Start with the Breath
Before we can formally say we’re meditating, we must begin with breathing. In my experience, breathwork and meditation are one and the same, but I’ve found it’s easier for most people to start with breathwork than with meditation. When I’ve spoken to scores of people about this, I’ve discovered that many of us share a common experience: in the beginning, we didn’t know what meditation was supposed to give us. We sat, we tried, and we felt… nothing. No result. To make matters worse, many of us were skeptical or cynical about meditation, dismissing it as new-age nonsense.
The Mind’s Resistance to Stillness
I now understand that my resistance came from the mind itself. The mind is a brilliant survival machine—it estimates, judges, defends, wins, fixes, obsesses. It is designed to keep us alive at all costs. But the same mind, when untamed and unbalanced, becomes destructive. That’s why evolution gifted us with traits that need to be developed—like resilience, compassion, patience, and humility—qualities that allow us to coexist, connect, and form communities. We are group creatures. We need each other—not just for survival, but for emotional and psychological regulation. That’s why bonding is so crucial in early childhood.
Bonding, Attachment, and Early Anxiety
From the moment we’re born, we crave warmth, food, love, and the freedom to release waste. The human infant is 100% dependent on a caregiver, and if the bond with the mother is broken or inconsistent, anxiety takes root. It doesn’t happen from one missed bottle—it takes repeated emotional absence or neglect to program the child’s nervous system into an anxious, defensive state.
I know this is true because I’ve lived it. I failed to bond with my mother, and my relationship with my father was confusing and distant. I repeated that cycle with my two older daughters, but with my youngest, I recognized the pattern and broke it.
Inherited Pain and Modern Anxiety
To change, I had to rebuild my broken self-esteem. It was my anxious state that prevented me from being present and emotionally available. It would be unfair to place all the blame on my parents because I know this wound stretches back through generations—grandparents, great-grandparents, and even our ancient ancestors. It’s part of the collective human condition: a deep, pervasive failure to attach.
And that anxiety doesn’t just come from relationships. Some of us are born with physical imbalances—like poor digestion—that contribute to discomfort, which we internalize as fear. Add to that a society that’s never truly at peace, where leadership is often corrupt, natural disasters are constant, and even our food supply is poisoned by faceless corporations—and you begin to see why anxiety is such a dominant force in modern life.
Breath as a Tool for Presence
Before we can meditate effectively, we need to understand anxiety and how the breath helps us manage it. Breath is the gateway to presence. I write about anxiety often, and I’m constantly learning. We can’t move into deeper spiritual or philosophical work if our nervous system is dysregulated. Meditation is the act of becoming aware of where we place our attention. In extreme cases, some people are battling obsessive thoughts or physical pain that keeps them locked in a loop of suffering. Meditation is a tool to bring us back to a state of peace, even if only momentarily.
The Paradox of Practice
Yet many of us resist both breathwork and meditation. Why? Because they require energy. They don’t always give us immediate gratification. The benefits may take weeks or decades to truly unfold. The mind says, “Why bother?” And so we don’t practice. We forget to breathe. Anxiety distracts us. And that’s the paradox: the very thing that could help us—the breath—is the thing we forget to do because of anxiety itself.
Physiology and the Freeze Response
It helps to remember how essential oxygen is. Block your nose and mouth for a few seconds and you’ll feel the panic rise instantly. That’s how vital breath is. Our entire system is built around it. Yet under stress, some of us hyperventilate and others hold their breath entirely. These are primal responses: fight, flight, or freeze.
For me, I’ve experienced the freeze—where I stop breathing properly and everything tightens. My diaphragm contracts, my chest closes, and my thoughts spiral into anxiety: Am I dying? Am I aging too fast? Do I have enough money? Am I loved?
Thought, Choice, and Freedom
All of these thoughts create more suffering. They become filters, distorting my reality. I lose touch with the present. But through years of writing, therapy, service, and creative work, I’ve slowly trained myself to observe my thoughts more objectively. I now recognize that I have a choice: I can attach to the thought—or I can let it go. That ability to choose is the essence of freedom.
Neuroscientists may argue about whether or not humans have free will, but I know this: in the next moment, I can choose whether or not I attach to a thought. If I don’t choose consciously, my subconscious will choose for me—usually based on past programming. In that way, I end up living in the past, not the present. I become frozen in an old narrative, trapped by outdated coping mechanisms. Recovery, then, is the process of reclaiming my ability to make conscious choices in the present moment.
What Recovery Really Means
When I first got sober, I thought recovery was just about abstaining from substances. Later, I believed it was about learning to feel again without numbing. Then I thought it was about healing childhood trauma. All of these are true, but today I believe recovery is about emotional regulation—learning to experience life without reacting destructively. Recovery is about releasing the past, avoiding future obsession, and developing the personality traits that make us whole. And in my worldview, those traits aren’t random—they’re evolutionary. Evolution wants to preserve life, not destroy it.
The Role of Discipline
The number one reason people struggle to stay consistent with practices like breathwork and meditation is distraction—caused by anxiety. It pulls us away from positive action. We forget to breathe. We forget to care for ourselves. The solution? Discipline. The slow, patient building of new habits—one breath, one moment, one day at a time. Do it enough times, and the habit itself will carry you forward.