What a joy it is to turn your wrist toward the sun and scratch. This ability, the ability to do a physical movement, is a miracle. And coupled with the fact that we can do anything at all–control our fingers, speak a word–is a miracle. It’s an amazing thing to be able to exist in the world. When you are immersed in the world in the right way, there is an ocean of depth to explore. With an itch on your wrist as an example, let’s dive into some of the ways you can find more meaning.

Can you see the itch as a grand forest, a vast jungle of space that you can walk into at any time? This is the the value of the hidden room: an experience in the world that reveals itself to be much more than what it appears to be. Whenever you have an itch, can you experience it with your whole being? Can you walk into it like you’d walk into the Grand Canyon, looking around at all the splendor? This idea is more than evaluating if something feels hot or cold, light or heavy. The idea is to embody the experience so much that experience falls away and you become what you feel. You merge with it. There’s a place for detachment, but getting to know your body and what it feels is an unending expedition. You don’t have to look outside yourself for an experience of total immersion. With full attention, you will never explore enough of a single yoga pose, a single tingle in your finger, a single brush of cloth against your stomach. These experiences can be treasured without having to get anything.

Hidden rooms lie in other parts of reality too. Meditation can also be a hidden room, a struggle where you try your hardest–meaning to let go of trying in this context–and then suddenly “pop” into another place you never knew existed. It’s an immersive experience that defies language, which is why meditation has to be described with metaphors and poetry, things that indirectly touch the essence of what defies language. The hidden room is always accessible, but we forget to look for it. I know I do. The quest to understand the hidden room is the quest to find the message written in the stones of a craggy shore: impossible. The only thing we can do is try to understand more of what the hidden rooms are. If we understood them completely, we wouldn’t value them as much. This is the power of the hidden room: an unanswerable question that can give a life meaning.

Hidden rooms don’t appear just for anyone. There are pathways to finding them which everyone must follow. The first is the most important one: total immersion. There’s no way to experience the beauty of a hidden room like meditation or physical sensations unless you are completely present. You can’t be watching the latest TikToks while you look for this hidden room, and you can’t go searching for it in order to tell other people about it. The hidden room has to be a goal in itself.

The second characteristic is that it’s not something you strive for. The period is effortful for a moment and then you are sucked so deeply into the experience that there is nothing but that experience. Your entire world is subsumed into this experience. It’s not something you search for–and searching for it means you won’t find it.

The third characteristic is observation. With every type of experience, it’s different: yoga requires inner exploration of the nuances of a pose and sinking deeply into the feeling of exploration; language learning requires stepping into your English-speaking mind when someone releases a flurry of Georgian or Manx at you and marveling at the sounds you once thought were foreign; breakdancing requires flashes of noticing the power of centrifugal force as you ride the wave until it breaks; having a best friend requires looking at your friend as a stranger in order to contrast what you see that the world misses.

When you experience a hidden room, you’ll begin looking for it everywhere. It’s real-life magic waiting to happen. But it isn’t like other peak experiences; unlike flow, this doesn’t require any set of specific conditions other than the willingness to totally immerse yourself in an experience.

Hidden rooms are out there, and life is so much more colorful, so much more vivid, so much more magical when we discover these hidden rooms and enter them frequently. It begs the question: What else am I overlooking? Stay a while and you just might find out.