How I Finally Learned to Meditate
Javier García Sánchez is a meditation teacher and artist at WITHIN Meditation. Rooted in over a decade of contemplative practice, he draws from Tibetan Buddhist tradition and contemporary practice maps to help students build a lasting relationship with their own minds. His 6-week course, Building a Lifelong Practice, begins April 15th.
I remember that feeling like it was yesterday. The knot in the stomach. The sweaty hands. The restless back-and-forth. The endless doubts. The doubt of the doubt. The doubt of the doubt of the doubt.
That was the inner experience of most days at work. Having moved to New York almost 15 years ago, I had never worked in places so large — first at a digital agency, then at a consultancy with high-profile clients and secret projects. In the creative world the work is never finished. There's no perfect solution. You can always go bigger, go the extra mile, make it better. Working with high achievers means there's always feedback. And deadlines. And impossible things to create before those deadlines.
First came the late nights. Then the weekends. Then the travel — with the late nights and weekends also. I couldn’t keep up. I went to therapy for the first time in my life. Eventually that came with prescribed medication.
And somehow along the way I ended up downloading an app where an ex-monk would make me count my breath to ten.
That’s how I started to meditate.
Ten minutes a day. Those streaks were addictive. It became my safe space — a bubble from the rest of the world. I learned to hold attention better, to create space between stimulus and response. But it didn’t fix everything. I would still feel anxious — I just knew how to respond better. The deadline would still be there.
Then a few things happened.
In between jobs I finally did a Vipassana retreat — ten days in silence, meditating for about ten hours a day. And eventually things opened up like the sky letting a bright big sun shine the sharpest light upon my head.
I felt I was truly seeing and feeling everything around me for the first time. Everything so vivid, just by training my attention. I knew there was more. I just didn't know where to look.
Years later a friend asked me to teach them to meditate. We found a studio, went together, chatted after class. That seed went underground. A few years later that same studio offered a meditation teacher training. I wasn’t planning on teaching — I just wanted to go deep. But the best way to truly learn something is to force yourself to teach it.
For a long time though, even through all of this, I was meditating like someone told me it was good for me. Like eating kale. Showing up, feeling something, a bit calmer — but no real fire. No sense of where I was going or whether any of it was working.
What changed was finding real clarity — about why we meditate in the first place, how attention actually develops stage by stage, and what to do when things aren’t going well. When those things clicked, practice stopped feeling like a routine and became something alive.
I just came back from my second month-long solo retreat. And what still strikes me is how normal it feels — when not long ago I was sitting ten minutes a day on an app, wondering if any of it was landing.
That arc didn’t happen by accident. It happened because at some point I stopped wandering and found a real map.
Which is why I created this course. You don’t have to spend years finding your way. What you need is clarity — about why you’re doing this, how attention develops, and what to do when things don’t go as planned.
Building a Lifelong Practice is a 6-week online course beginning April 15th. Six Wednesday evenings, one hour each, through WITHIN Meditation. Until April 3rd, registering includes a private 30-minute session with me.
If any of this feels familiar — this course is for you.
I'd be glad to sit with you.
→ Register here · Early bird closes April 3rd