Joe is a longtime advocate of meditation, but he’s candid that for years his own practice was a sophisticated way of managing himself. The teaching was “be with whatever is,” yet he spent the sit constantly steering his experience—chasing expansion, fleeing worry, grading each moment against the last.
“I was constantly in a management of my own experience.”
The subtler trap is dissociation. Brett describes using meditation to “hold myself at some distance, some safe distance”—genuinely useful for becoming less reactive, but also a way to not notice discomfort by retreating to a place where there is none. Awakened access to peace can work the same way: a head awakening lets you bypass “all these fussy emotions” rather than feel them. The capacity to create distance can be a necessary step, but mistaking it for the destination keeps the unfelt material unfelt.
Joe’s correction is to bring view and non-management to the cushion—vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, wonder, and above all not trying to control anything. Done that way, meditation stops being hell and becomes “far more like hanging out on a beach and enjoying a nice breeze.”
“Typically it’s not a management, it is an unwinding of management that allows us to enjoy the moment.”
Related Concepts
- Welcoming everything, not managing it, is what leads to awakening
- Making awakening a goal slows the process down
- Pleasure is the safe path to the gut awakening
- Emotional inquiry is embodied exploration, not intellectual analysis
- Enjoying the sensations rather than bracing eases the integration
- Stuckness is resistance to the abyss, not the abyss itself
- Loving anxiety is fundamentally different from being with it