it starts with learning to stay

I used to think mindfulness was about finding stillness. Quiet mind. A motionless body. Some version of peace that would settle over me like a warm blanket if I just practiced enough.

It didn’t start out that way for me. Not even close.

When I was in my mid-twenties, working in a warehouse in Melbourne, changing TVs, mindfulness was not peaceful. It was brutal. During my break, I sat on a crate, phone in hand, reading about Buddhism while my back ached and the same questions ran through my mind: What am I doing here? When will it get better? Why is my psychology degree worthless in the real world?

I didn’t meditate on my way to peace. I was just trying to survive my own head.

And I think that’s where mindfulness starts for most people. Not calmly. Not for clarity. But in the raw, uncomfortable decision to stick with something you’d rather run away from.

There is a word for this in psychology: anxiety tolerance. It’s not a flashy concept. It does not sell wellness retreats. But Peking University research have found that anxiety tolerance is one of the key mechanisms through which mindfulness actually works. In other words, awareness does not help to eliminate discomfort. It helps by changing your relationship with it, developing your ability to stay present when everything inside you wants to break.

This finding did not surprise me when I read it. He described something I had already experienced.

Because I did not attain enlightenment in that warehouse. I just learned, slowly, painfully, not to run away from the fact that my life doesn’t look like I thought it would. To sit with the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be without being numb to distraction or drowning in self-pity.

It stays. And staying is the hardest.

Most people come to attention because they hurt us. We’ve read the articles, seen the apps, heard that meditation reduces stress. And it can. But the part that no one warns you about is that before you reduce anything, you increase awareness of everything. The anxiety you’ve overcome. Boredom you’ve outgrown. The sadness under your busyness.

Awareness does not give peace. He hands you a mirror. And then he asks you not to look away.

I remember the first time I tried to sit with my own restlessness in a meditation session. I lasted maybe ninety seconds before I picked up my phone. Second time, two minutes. The third, I got to five. Not because I found peace in those five minutes, but because I didn’t expect it.

This change matters more than people think. You don’t train yourself not to feel anything. Train yourself to feel everything and not flinch. Or at least flinch and then come back.

When I finally left Australia and moved to Vietnam, I thought I was making a bold, decisive change in my life. And in some ways I was. But I carried everything with me: the restlessness, the lack of confidence, the habit of reaching for the next thing instead of being with the current thing.

Saigon did not fix this. He exposed.

There is a certain overload of living in a city of nine million people, where the traffic never stops and the noise is constant. I remember the early morning runs in District 1, sweating in the tropical heat, motorbikes roaring past, the air thick with exhaust fumes and the smell of pho from sidewalk kitchens. Everything inside me wanted to retreat to the air conditioning and silence.

But something changed during the runs. Instead of resisting the chaos, I started to just… be in it. Not to love, not to hate, just stay. To feel the warmth without wanting to feel it. Hear the horns without straining. Let the discomfort stay there without causing a problem.

This is the exercise. Not the sitting-on-the-cushion-in-a-quiet-room version that looks good on Instagram. The kind where your shirt is soaked and the taxi nearly cuts your elbows and your legs hurt and you keep going, not because you’re tough, but because you’ve learned that the urge to stop doesn’t always signal a stop.

Buddhism has a concept for this, although it took me years to connect the philosophy with my own experience. The second noble truth points to desire and aversion as the root of suffering. It is not the pain itself, but the desperate desire to get more of what is good and less of what is bad. The constant reach and kickback.

Awareness breaks this cycle. Not by eliminating the craving or the aversion, but by creating a little gap between the feeling and the reaction. You notice the urge to check your phone instead of just checking it. You feel the impulse to slam into your partner instead of just snapping. You feel a pull towards worry and don’t follow it for a moment.

One second. That’s all it takes to change the pattern.

But here’s the thing no one tells you about this one second: It doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like nothing. It feels like you sat there and suffered and didn’t even get a good distraction. Where is the dopamine? Where’s the relief?

It’s not there. And that’s the point.

Relief will come later. Weeks, maybe months later. One day, you realize that the thing that used to spiral you is now just… bothering you. It still bothers me, but it doesn’t consume me. You stayed with it enough that it lost its power to throw you off balance.

I see this now in my meditation practice, which is changing wildly. Some days I sit for thirty minutes. Some days, five. When my daughter was a newborn, for a few days I sat for exactly the amount of time between falling asleep and waking up again, which could be as little as forty-five seconds. The length doesn’t matter as much as sitting down first and choosing to face what’s on my mind instead of running through a playlist of distractions that are always available.

The truth is, it taught me more about abstinence than any book or retreat. Babies don’t care about your need for peace and quiet. They need you, now, in the mess, the noise, and the 3am chaos. You can’t intellectualize your way out of a crying baby. You can only be there.

And that’s perhaps the simplest definition of mindfulness I’ve ever come across: being there. He’s not calm. Not centralized. Not particularly at all. Just being there in whatever is happening without reaching for the exit.

I think we overcomplicated this. The wellness industry sells mindfulness as a destination, a blissful state you arrive at with enough practice and the right app subscription. But in the Buddhist tradition that I have studied and tried to (imperfectly) live for over a decade, mindfulness is not a goal. It’s a direction. You turn towards the experience instead of away from it. That’s it. This is the whole exercise.

Turning towards it is what is difficult. Because what you turn to is not always pleasant. Sometimes sorrow. Sometimes it’s failure. Sometimes it’s the quiet realization that you’ve avoided a conversation you need to have, or a truth you need to face, or a part of yourself you’d rather not look at.

I still struggle with this. I still find myself reaching for my phone when an unpleasant thought pops up. I still feel the urge to plan my way out of uncertainty instead of sitting in it. The difference is not that the urges are gone. The fact that I recognize them faster and give in to them a little less often.

The development of awareness looks like this: you catch yourself one second sooner. That’s it. One second sooner than yesterday, than last week, than last year. Not dramatic. Not Instagram worthy. But it’s real, and it adds up.

When I sit in a café in Saigon now, drinking my black coffee and watching the street life, I sometimes think of that warehouse in Melbourne. The version of me sitting on a crate, reading about transience on a cracked phone screen, trying to make sense of a life that didn’t make sense yet. It was not peaceful. He was not wise. It’s just left.

And it turned out that was enough.

It turns out that everything begins with staying, with one simple, enchanting act. Not peace. Not clarity. Not the transformation. Just the willingness to be exactly where you are and feel exactly what you feel, for one more breath than you think you can handle.

This is mindfulness. It begins long before peace. It starts with learning to stay.

2 minute exercise

The next time you feel like reaching for your phone, scrolling, or otherwise distracting yourself, take a break.

Set a timer for two minutes.

Don’t do anything. Do not meditate in any formal sense.

Just sit down with what you wanted to avoid. Name it if you know it: boredom, restlessness, worry, sadness. You don’t need to fix or analyze it. Just let it sit there for two minutes. When the timer goes off, get on with your day.

That’s the whole exercise: two minutes of no running.

Common traps

• Believing that “true” consciousness must be peaceful. If you’re restless, irritable or bored during your workout, you’re not doing it wrong. You do it.
• Using mindfulness as another form of avoidance, meditation is a way of avoiding difficult emotions rather than facing them.
• Measuring progress is based on how calm you feel, rather than how quickly you notice when you’re not.
• To stop because the initial stages are unpleasant. Discomfort is not a sign that mindfulness isn’t working. This is a sign that it is.

Easy to take away

• Awareness does not begin with peace. It starts with the decision to stay present when you’d rather log out.
• Anxiety tolerance, not relaxation, is one of the primary mechanisms through which mindfulness helps.
• Progress looks like catching yourself a second sooner, not an empty mind.
• The urge to run away from discomfort is normal. Noticing the urge without obeying it is the practice.
• Two minutes of being uncomfortable teaches you more than an hour of comfortable distraction.