Mind racing. Thumb scrolling. Eyes swirling.

When your life feels like it is going too fast, at risk of spinning out of control, you can feel like a passenger getting thrown around in the backseat of a car.

In the backseat, you have no control. You can’t change anything until you find your way from the back seat to the driver’s seat.

In the driver’s seat, you gain the ability to slow down, speed up, or turn the car in the direction of your intuition. The driver’s seat is the position you were always meant to sit in.

How I Found the Driver’s Seat

In my life, I have found my way to the driver’s seat in three ways: “parts work” (Internal Family Systems), a Hawaiian practice called ho’oponopono, and meditation.

The most powerful and enduring shift in my driver’s seat (self) energy has come through meditation. I meditate for 20 minutes twice a day. I know that sounds like a lot of time. It is!

It’s a big commitment. But I didn’t make that commitment at first. I had to learn the hard way.

What It Actually Looks Like (It’s Not Pretty)

When I first heard about meditation, I was a hard no. I thought, “You want me to sit still and let all of these thoughts attack me for 10 minutes? I’d be like a mental piñata! No thanks.”

Even after nearly 10 years of meditating, it’s still hard. Here is how it usually goes: I sit down and close my eyes. My eyes are still swimming. I breathe, a couple of big exhales. My eyeballs still feel like they are swirling. From experience, I know that it will take a minute or two (or ten) for them to settle down.

Other times, it’s not my eyes. My brain is spinning. It is busy seething about someone’s actions, or it’s obsessing about a conflict coming up in my life that scares me. I feel like a marionette being danced around for a while before I can recognize that my brain is swirling like my eyes.

It’s when I get to the “oh, right, I’m a marionette!” stage is where meditation helps: I start to turn the ship and take control when I finally recognize what is going on. Still, my mind will repeat the same thought a few more times before I can turn down the heat. Next, I find myself planning out my day but I catch that diversion pretty quickly.

I tell myself that’s a Later-Me problem, not what I need to be doing now. It’s easier to let that go than the seething or obsessing. What’s left is some tune playing in the background of my mind, often a lyric that my subconscious is waving around like a flag to get my attention.

Today, “Wasting all my time…” by Soccer Mommy was playing on repeat. Thanks, subconscious! I know you think I’m wasting my time. I want to respond, “Didn’t you see me working my butt off the last 15 minutes, sorting through all of these swirling, seething, and useless thoughts and feelings?”

There is a line from a TV series that meditation always reminds me of:

“Bring yourself back online”
-Westworld TV series

This is why I committed to this practice: twice a day, I do this work to bring my Self back online.

Why do I spend so much time meditating? The answer to the question “why I committed” comes down to simple math:

The Math That Keeps Me Coming Back

I spend 2% of my day making the other 98% better.

An honest audit of the 98% of my time each day would show me spending most of my energy (1) acting the way I think an adult should act and (2) chasing money.

As a result, I lose connection with my Self and sacrifice any real connection with others. My purpose gets buried in a blur of tasks and rationalizations.

Using meditation, I re-align twice a day to:

• center my Self in all the tasks I seek to accomplish every day
• amplify my Inner Voice as it competes with all the voices in my head that clamor for my attention

Without this routine of grounding myself, my days become a chaotic race of people-pleasing and attempting to be more “productive.”

That’s my story. Here’s what you can do to start writing yours:

Where You Can Start

If you already meditate sometimes, I want to persuade you to make a commitment to doing it every day.

If you don’t currently meditate, I want to help you begin. I don’t care how you start or what type of meditation you try. Commitment matters more than the method. Trust me, I tried for over five years to meditate the way most people suggest, noticing my breathing using mindfulness meditation, adapted from Zen Buddhism. I tried and tried. I paid for classes and joined accountability groups.

It turns out that this style of meditating (focus on breathing) didn’t work for me. My brain was already too involved! I didn’t need to use it more. I needed to give my brain a break. To better regulate my nervous system, I needed a way to rest and reset.

I hope that following your breath works for you. If it doesn’t work for you, please check out Vedic meditation. One easy way is to pick up Emily Fletcher’s book “Stress Less, Accomplish More.”

Emily helped me find a way to return to my Self twice a day. Vedic meditation gives me a way to replenish my energy, which I use up adapting to the day’s challenges. Emily also taught me how to form a habit. Now, for me, meditating is more than just taking a pause on the craziness of my day. It refills my tank!

It doesn’t matter where you start. Check out some YouTube videos or the Headspace or Calm apps. The Insight Timer app has a lot of options. Like I said, the method isn’t important. The key is finding a way to build a habit and make a commitment.

P.S. If you want to read more, learning how to meditate is one of the “Meal Kit” items in my brief, illustrated guide, “How to Be a Better Partner.”