I’m 47, spent two decades in the service, and PTSD eventually packed me out to the Colorado high country. Talk therapy barely scratched the surface. What actually downregulated my nervous system was stoic meditation and controlled breathwork. But I had to learn the hard way that spiritual practice isn’t a tactical objective. When I first started sitting, I treated it like a field training exercise. I forced the focus, clenched my jaw, tried to “grind” through the mental static. Predictably, I just fried my system. The mind rebelled. The harder I pushed, the worse the results got.

That’s the paradox every contemplative tradition knows but never gets tired of repeating: forced effort creates resistance. Carl Jung theorized that the psyche self-regulates, and that pushing for a breakthrough usually just triggers the ego’s defense mechanisms. On the cognitive science side, Daniel Wegner’s research on ironic process theory is the established fact here: try hard enough to suppress a thought, and it rebounds harder. The brain isn’t a server you can just overclock. It responds to allowance, not pressure.

Look at the tarot. You want clarity? You don’t pull The Chariot and try to white-knuckle your way through the maze. You look at The Hermit. Withdrawal. Stillness. Turning the dial down until the signal cuts through the noise. The engineers tweaking that effort parameter are accidentally mapping the exact same terrain. They’re learning that sometimes the model needs to stop “trying” and just follow the probability distribution. We’ve known that for centuries.

I’m not here to sell you crystals or promise enlightenment. I’m a skeptic who’s seen firsthand that the nervous system calms when you stop fighting it. But it’s wild to watch tech hit the same wall we hit on the cushion. So I’ll put it to the room: have you noticed this same friction in your practice? Or do you genuinely believe that grinding harder through a dry spell is the way forward? I’m ready to debate it. Show me where I’m wrong.