

In 2017, I sauntered into the London Meditation Centre.

I was the last in my friend group to surrender to “bliss consciousness.” My spiritually superior pals had made it clear: join the mindful brigade or risk being disowned.

I figured, fuck it—why not? Couldn’t hurt to close my eyes and breathe for 20 minutes, right? Soon after, I was anointed with a mantra and crowned a meditator.

Cut to a train at rush hour, packed like sardines. I’m heading south to Brighton, sneaking in some work on my laptop. I clock a cup of hot coffee dangerously perched on my neighbour’s tray. I tap away, keeping half an eye on the hazard.

At the next stop, more passengers flood in. It’s elbowy, chaotic, and inevitable. I sense the coffee’s going down.

And then—bam.

In one fluid move, I twist, snatch the MacBook, and like a newborn, shield it from the carnage. My neighbour and the surrounding passengers look on in awe. The coffee flies onto my back, and my computer remains unscathed. For a glorious second, I’m the MacBook-saving samurai London didn’t know it needed.

Then I think, maybe it’s meditation?

Not the serene, lotus-sitting kind. But the reflex. The heightened awareness. Matrix-style bullet-time. Moving through chaos in slow motion.

Okay—maybe I just got lucky. I’ll take it either way.

No More Shoulds

On the train, my reflexes brought me into the moment. Off the train, in everyday life, my practice of being present wobbles. So I breathe. I try all the things—and yet still feel stuck. Meditation. Medication. Movement. Mantras. I chase anything that starts with an M and think, What are you even on about, Jonas?

When I’m ‘out of sorts’ —absent from the now— I feel it in my body. Tight chest. Heavy shoulders. Shorter breaths. Dis-ease. Separation. The stuck-ness waxes and wanes like the moon.

I rewind. I fast-forward. But I miss the ongoing wow happening right now.

I can’t think my way into presence. Discovering what I need— my next move—takes more than logic. It’s been a long slog to read the subtle tracks of my body: how it relaxes when something feels right, how it tightens when I’m off course.

I’m still learning the language of my body. How do I know what I know? Can I trust it? Attuning to my feelings, sensations, and instincts brings me back home to myself. The truth lies in trusting this deeper, wiser, wilder place inside—the one that never speaks in shoulds.

Boyd Varty, in The Lion’s Tracker’s Guide to Life, writes:

”The journey out of [of falling asleep in your own life] will begin not with the call, but with the desire to hear the call. The desire itself has an energy…Most of us are looking but not seeing…As trackers, our part is to be awake. Our part is to listen. We want to hear the call. Tracking begins with wanting to track.”

We shape our lives by how we expend our energy, our time, and our attention. But most of us are conditioned to look outward—soaking up cultural cues, letting others define our value, our direction, our purpose.

And so, we lose our way. We lose ourselves. In shoulds.

Shoulds are traps we build from narrow rules and second-hand beliefs. No wild animal has ever participated in a should.

What makes you come alive runs deeper than any rule or rationalization. No one else can show you the way. That’s The Work.

The Myth of the Magic Bullet

I wish I could hand you a neat little shopping list of enlightenment essentials. But there’s no one-size-fits-all. No ultimate hack. No system reboot. No internal landscaping or spiritual Botox that will snap you back to your higher self.

I get caught up in my silly stories all the time. I ride high, then low. I’m in flow, then stalled out. I double down. I do “The Work.” Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t.

What I’ve learned is: The Work isn’t about arriving anywhere. It’s about returning.
It’s a practice—not a finish line.

The aim (if there is one) is to unhook from the grip of suffering-laced beliefs. You say to hell with your mood and follow your practice. You stop trying to make sense of it all and surrender to the unravelling. You permit yourself to be messy. To let go. And just be.

You’re not fixing yourself—you’re not broken. You aren’t becoming whole again because you already are. You are simply returning, humaning really, to your natural state: innocent, present, and calm.

Meditation or otherwise, I come back to what grounds me: my breath, my body, my people, my natural surroundings. To the pulsing awareness that—despite what the world whispers—there’s nothing wrong with me.

I squint, and the view sharpens. A massive Douglas Fir stands still and true. It doesn’t carry its past. It doesn’t store hurt. So why should I?

I listen. I pay attention. I heed the call.

And it’s these tracks, this embodied remembering, that leads me back to the wild self I’d forgotten.

Practice over Perfection

Sure, maybe you don’t want to get out of bed. Perhaps you’re caught in a thought loop, wondering if you could’ve done something differently. Or spiraling over something that hasn’t even happened yet.

And yes—there’s that gorgeous pint of ice cream in the freezer, your trusty emotional support dessert.

Lions don’t lie awake wondering if they should be better lions. Birds don’t question their career paths. Only humans seem to think they’re a problem to be solved.

And yet, I still fall for it—convinced there’s a fix for the human condition I just haven’t found.

But then Byron Katie’s voice echoes in:

When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.

If we begin to see our parts as a symphony rather than a mess of broken pieces, something shifts.

We begin to emerge—unmasked, revived, evolved. We inch closer to coherence.
We start to trust that it’s all figure-outable. That life, in its own bizarre way, knows exactly what it’s doing.

And then we can tune back into the music—remembering how to do the dance.

OK, I’ll leave you here. Time to get back to doing The Work.

But first… I need a nap.