The fresh face of meditation shows its face time and time again. Returning to the breath helps us navigate life’s challenges by tuning out of what’s outside of us and tuning into what’s inside of us. The remarkable thing about meditation is that you realize everything you want, you already have. You can step out of the mind and be free.

Freedom in this case is the ability to see beyond your own story. Beyond the idea of your identity–that you’re a mother, a friend, a local baseball pitcher, a sink repairsperson–is the absolute world of stones and sunlight. These things have no emotion about what is happening to them. They don’t want to hoard things, keep things, run away from feeling bad, or anything else that humans do. They’re more resilient than us, because they’ve “survived” longer. Rocks have been around for a lot longer than we have, and they did it without being attached to what happens to them. Rocks are the OG survivalist.

But we don’t see it that way. We see rocks as being so unlike us that we can’t learn from them. That’s the ego talking, always finding ways to ignore what’s best for us. When we look through the lens of the ego, we continue to give it what it wants–which never ends well. We are either attached to what we have or want something we don’t have. Either way, it’s pain.

Rocks are something we can learn an immense amount from. The soul of a rock doesn’t come from getting what it wants all the time. Aren’t you tired of fighting for what you want all the time? Rocks are peaceful in a way that they don’t even know is peaceful. Rocks are so peaceful that they’ve stepped out of peace-ness entirely. I know this because language fails to describe a rock as peaceful–and when language fails to describe something, you know you’re on the right path.

To step out of peace-ness is to give up the concept altogether. Giving up doesn’t mean you stop trying–it means stepping out of the thinking mind and into the real world. The real world is here, now, and it will never be anything but that. Freedom comes from this realization.

If you’ve been reading my Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve already talked about how the sun doesn’t get sad and the rain doesn’t get angry. This is the way of the non-human. The silence in every sound is the joy in every moment. If you lived like a rock, nothing would disturb you–no physical, emotional, social, or psychological happening could rock you, so to speak.

But this can seem like an unreasonable statement: “Of course I can’t live like a rock! I have bills to pay and places to go!” This is the disturbance of the mind, creating the illusion that you have no peace. Whenever you think you have no peace, there is only the mind’s illusion telling you so. The mind is a magician that tells you there’s no trick. And we believe it–the very thing that brings us pain is the thing we look to for guidance on how to release ourselves from pain. Suffering comes from the mind–why would you turn to it in times of trouble?

Living like a rock means you continually return to the place you always should be: the present moment. It means being so deep in the now that unexpected events don’t disturb you. You rise above them because they flow through you. You remain at peace.