I Thought I Was Bad at Meditation

Early in my law enforcement career, I remember watching The Sixth Sense. In the film, a young boy delivers the iconic line: “I see dead people.” As it turned out, over the years I would see my fair share.

Death was simply part of the job. As a patrol officer, I responded to fatal crashes, suicides, sudden deaths, and other situations that most people never have to see firsthand.

When I became a supervisor, the exposure increased. I was expected to respond to virtually every death scene and other significant or potentially fatal calls. There were stretches when I might go to several in a week.

For the most part, I thought I was fine.

You managed the scene, did what needed to be done, and moved on. There wasn’t much space in police work to stop and think about what you had just seen. Sometimes you were heading to another call before you’d really had a chance to process the last one.

So I didn’t spend much time thinking about how any of it was affecting me.

When the Load Starts to Add Up

Years later, I learned there is a term for some of what happens under repeated stress: allostatic load.

The science can get complicated, but the basic idea isn’t. Our stress response is designed to activate when we need it and then recover when the demand is over. The problem comes when that cycle happens over and over without enough recovery in between.

In law enforcement, it all adds to the load, and it just keeps piling on.

It might be a death call one day, a violent encounter the next, then a stretch of poor sleep, long shifts, organizational stress, and the constant responsibility of being alert for what might happen next. You go home, try to shut it off, get some sleep, and then come back and do it again.

The call ends and the scene gets cleared. What doesn’t always get the memo is your nervous system.

And the tricky part is that you can get very good at functioning under that load — you adapt, you still show up, you still perform, and you still get things done.

But I eventually learned something I wish I had understood much earlier:

Being able to function is not always the same thing as recovering.

For me, one particular call made that painfully clear.

The One That Hit Differently

We received a report that a woman hadn’t been heard from after an argument with her son. Another officer and I went to her apartment to check on her welfare, and found that she had been violently killed by him.

By that point in my career, I had been to a lot of death scenes. But this one was different.

It wasn’t just that someone had died violently — it was who had done it. Someone had done this to his own mother, someone who had raised him and cared for him.

For whatever reason, that one got through defenses that had worked pretty well for years, and it put me in a very dark place.

Looking back, I don’t think that one call was the beginning of everything. I think it was more of a tipping point. Years of exposure had already been piling up. This was the call that finally made some of that impossible for me to ignore.

I had spent years believing that because I could continue doing the job, I was handling what the job was doing to me. Those turned out to be two very different things.

Then I Tried Meditation

Somewhere along the way, meditation entered the picture.

I tried some of the approaches most people encounter first, including guided meditation and mindfulness. I could see the potential, but I struggled with the practice itself.

There always seemed to be something I was supposed to be doing. Focus on my breathing. Pay attention to the present moment. Watch my thoughts. Quiet my mind. Relax.

Have you ever tried really hard to relax? It doesn’t work particularly well.

My mind was already busy enough. Meditation started to feel like one more thing I wasn’t doing correctly.

That began to change when I was introduced to non-directive meditation. I trained in Turning Within Meditation and later with 1 Giant Mind, where I became a certified meditation teacher.

Through both experiences, I learned a very different way of approaching meditation. I didn’t have to constantly control what my mind was doing. Thoughts weren’t something I needed to get rid of. I didn’t have to force my attention onto one thing or somehow make my mind go blank. Instead of working harder at meditation, I was learning to do less — less effort, not more.

Over time, meditation became easier to return to because I wasn’t constantly judging whether I was doing it right.

But learning a different way to meditate was one thing. Experiencing what that practice could mean in the middle of real life was another.

One afternoon at work, I got a very clear example.

This Time, I Had a Way Back

I was working at what had been a relatively peaceful protest. I was there by myself, monitoring things and checking in with the organizers.

Then someone approached me and said there was a man nearby attacking people in their cars.

I went to where she pointed and found two men fighting. I broke up the fight and, after a short physical struggle, took the aggressor into custody.

My nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do. It went on high alert. That’s useful when you’re alone and suddenly dealing with a physical confrontation. I didn’t need to be calm in that moment. I needed to do my job.

The problem was that the incident ended, but the activation didn’t — it stayed with me for the rest of the day.

Later that afternoon, before going home, I sat at my desk and meditated. The change was striking. It felt like somebody flipped a switch, and I could feel myself settling out of that fight-or-flight state.

What stayed with me wasn’t just that I felt better sitting at my desk. It was what happened when I went home. I could have dinner with my wife and kids and actually be there with them.

The other option was familiar. Go downstairs, disengage, zone out in front of the TV, maybe have a drink, and wait for everything to settle on its own.

This time I had a way back.

That experience changed the way I thought about meditation. It wasn’t about trying to make sure I never felt stressed. It wasn’t about walking around perfectly calm while difficult things happened around me. My nervous system had done exactly what it needed to do.

The goal was never to stop my nervous system from responding to stress. I needed a better way to recover after it did.

How This Became Neural Drift Meditation™

As my own practice and training deepened, I started thinking about meditation beyond what it was doing for me personally.

Toward the later part of my law enforcement career, I served as the Wellness Program Coordinator for my department. That role gave me an opportunity to look more closely at stress, resilience, and what actually helps people in high-stress professions stay well over the course of a career.

I also became interested in the concept of post-traumatic growth, the idea that difficult experiences don’t always have to leave us diminished. Sometimes they can change how we see ourselves, our relationships, what matters to us, and even what we believe we’re capable of.

That doesn’t mean pretending difficult experiences are somehow good for us. I had seen enough by then to know better than that. But it did change the question for me.

Instead of only asking, how do we help people survive the stress they’re exposed to? I became more interested in asking, how do we help them recover from it — and maybe even grow through some of what they’ve experienced? I think most people would prefer to thrive in life instead of just surviving.

In public safety, we understand the importance of training before a skill is needed. We don’t wait until a critical incident happens to learn tactics, and we don’t wait for a deadly-force encounter to practice firearms. We train, we run scenarios, and we practice decision-making before we’re under pressure. I started thinking that recovery deserved the same kind of preparation.

We shouldn’t have to wait until someone is overwhelmed by stress to give them a way to recover from it. Difficult calls are still going to happen. Tragedy is still going to happen. No meditation practice is going to make someone immune to any of that. The value is different.

What if we could build the capacity to recover before we needed it?

That question became a big part of what eventually developed into Neural Drift Meditation. I already had the foundation — what I kept coming back to was what I’d experienced myself: what happens after the call is over?

I wanted to teach meditation not just as something that helps you feel calm in the moment, but as a skill you practice ahead of time. The same way you train for everything else in this work, with a direct focus on nervous system recovery and building resilience.

I started teaching it that way inside my own department, as organizational training, and it was well received — including with people who had never tried meditation before or thought they were bad at it.

Over time, those ideas took shape as Neural Drift Meditation.

“I’m Good”

There was another phrase I heard a lot during my career. I said it plenty myself.

Someone asks: “How are you doing?”

And the answer comes almost automatically: “I’m good.”

For a long time, that was my answer too — I could handle the calls, do the job, and go home and keep moving. So, I must have been good.

Except sometimes I wasn’t.

A friend once asked me a question that stuck with me: if there were an antidote to stress, would you take it?

I don’t think meditation is a magic bullet that makes stress disappear. Life doesn’t work that way, and stress isn’t always something we should be trying to avoid. But I do think we can get better at recognizing when we’re carrying too much, and we can develop better ways of recovering instead of simply waiting for everything to settle on its own.

Maybe the first step is recognizing when “I’m good” really means “I’m not.” And then doing something about it.

This is the practice that grew out of all of it.