Come Home to Yourself
There isn't one perfect practice. There's the one that becomes yours.
For much of my life, I thought growth meant becoming someone else.
A calmer person.
A wiser person.
Someone who worried less, reacted less, and somehow had life figured out.
So I searched.
Like many people, my search looked productive. I read books. I attended retreats. I explored meditation. Over the years, I found myself studying contemplative traditions from India and around the world, always believing there was one more insight, one more practice, one more teacher waiting just over the horizon.
The search wasn’t unpleasant.
In many ways, it was beautiful.
But after a while, I began to notice something.
The search itself had quietly become a habit.
And then another question began to emerge.
What if the point of contemplative practice isn’t to become someone new...
...but to become more available to the life you’re already living?
Every new practice had arrived with the promise that this might finally be the one.
The one that would bring lasting peace.
The one that would quiet the mind.
The one that would help me arrive.
And yet, after every arrival, another destination appeared.
One of the unexpected gifts of exploring different contemplative traditions was discovering how different they looked on the surface.
Some emphasized silence.
Others movement.
Some invited inquiry.
Others devotion.
Some began with the breath.
Others with the body.
Others with music, gratitude, or simply paying attention to the ordinary moments of everyday life.
At first, I treated these differences like competing answers.
Eventually, I realized they were pointing toward the same place.
Different doorways.
The same house.
That realization changed the question I was asking.
Instead of wondering,
“Which practice is the best?”
I found myself asking,
“Which practice helps me remember what is already here?”
That is a very different question.
A few months ago, I invited a small group of friends to spend three weeks exploring contemplative practices together.
Not one tradition.
Not one technique.
Simply a collection of practices that had become meaningful in my own life.
I expected people to like different things.
I didn’t expect what happened next.
One morning I received a message from one of the participants.
He wrote:
“I did something that wasn’t prescribed by you. I blended the walking practice, observing sounds, and the watcher idea into my daily hill walks. I lost track of time and surroundings. The only recollection I have from those walks is the step in front of me.”
I read it twice.
Because that was exactly what I had hoped would happen.
Not that he practiced my way.
That he found his own.
I think we sometimes misunderstand what contemplative practice is for.
It’s easy to imagine that the goal is mastering meditation.
Learning to sit perfectly still.
Thinking fewer thoughts.
Collecting deeper experiences.
For me, it has become something much simpler.
It’s about collecting enough doorways that, wherever life finds me, I know how to come home.
Some mornings that doorway is silence.
Other days it’s a walk without headphones.
Sometimes it’s gratitude.
Sometimes it’s simply noticing my feet touching the ground.
Sometimes it’s taking a slow breath before responding to someone I love.
The practice changes.
The remembering doesn’t.
This is the work I care about now.
Not creating followers.
Not teaching one correct method.
Simply sharing practices that people can eventually make their own.
Because I don’t believe peace comes from mastering meditation.
I think it comes from remembering ourselves.
Again and again.
If this way of looking at contemplative practice resonates with you, I’m opening a small Joy Circle this August.
For twenty-one days, we’ll explore a variety of contemplative experiments together—not to master them all, but to discover which ones quietly become part of your own life.
I’d love for you to join us.
Come home to yourself.
Reading this blog was like my Saturday walk where I stop to gaze at a tree, stop to look in the direction of a barking dog in the neighborhood, stop to look at the crumbling block of a wall, stop to do little breathing exercise, stop to make a phone call as he came into my though, and so on.