How I helped my client achieve their 12 week goal in 90 seconds

Most of my days are spent helping people free themselves from the content of their inner world and the suffering it generates.

In turn, they experience profound peace and, as some call it, bliss.

That’s what the client I met with 36 minutes ago called it.

Thoughts were consuming her. She was stuck in a spiral. She was suffering. Her words, not mine.

She didn’t realize that the way out was available to her right now.

She came to the session with a short list of 12 week goals.

She didn’t realize that one of them was 90 seconds away.

One of her goals was to feel safe within herself.

We can do that right now, I shared. If you’re open to it.

She laughed, almost dismissively.

Or we can wait 12 weeks, I shrugged. Either way, that goal doesn’t happen in the future. It happens right now, and 12 weeks from right now is just another right now.

She was in.

We closed our eyes. Slowed our breathing.

Long exhales.

Slower.

Witness the thoughts.

Are you thinking, or are thoughts happening?

Witness them, without becoming them.

Now, bring your attention to the area between and slightly above the eyebrows. Let your focus rest on this area.

Stay there.

Stay there.

Within about 90 seconds, something changed. Her shoulders dropped. Her face relaxed. An easy smile emerged from the corners of her lips.

She dropped into a sensation she described as complete bliss.

I’ve never experienced anything like that in my entire life, she claimed, as the unfamiliar calm persisted.

I smiled because I knew the place she had found.

It’s a place I’m deeply familiar with.

There’s something almost funny about how simple it can be. We spend so much of our lives trying to arrange the external world in ways that will finally allow us to relax internally.

We solve. We plan. We control. We numb. We distract.

How exhausting. How unnecessary.

We change our circumstances and relationships and environments, hoping that somewhere on the other side of all that movement we’ll finally experience peace.

Meanwhile, there is a place within us where nothing needs to happen.

Nothing needs to be solved there. Nothing needs to be understood. Nothing needs to change.

And when the mind becomes quiet, we notice that peace doesn’t need to be created.

It’s already there.

Thought had simply been covering it.

This realization has changed my relationship with my mind.

For one, I don’t take it so seriously. So much so that I’m frequently amused with the way people believe everything they think.

I, like many people, used to be consumed by my mind. The mind moved and I moved with it.

I didn’t realize there was another option.

Now I know, like an instrument or tool, I can use the mind when it’s helpful and set it down when it’s no longer needed.

I wish for everyone to experience that option. And that’s why most of my work is about helping people expand their options.

Because once you experience the mind becoming completely still, you access insight (sight within) that can only be accessed through direct experience.

You are not trapped inside your thinking.

There is somewhere quieter. And it isn’t far away.

In fact, it’s not anywhere else at all.

It’s right here, right now, underneath the noise that you’ve become so attached to.

Stillness.

Space.

A kind of weightlessness.

Peace without a reason.

Yes, bliss.

Life will continue to move.

There will be uncertainty. Decisions. Desire. Fear. Things our minds will latch onto.

But beneath all of that movement, there is somewhere we can return to. Somewhere we can rest.

And that somewhere, is right here, right now.

And 12 weeks from right now is just another right now.