learn · 2026-09-20 · 4 min read
Don't tell anyone you have started meditating
On the third day of my five-day home course I give a piece of advice that surprises people: don't tell anyone you've started meditating. Not your partner, not your friends, not the internet. Let it be yours for these five days, without words or explanations: an experience that stays inside for a while and doesn't need to be shared with anyone else.
I don't say it because meditation is a secret. I say it because I watched what happened to my own practice when I talked about it.
In the first years I told people. It was the most interesting thing that had happened to me and I wanted it known. And I noticed, slowly, that the more I spoke to others about my sittings, the less pleasure and depth was left for me, as if part of the energy had gone out with the words. When I kept it inside and didn't carry it out, the opposite happened. It accumulated. It became a quiet strength, and it began to work much deeper than before.
I don't have a theory for this that I fully trust, so I'll only say what I saw. Talking about a practice is also a way of collecting a reward for it, and once the reward comes from outside, from the interest on someone's face, the sitting itself has to compete with that. It usually loses. If you sit and say nothing, the sitting is your only reward, and it's enough.
Every long sitting has the same visitor, and I met him for years before I knew his habits. He comes near the end of the hour, never at the start, and he says: that's enough, finish early, you've done well. He's reasonable. He's on your side. At first I just obeyed him.
Then I began to hold on. More patience, more humility: I went on sitting motionless as if nothing were happening, putting roots down a little deeper, watching. And what happens if I sit longer? Those were small victories, staying in every sitting to the last minute, to the gong, and it was in those minutes, not in any special state, that I first understood I'd stepped onto a path of my own. The strength that comes from that is out of proportion to the size of the win.
You'll meet him too, and at home he's stronger, because there's no gong and no hall. So just try. Slowly, without expectation or hurry, and the knowledge that was closed opens by itself: not as information, but as direct understanding you didn't have access to before. The process at home is gentler than on a retreat. In that, you're lucky.
I recorded the talk for the second day in Myanmar, the country they call the golden land, and it says the thing this article is really about. Look back. Your mother gave birth to you, and it hurt her. Your parents raised you, and you gave them plenty of trouble. Now imagine you're alone and there's no one beside you: no parents, no friends, no one left to hand responsibility or blame to. That's when the real game begins. Before, everything looked staged. Now you've gone backstage and you see how it's actually built.
Nobody will notice. Nobody will praise you for your practice. Whether you sit half an hour or three, it matters to no one at all, and that's precisely your chance to look yourself in the eye and meet what you've been running from since childhood. I'll be beside you as a guide and a friend, but there will be moments when you're alone, and those are the most valuable, because that's when knowledge is built on your own experience, the kind you can lean on later. Nobody else can do it for you.
That's why you don't announce it. An announced practice has an audience, and an audience is someone to perform for. The five days are the one stretch of your week with no one to perform for.
If you need to tell someone, tell the notebook. On day zero you write Day 0 on the first page, in your best handwriting, with a good pen, and every evening after that the course asks you a few plain questions: how many sittings did you miss, how many seconds could you stay with the breath, what will you do tomorrow, what good did you do today. The notebook doesn't leak. Over the weeks it becomes the closest thing a home practice has to a teacher: patterns show up on paper that you couldn't see at the time, and nobody reads them but you.
And when the five days are over, tell whoever you like. But notice how the practice actually spreads, because it isn't by being talked about. One student said it in a video she recorded for me after the course. She'd heard me mention meditation in passing, but that isn't what sent her. She was staying at my place in Bali and came into a room at six in the morning, with beautiful light coming in, and saw someone sitting who didn't move. She'd never seen that. She understood he wasn't simply sitting; he was doing some kind of work inside. That picture is what she describes when people ask her how she found meditation.
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