Meditation reveals that I rarely live my life in a “pure” state. Instead, a relentless, buzzing inner narrator constantly insists on labeling each moment before I have the chance to genuinely experience it.

Sometimes I feel I have morphed into a character in a New Yorker cartoon, standing before a magnificent sunset while holding a phone and saying, “It’s beautiful, but can I find a filter that makes it look more like me?”

Honestly, it has taken a ton of meditation over the years to really catch on to–

how sneaky this invisible commentator can be.

The first big tell that my inner narrator is up to their old tricks is when they start comparing and complaining—missing out on the life that happens while I’m “busy making other plans,” as John Lennon famously put it.

This mental preoccupation with what is lacking or what should be spins me into the past and the future like there is no tomorrow.

Here is another cartoon: a person is at a cocktail party saying, “I’m not actually here; I’m currently at a retreat being much more centered than this.”

Too often, we are never where our feet are because we are too busy being “centered” somewhere in our imagination.

The teacher John Astin beautifully describes the antidote as:

…relaxing the habit of trying to arrive somewhere else.

It is the realization that we are already soaked to the bone with the very reality we are looking for, yet we run around holding a cup and asking for a drink. We spend our lives chasing the carrot, trying to fix a self that doesn’t actually exist in the way we think it does.

Healing begins when we realize the inner narrator is just a heckler in the front row of a play they didn’t write.

In “just sitting,” there is no supposed to be. When we return to the “primary point”—the zero point before the pronoun—the heckler finally loses their voice.

The realization of the fictional nature of this internal narrator is the ultimate liberation. This begins by “turning the light around,” as they say in Zen—not as an act of self-blame, but as a commitment to investigating our own contribution to the “disaster” of dualistic thought.

Life without the subtitles happens when we stop reading the inner narrator’s script and simply live the original scene.

True freedom is having the energy to deal with our own stuff, to relax the effort to rearrange the other person, and to finally feel at home in the reality of the mess. In this radical acceptance, the self-made ghost vanishes.

We find that peace is not a destination we are chasing, but what is left—the endless miracle of just this—when we stop trying to arrive somewhere else.