Hey Reader,
I sit alone in my room, staring at the ceiling. The feeling of existential dread is palpable.
I just returned to my hotel room after night one at a Baby Bathwater event, an unconference for founders and high performers. Think of it as mastermind meets music festival, where vibes are on point and good times flow.
Except this particular night, I cannot drop in. From dinner onward, I feel disconnected from the conversation. I find myself drifting. I figure it will sort itself out over the evening, but I can’t shake the feeling.
The harder I try, the more the feeling of loneliness intensifies.
Finally, frustrated, melancholy, and defeated, I call it a night.
My mind is heavy and racing as I lie in the unfamiliar hotel bed.
“Have I lost my spark?”
“Have I meditated my way out of being able to have a good time?”
“I used to love Baby Bathwater. This is my favorite thing. What is WRONG with me?”
“Has life lost its color?”
These are the intrusive, looping thoughts that pervade my mind, alone in the dark.
Then I remember, I know what to do in this situation.
I take three deep breaths, relaxing my body and signaling to my nervous system that I am safe.
I focus on my breath, allowing the thoughts to arise and fall away on their own.
I see the thoughts for what they are, not my own, but mere objects in consciousness.
The existential dread fades into the night, like a wave subsiding back into the ocean.
When the wave recedes, the pattern is visible. My mind does two things. It takes a single, present moment and stretches it into a future. Then it attaches a story to the projection.
This is the mind’s baseline program. Our brains evolved as pattern-matching machines, with one job: to keep us safe. They do this by synthesizing information and matching patterns to predict future outcomes.
This is a very useful evolutionary adaptation. It is precisely this extraordinary pattern-matching ability that drives our remarkable evolution as a species.
The problem is that we now live in a world where comfort, rather than survival, is the norm, and our brains have not had time to adapt to the new paradigm.
What evolved to keep us safe also keeps us trapped in suffering.
Here is the program laid bare:
1. Activation
A trigger arises. In this case, social disconnection at an event I usually love. Feelings arise in response. The feelings land viscerally.
2. Projection
The mind takes a single moment—a now experience—and runs a forecast. Tonight becomes always. The feeling becomes the future. “This is how it will always be.” The body begins to believe the forecast and tightens. The wave gains power.
3. Meaning
Once the forecast is in place, the mind assigns a story. “I’ve lost my spark.” “Meditation broke my capacity for joy.” “Something is wrong with me.” “This is who I am now.” Meaning hardens the forecast into identity. The story now explains the feeling and feeds it. Emotion confirms the story. The loop intensifies.
From here, the loop continues unless one of two things happens:
Either a) new information from external sources eventually starts to update the program and life goes on, or b) we interrupt the pattern by bringing the subconscious forward into awareness.
The former is the default. This is how most of us live, on autopilot, at the mercy of external conditions that dictate our internal state.
The latter is how we become the author of our own experience. When we reclaim agency over our thoughts and recognize them as objects rather than identity, we allow ourselves to return to freedom, spaciousness, and presence.
The following two steps are how we break the cycle and restore freedom:
4. Interrupt
Relax the body first. Three breaths, exhaling fully and pausing at the bottom. Signal safety, then begin watching the moves in real time. “I am forecasting.” “I am living in the future.” “I am assigning meaning.” Name them, without judgment. Remember, our mind is only doing what it is designed to do. Trying to imagine it could be otherwise would only be bargaining with reality, like judging a tree for growing.
5. Return
Replace the forecast with presence. “What am I experiencing right now, in this moment?” Feel the feelings fully. Watch them dissipate. Recognize them as weather. No future to predict. No identity to defend. Simply living in the moment, being here, now.
This is the whole game. In the West, we mistake awakening to mean we will no longer drift. We imagine that at the end of all the spiritual seeking, if we just try hard enough, we will arrive at a place where the weather no longer appears. We imagine a constant state of joy, bliss, and perpetual happiness.
But real freedom isn’t the absence of weather, it’s the ability to not attach to it. It’s the perpetual cycle of forgetting and remembering, and instead of imagining it could be any other way, being totally ok with things exactly as they are.
Our lives, our minds, our breath, everything in the cosmos, all operate in a constant state of expansion and contraction. This is the way it always is. Birth, death, rebirth, an endless cycle. Don’t try to stop the tide; simply notice it, let it move, and return to presence. When you know the rhythm, you stop turning weather into identity.
I wake the next day with a rueful smile, laughing gently at the self that fell into the trap.
I connect, I laugh, I enjoy the conversations, and let each moment be new.
The next two days open up into ease. Night three is a peak experience. Laughter in the cold air, music in my chest, present and alive.
I have the time of my life.
Not because the color returned, but because I remember it never left.
Mb
This Week on Money Stories: Dr. Vass spent over a decade in emergency rooms, treating patients at the edge of life. But the more truth he heard in those final moments, the less aligned he felt with the system he worked in. This episode is about mortality, meaning, and the kind of health that starts from within.
Full episode: Youtube | Apple | Spotify
