A Brief Guide to Stilling the Mind

How I learned to stop my thoughts on command

I’ve never shared this before. But that’s half of what I’m doing here: sharing things I haven’t shared before.

After years of meditating, after countless sessions of watching my thoughts, I discovered something—an ability that feels like magic, but is absolutely real. I found a way to stop my thoughts.

When I say stop, I mean stop. Entirely. Not just being aware of them or letting them pass (although that’s great too), but stopping them completely, quieting the mind.

This little method allows me to experience a complete cessation of thought activity, and the feeling that follows is one of pure bliss—boundless and expansive. It’s a feeling of being both everything and nothing at all, a state I can now summon at will, in a matter of seconds.

In those moments, I realize deeply, experientially, that I am the universe experiencing itself through human form. Because when I silence the mind, I experience myself beyond the ego—beyond the collection of memories, thoughts, and stories that form the concept of “me.”

This discovery wasn’t immediate. I stumbled upon it after reading Autobiography of a Yogi. There’s a passage in the book that perfectly describes the experience I’d found but couldn’t yet recreate consistently. It’s a story about a blind man named Ramu who seeks the healing powers of a guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, to experience sight for the first time. The interaction goes like this: