Practice doesn’t end though: wherever you find yourself, arrive there.

Cheers!

Not in the theoretical sense; in the felt sense. When a good song comes on, something in you releases and you make contact with a rare sense of freedom. Same with sex, a riveting movie, or a sport that demands your full attention.

The conventional explanation is that these things are pleasurable, so we pursue them. But if you look closer, it’s obvious that what makes them pleasurable is the level of attention we place on them.

When a really good chorus hits, you’re not narrating, wondering, or worrying. You’re just in it. Your attention, which is normally running circles around yourself – How am I doing? How am I coming across? What does it all mean? – is free of all that and fully fixed on the moment.

The aliveness that emerges in the absence of self-commentary is the main ingredient to making an experience good.

Freedom was never in the thing. The song didn’t add anything to you; it captivated your attention so fully that the usual layers of self-recursive thought fell away. What remained was you, unencumbered and free to interact fully with the moment.

This also explains why chasing things disappoints. If the goodness truly lived in the song, replaying it would work every time. But it doesn’t – we often listen half-heartedly, with the narrator active: This part’s boring, the good bit’s coming up. The thing itself is exactly the same; it’s your level of attention that varies.

The amazing news is, if the magic isn’t in the thing, that means it’s in you. And you’re always here. So freedom is always available, always attainable.

The scratch reflex is so automatic that when you disrupt it, you shift into a more conscious state. This practice keeps you in that space so you can gain familiarity with it:

1. Sit still and wait for an itch to show up (it won’t take long).

2. When the itch arrives, don’t scratch it. Stay completely still, feeling the sensation in its entirety.

3. Watch how the sensation evolves. Most itches peak and dissolve on their own, often within seconds. Witness the moment it fizzles out.

Fair warning: this is genuinely hard. Your brain and hand will put up a fight. Let them.

If you can endure this urge without automatically reacting, you can apply the same move to bigger things: the compulsive phone check, the guilty snack, hitting the snooze button again.

In the meantime, the itch will return. So will your next chance.

As Michael points out, the moment you decide an insight is final, you stop looking at what’s actually in front of you, and you drift from the realization. Yesterday’s clarity hardens into today’s dogma.

I’ve been there plenty. Every real glimpse I’ve had came with a pretty much immediate urge to bank it and memorialize it like a trophy. Once the lived experience becomes just a memory, you’re left staring at a plaque that’s meaningless absent the presence that produced it.

I mentioned to Michael in the comments that I doubt there’s any point where you get to coast for free. His reply was perfect: it’s like surfing. Getting up on the board isn’t the end; it’s the beginning. You have to stay balanced, ride the wave as it unfolds.

The complaint hiding inside the wish for a final, irreversible awakening is I don’t want to have to keep showing up. But showing up is the fun part! A motionless wave would be pointless to ride. You’d just be standing in place, inert. Where’s the fun in that?

There is one thing that stays constant: the fact that you’re here at all. That was as true yesterday as it is right now. But it’s a lived experience that keeps unfolding moment to moment, not a possession you can put on the mantle. It’s only ever available fresh, in real time, like a wave.

You’re not in charge of the healing; your job is to obey the warning. As long as you stay out of the way and prevent additional injury, the body will take it from there far better than you could ever hope to.

Emotional pain runs on a similar system. Challenging feelings aren’t a malfunction, they’re a signal that something’s off balance. The instructions are the same: Mind this, adjust your behavior to let healing do its thing.

Our job isn’t to do the emotional processing itself. That gets organically taken care of by the system, which is far superior at it than we could ever be. We just have to make sure we don’t grab the hot pan again, or keep picking at the wound.

When emotional pain comes, overcome habit and feel it without either flinching away or giving in to despair. Meet it as it is. Don’t keep acting as if it’s not there, and don’t be incapacitated by it. Keep living, making proportional allowances for its (temporary) presence.

Protect it, and the healing will take care of itself.

1. Pick a song you love. Something with energy – not frenetic, but not slow.

2. Grab a pair of headphones and sit or lie down somewhere interruption-free.

3. Close your eyes and play the song. Breathe deeply in time with the beat, taking in more air than you let out to build an oxygen surplus.

4. About halfway through the song, take one last big inhale and hold.

5. Now listen to the song as closely as possible while staring at the back of your eyelids. Notice the shifting shapes and colors, subtle at first and more vibrant the more you focus on it.

6. When your body needs to, exhale and return to normal breathing, keeping your eyes closed as the song ends.

Open your eyes and get on with your day. Don’t forget how little it takes to get here.

One thing: Deep breathing can cause lightheadedness, so don’t do it in water or while driving. Moderate dizziness and body tingling is normal, but trust your instinct. If it doesn’t feel right, go back to normal breathing and just focus on the song.

If you give it a try and are willing to share, I’d love to hear which song you picked 🤘

It brought to mind my seeking days and how obsessed I was. I meditated for hours daily, read all the right books, simplified my life down to near-monk status. After a year of dutifully checking all the spiritual boxes and in spite of a handful of interesting experiences, I still hadn’t “gotten there” yet.

Then I met someone who artfully pointed out that all my efforts aside, I still hadn’t taken the first actual step toward enlightenment.

At first, this blew me away, and was even slightly offensive. But I had to admit she was right. I’d done the practices, the retreats, the contemplation. Sure, I was somewhat less of a mess than I’d been, but nothing truly fundamental had shifted.

I’d been engaging with spirituality the only way I knew how, as another self-improvement initiative. Like a career objective or a new exercise routine. It was the same old software now running the “get enlightened” program.

This gets to the paradox Kat’s piece points at. Enlightenment isn’t a benefit the ego receives. Enlightenment is the dissolution of the ego as an apparently solid reality. There’s no version where the seeker crosses the finish line and collects the prize. It’s only the finish line when the seeker has been recognized as an illusion.

Was all that effort wasted, then? I don’t think so.

The pull toward truth is legitimate; it just gets co-opted and diverted by the ego. Until it doesn’t. So the real practice is not to reach for anything, and see that the freedom you’re shopping for can’t be acquired… because you already have it.

If any of this resonates, read Kat’s work. She writes with a clarity that doesn’t flatter the reader, which is exactly why it’s helpful.

Whether or not things should be this way is above our pay grade. It’s just the way it is. That leaves us with two options: resist, or hop on for the ride.

Resisting means stubbornly insisting on solidity. In that mode, every reminder that permanence isn’t in the cards frustrates you, because at some level you know you’re playing a losing game.

The alternative is to willingly – even gratefully – let things come and go as they do. When you’re not fighting it, the same current that once completely wore you out starts to actually carry and sustain you. This builds trust in life. You develop the courage to endure challenge and the presence to appreciate beauty.

This isn’t resignation. This is reality. You’re not giving up, you’re giving up on trying to freeze the river so you can walk across it.

Just learn to swim. The water’s fine.

Instead of avoiding or attacking it, just for the span of a minute try this:

• Name it: Pinpoint it to yourself plainly, in one or two words. Nervous. Annoyed. Scared. Identify the physical feeling, not the story or the analysis around it.

• Face it: Find where it is in your body. Stomach. Jaw. Shoulders. Don’t be afraid to feel it. Don’t judge the sensation. Just accept it as fact and turn your full attention on it.

• Embrace it: This is the counterintuitive part. Stop holding the feeling at arm’s length. Let it be exactly what it is without trying to minimize or exaggerate it. Breathe steadily and stay with the raw sensation for thirty seconds.

The feeling may or may not go away. That’s not the point. The change is in your response: Every time you embrace difficult experiences head-on, you become less crippled by fear.

You’re not failing at life when something hurts, but you will stall if you avoid it. Facing the hurt is the practice, and it pays off.

By afternoon, more out of exhaustion than wisdom, I finally admitted that it wasn’t happening. The uncomfortable feeling stayed, but I stopped struggling against it. That was most of the weight right there.

It’s one of those lessons I’ve relearned constantly throughout life, last drilled into me a few years back while standing at the kitchen sink during a challenging phase of my life.

Washing dishes, mentally wrestling with my situation for the hundredth time, I finally asked myself what I was fighting so hard to avoid. The answer didn’t come back in words: it was a heavy, burning feeling in the pit of my stomach. A sensation.

Weeks of dread, and it all came down to a physical sensation. That’s what I was so scared of – much more so than the story I’d been telling myself.

So I stopped resisting it and just let it be. It burned, but I could handle it. More than that, I was actually fine. It was just a feeling. Intense, but clearly survivable.

I finished the dishes and moved on, a new phase of my life started with a turn that took just a few seconds.

But no change is permanent. Yesterday I was back on the riverbank of experience, pointlessly trying to negotiate with the current. When I finally got back in, chest-deep in the cold water with no intention to bail, I wouldn’t say I was comfortable. But I was unmistakably alive.

Acceptance hadn’t served as a magic trick to make the challenging feelings vanish. Good, that was never the deal. You don’t find your strength by staying on the bank.

After the big move. Next week. Once the baby’s sleeping through the night, when the knee heals, when work settles down.

Bad and good news: that perfect clearing in the woods isn’t coming. Not because you’re unlucky, don’t deserve it, or didn’t work hard enough to get there. Because it simply doesn’t exist, for anyone. Everyone you’ve ever admired did it while battling fires on mulitple fronts.

Here’s the funny part: the noise was never the obstacle.

Being awake to life doesn’t require silence. It requires being here, and here can be loud. Here has dirty dishes in it. Here has that unsettling noise the car started making last week.

You already know this. Think about a time when things were going sideways, but somehow you were completely relaxed and present. It wasn’t in spite of the chaos. It’s because you were in tune with it; it pinned you to the moment.

The mess isn’t in the way, it is the way.

Most of what’s in front of you isn’t stuff. It’s the space between. The gap from the lamp to the wall. The air above the desk.

As ever-present as it is, you rarely if ever focus on it. It’s what your eyes slide across on the way to the things that “matter.”

Try this:

1. Stop where you are. You don’t necessarily have to sit. Don’t close your eyes.

2. Pick two things in the room. The mug and the window, for example.

3. Soft-focus on what’s between them. Not the objects; the nothing in the middle. Keep your eyes relaxed, you’re not trying to lock onto anything.

4. Stay here for a slow count of ten.

That’s it.

Notice what happened while you weren’t managing anything. Maybe the room got more spacious. Maybe your shoulders dropped a little. Something in you let go without you telling it to.

The space didn’t change. It’s being exactly what it was a minute ago and a million years before that. The only thing that shifted is your attention.

In the same way, the freedom you seek isn’t a state you build. It’s the thing you keep skipping over on the way to more pressing matters.

Trust it. It’s never once not been here.

Everything I’ve shared has circled one point, said different ways: You’re only ever here. Pay vivid attention. Live from here and everything else will work itself out. I named the publication after the mind, but the mind was never the point.

So: Already Here.

The name is the whole teaching. The freedom we seek is what we are, not a state to earn, not elsewhere, not later. Obvious, and almost universally overlooked. Everything here is about encountering it through the very life we’re living, through this exact experience we’re having.

What’s changing:

• The name and the address: read.alreadyhere.space

• Three short posts per week. A practice you can do in two minutes or less, an observation to invite spacious awareness, and a field entry from the trenches.

• That’s it. No doctrine, nothing to believe in. Everything discoverable through firsthand experience.

If you’ve been here since Livemind and you’re still reading, thanks for sticking around. If anything here has ever been useful to you, please forward this to someone you think would appreciate it. Let’s wake up together.

We’re looking for something we think we need to be happy. In reality, contentment comes out of the box. It’s the acquisitive mindset itself that generates the illusion of discontent.

At some point we became convinced – really, we convinced ourselves – that what we are isn’t good enough as-is. This has led us to sink enormous time and energy into a pointless process of trying to “enhance” ourselves by appending things (ideas, experiences, achievements, posessions, relationships…) onto our sense of identity.

We’ll stay stuck in that bottomless doomscroll until we A) recognize the futility of trying to be anything other than what we actually are, B) stop searching for something that doesn’t exist, and C) finally return our attention to what we’ve always been.

Once that happens, we become free from the limiting sense of need that’s inherent to the imagined self. We see with unmistakable clarity and enormous relief that our default unfabricated being is perfectly suited to navigate the world from a place of joy.

You’re here no matter where you go. No matter when it is, you’re here.

When you live consciously from here, you’re rooted. You’re at peace in the knowing that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be - the only place you ever could be.

When you forget this, you’re adrift. You lose touch with reality and become unsettled.

One orientation nurtures awareness and love. The other fuels a cycle of disorientation and unhappiness.

It all comes down to how you manage present experience, which is all you ever have to work with. There’s a sweet spot between being present and investing in thought.

Too much presence and you don’t get anything done. Too much thought and you’re separated from the peace of being.

The two come together when your thoughts and intentions align behind the primary focus of here, and rather than diminish awareness actually help deepen your connection to what’s real.

The rest follows from there. There's really not much else that needs to be said.

But we also shouldn't let it dictate our existence.

It’s not efficient to battle the not-right in what-is. Better to reach for the right-that-isn't-yet. In going for that, old patterns are automatically de-emphasized.

Opposition locks us into struggle, closing off other opportunities.

We can grow through challenge rather than be entrapped by it.

I love you.

I love you.

In spite of everything, I love you.

Because of everything, I love you.

It's okay. It's okay. I love you.

Now carry that with you through ordinary life and share it with others.

When you love life, life loves you back.

It's responsible, not selfish to put energy into your own wellbeing and growth.

The proof's in the pudding. You helplessly evoke your state in everything you do and don't do. We read each other at a glance.

So if you don't live it from the inside out, you won't inspire others to elevate themselves.