The incense is thick enough to chew, a heavy sandalwood cloud that clings to the back of my throat like 19 years of accumulated regrets. I am sitting on a zafu that cost me $89, my spine elongated in a way that feels technically correct but spiritually exhausting. Around me, 29 participants are breathing in that rhythmic, slightly forced way that people do when they are paying a professional to tell them they are doing it right. I am Adrian V., and for the next 49 minutes, I am their conduit to the divine, or at least to a slightly lowered heart rate.

I feel the collective flinch of the room. My own heart, which I was just bragging to myself about having under 69 beats per minute, spikes into a frantic gallop. The owner of the phone is fumbling, their face turning a shade of purple that I usually only see in 9% of high-altitude hikers. In that moment, the ‘peace’ we were building vanishes. But here is the truth I usually hide behind a serene smile: I wasn’t at peace before the goat screamed. I was thinking about my laundry. I was thinking about the 139 emails I haven’t answered. I was performing.

We have turned mindfulness into a high-stakes performance art. We believe that if we can just get the variables right-the right temperature, the right lighting, the right $159 noise-canceling headphones-we will finally arrive at the destination of ‘Zen.’ We treat our minds like a luxury renovation project. We want to gut the ugly parts and install sleek, marble countertops of tranquility. It’s a core frustration that I see in every workshop: the belief that the world is an obstacle to our presence, rather than the very material of it. We are waiting for the world to shut up so we can finally be quiet, not realizing that the quiet is actually in the way we listen to the noise.

[The performance of peace is the greatest obstacle to actually finding it.]

Last week, I was at a dinner party with a group of people who use words like ‘vibrational frequency’ without irony. Someone told a joke. I didn’t get it. It involved a pun about quantum physics and a Tibetan bowl. Everyone at the table erupted into this enlightened, knowing laughter. I joined in. I leaned back, shook my head, and let out a hearty, fake chuckle that felt like it was made of 39% recycled plastic. Why? Because I am Adrian V., the mindfulness instructor. I am supposed to be ‘in’ on the cosmic joke. I am supposed to be so present that I understand the subtext of the universe. In reality, I was just a confused man who wanted more bread.

I remember a student who once came to me, distressed because she couldn’t stop thinking about her grocery list during her 29-minute morning sit. She felt like she was failing. She thought she was ‘bad’ at meditation. I told her that the grocery list is the meditation. The frustration is the meditation. The fact that you are annoyed that you forgot to buy almond milk is the most ‘present’ thing about you right now.

The Climate Control Obsession (Time Spent Researching)

I eventually found myself browsing MiniSplitsforLess because, honestly, if you’re trying to achieve Zen while sweating through your organic linen shirt, you’re not meditating; you’re just suffering in an expensive outfit.

But even after you get the climate control perfect, even after you spend $499 on the perfect air filtration system, the goat will still scream. The phone will still ring. Your knees will still ache with a dull, thumping intensity that feels like it’s being broadcast from a station 19 miles underground. The frustration isn’t that life is chaotic; the frustration is that we think it shouldn’t be. We have this delusional hope that if we do enough 9-minute breathing exercises, we will eventually become unshakeable. We won’t. We will just become more aware of how much we are shaking. And that, oddly enough, is where the relief is.

There is a deeper meaning in the mess that we are all trying to ‘fix.’ Mindfulness isn’t about the absence of the mess; it’s about the hospitality we extend toward it. I’ve been teaching for 19 years and I still haven’t ‘solved’ my brain. It’s still a chaotic bazaar of 239 different desires and anxieties at any given moment. The only thing that has changed is that I no longer try to set the bazaar on fire. I just walk through it. I look at the 9 different versions of myself that show up to a single conversation and I say, ‘Oh, it’s you guys again.’ There is an authority in admitting that I don’t know what I’m doing 89% of the time. People think expertise is about having the answers, but in my experience, expertise is just being less surprised by your own failures.

I once went on a silent retreat in 1999. It was supposed to be 9 days of profound insight. By day 3, I was so bored that I began naming the dust motes floating in the sunbeam in my cell. I named 49 of them. I developed complex backstories for each one. Mote #19 was a tragic hero who had lost his family in a vacuum accident. By day 6, I realized that I wasn’t becoming more spiritual; I was just becoming more creative with my distractions. I felt like a failure until the lead monk looked at me during a private interview and said, ‘The dust is also the Buddha.’ I thought he was being deep. Years later, I realized he was just telling me to stop being such a weirdo and just look at the dust. Don’t build a story. Don’t name it. Just see it.

This is relevant to us now because we are all suffering from a kind of spiritual burnout. We are exhausted by the effort of trying to be ‘better.’ We are tired of the 19 different apps on our phones telling us to be more productive, more calm, more hydrated. We’ve turned self-care into a second job, and the pay is terrible. The real practice isn’t adding more to the routine; it’s the radical act of subtracting the expectation. It’s the 9 seconds of genuine honesty when you admit you’re tired, or angry, or bored. It’s about being okay with the fact that you aren’t okay.

When the goat-scream ringtone went off in my class, the person who owned the phone looked like they wanted to dissolve into the floorboards. I looked at them, and for the first time in that 49-minute session, I stopped performing. I didn’t give a sage-like nod. I didn’t offer a ‘gentle’ correction. I just laughed. A real, 100% authentic laugh that had zero ‘vibrational frequency’ in it.

And just like that, the tension broke. The 29 people in the room didn’t find Zen, but they found each other. They stopped trying to be ‘meditators’ and started being people in a room with a screaming goat. We spent the next 9 minutes just sitting there, not trying to achieve anything. The air felt lighter. The $89 cushions felt less like instruments of torture. We weren’t ‘mindful’ in the way the brochures describe it, but we were there. We were actually, finally there.

The world will always be 19 degrees too hot or 9 degrees too cold. There will always be a $299 problem that needs solving and a 49-minute commute that feels like an eternity. The goal isn’t to transcend these things. The goal is to stop pretending they don’t matter. I’m still Adrian V., and I still don’t understand that joke from the dinner party. I probably never will. But I’m no longer pretending to laugh. I’m just sitting here, breathing in the smell of sandalwood and sweat, waiting for the next goat to scream.