Meditation Will Break You Before It Saves You

The flight from London to San Diego was merciful. A little delay out of Heathrow, but our pilots—may their names be carved into the pantheon of time-saving aeronautics—shaved a whole hour off the return journey. Eleven hours in a metal tube hurtling through the sky, fighting physics and fatigue, and I emerged into the late afternoon San Diego mists like a time traveler whose molecules hadn’t quite settled.

My dogs mauled me at the door—three snorting, tail-whipping ambassadors of joy—and then I collapsed. Five days: San Diego to London. A blitz through the UK, short on sleep, long on stimulation, an hour stolen by British Daylight Savings, and an early Monday morning flight home to top it all off. I flopped onto the couch and clicked on episode three of Severance, hoping for some eerie dystopia to numb my brain. Made it to the opening credits. Out cold.

I tried again. And again. Every time I blinked, the show reset and so did my consciousness. Finally, I surrendered to the sweet mercy of oblivion at 8:45 p.m. and woke up at 5 a.m. with the full-body confusion of a man pulled from a dream mid-chapter.

The body was awake. The mind was still deep in the Outback somewhere—starving, hallucinating, refusing to come home.

And yet, being the earnest seeker I pretend to be, I decided to meditate.

I let the dogs out, brought them back in, lit a stick of overpriced Japanese incense, and sat down, cross-legged and cracked wide open by fatigue, hoping for twenty minutes of soul-settling insight. What I got instead was a full-blown neurological rodeo.

Thoughts tore through my skull like feral broncos, bucking and biting, kicking over buckets of reason and stamping out any glimmer of peace. I tried all the classics: breath awareness, body scanning, bird listening. I even tried gratitude, like a desperate man whispering love letters into a hurricane.

Twelve minutes in, I bailed. Meditation: 1. Joe: scorched, scrambled, spiritually spanked.

Staggering out of that mental minefield, I grasped for anything to pull me back into my body. I picked up The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, hoping for a gentle cosmic whisper. What I got was a sniper shot of truth between the eyes:

“Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.”

Not relaxing. Not escaping. Returning. And I realized I hadn’t been home in weeks—maybe longer. The mind is like a junkyard dog on bath salts. You try to sit with it and it goes feral, tearing through memories, insecurities, breakfast cravings, airport flashbacks, and the fact that you still haven’t emailed your agent No wonder the lamas tell us this is the greatest endeavor of our lives. It’s not a nap. It’s a jailbreak.

They say the purpose of meditation is to uncover our true nature—sky-like, unshakable awareness. But that sky is buried under a landfill of psychic sludge. And sitting in silence is the only shovel we’ve got.

So yes, it was a failure. Yes, I got my ass kicked. But maybe that is the practice: showing up in the wreckage, again and again, until the mind runs out of distractions and finally, mercifully, shuts the hell up.

For a moment. Maybe two.

And then—just maybe—you’re home.