The Seeking Mind
One day, you wake up with a quiet intention. Today, perhaps, you’ll finally take care of your body. Your back has been hurting for weeks. So you decide: today I will do some exercise.
But almost immediately you realise — “I don’t actually know the best exercise for relieving back pain.”
So you open your phone and type: “back pain relief exercises”.
What greets you is an ocean of information. Hundreds of videos, yoga sequences from gurus, physical therapy drills named after long-forgotten doctors, ancient breathing techniques, “scientifically backed” programs promising to fix your back in 21 days. Every post, every reel radiates certainty and superior technique.
Before you know it, an hour has slipped away. You’re still sitting on the bed. You think, “Okay… now I have a pretty good idea of what to do. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually try some of these.”
And just like that, you never moved your body.
Is this only about back pain? No. This is the quiet pattern so many of us live inside, across so many areas of life.
Want to grow wealth? You search “how to invest for beginners”. You arrive at: books promising mindset hacks and foolproof strategies, day-trading secrets, crypto predictions, and stock-picking formulas. Your mind lights up — wow, so much to understand. It feels like progress. Yet month after month passes, and you’ve achieved… nothing.
You long for a healthier body. You start exploring diets and land in: keto, intermittent fasting, plant-based summer resets, precise meat-cooking techniques, hundreds of scientific studies, personal testimonies, and complicated meal plans. You chase one method after another, never really doing anything.
You desire deeper connections, better relationships. You find: attachment theory breakdowns, love language charts, communication frameworks, dating strategies, ancient tantric practices, weekend retreats promising soul-level recognition, books on childhood wounds and relational trauma.
Whenever we want to improve any meaningful area of life, we fall into this ocean of information.
At first, the ocean feels exciting, alive, full of possibility. We swim around in it for hours. And when we finally climb out, we feel strangely empty. We were convinced we were making real progress, only to realise we did almost nothing.
We have all lived some version of this story.
What works
What actually works in life is simple. Deep down, most of us already know it: at least intellectually, or we can feel it in our bones.
To build a healthy body: consistent sleep, waking early, 20–30 minutes of straightforward exercises like push-ups, planks, bridges, maybe some basic breathing. Doing this every single day, year after year.
For wealth: setting aside or investing a portion of your salary each month. No heroics, just repeating the habit. Do it quietly for 10–15 years, and the results will probably surprise even you.
For healthy eating: regular, balanced meals built mostly around unprocessed food. No extremes, just a daily rhythm held over years.
I don’t need to elaborate on this. Anyone who genuinely wants to improve in any area already knows, at least in their head, that this is what delivers. Consistency, repeated over long stretches of time, creates outcomes that no technique, no hack, no “life-changing tip” can ever match.
The question almost everyone asks next is:
“Yeah, okay… but how do I stay consistent? How do I become disciplined?”
And here’s the thing: that’s the wrong question. The right one is: Why am I not consistent? What is actually blocking me from showing up?
Let me show you why.
The Fear of Silence
Take exercise as an example: Today you wake up and do your 30 minutes. The next session is almost exactly 24 hours away. In between? A whole ordinary day — one that has almost nothing to do with “achieving good health.” Just time. A kind of silence around your goal.
Or take investing: You put money aside this month. The next deposit is another full month away. Between those two small actions lies thirty days of normal, unglamorous life, nothing obviously connected to “building wealth.” Again, silence.
You see the pattern. Whenever you commit to repeating anything meaningful in life, what stretches between each repetition is time that feels unrelated to the goal. Empty space. Boring space.
Repetition is the quiet engine of consistency in anything worthwhile. And here is the deeper truth: To actually become consistent, to stay with something long enough for it to matter, you need the inner capacity to hold that silence. To sit with the boredom, the emptiness, the nothing-to-do feeling. without running away from it, without filling it.
It’s not a lack of the perfect technique holding you back. The real reason consistency slips away is simpler and more uncomfortable:
We are afraid of silence. We are afraid of emptiness. We are afraid of boredom.
The Mind: A mechanism
The symptom of this fear is the restless, never-quiet mind.
The fear of silence manifests as compulsive information-seeking. That empty space between repetitions, the “boring” gaps, gets flooded with an endless hunt: more videos, deeper theories, new courses, better frameworks. This constant searching keeps you occupied. It creates a convincing illusion of effort, of progress, even of consistency itself.
You decide: “I’ll exercise every day for 30 minutes.” Between one day and the next, the gap opens. And the mind begins its familiar dance. “What if I’m not doing the best exercise?” “What if this isn’t the right form for my body?” “Is this suited to my body type? My age? My metabolism?” What, how, why — an endless cascade of questions that demand answers. And so the search begins again. Eventually, the mind whispers its final, seductive conclusion: “No point starting until you’ve truly understood the right way.”
This happens with anything you want to do consistently. The mind launches the same compulsive inquiry. Here’s the key: it’s not genuine curiosity. It’s the compulsive nature of the questioning, a mechanism running on autopilot, asking and asking with almost no pause for your conscious choice. Under this barrage, real action gets postponed. The effort gets delayed. You keep chasing “the best way” instead of simply doing the thing.
The irony is almost funny: the mind convinces you that somewhere out there exists the perfect technique, the ultimate tool, the one method that will finally make you consistent. But what if the very act of hunting for that technique is precisely what keeps you inconsistent?
What the mind or mechanism is truly terrified of is silence. And consistency is the natural consequence of being able to simply stay with silence and emptiness.
The Wrong Way: The Forced Consistency
After some time, most people who want to change encounter this mechanism, the restless mind and the fear of silence. And here is the real mistake they usually make. They start fighting with it.
We have all done this. We feel the pull of endless seeking and procrastination disguised as preparation. Then we say enough. I will force it. I will take action. I will become disciplined. We make strict rules. We tell ourselves no excuses, just do it. We shame ourselves when we break the streak. We try to overpower the mechanism by fighting the mind itself.
We give this beautiful names: willpower, discipline, determination. They feel noble and strong, like the right cure for inconsistency. For some time it works. You exercise daily, invest monthly, take care of yourself. You motivate yourself every day. But something strange happens underneath.
The mechanism, the fear of silence, does not go away. The mind that once filled the silence with oceans of information now fills it with forced discipline and rigid consistency. The fight itself fuels the mechanism. The mind lives on. This is not the consistency I am talking about.
One day, the consistency breaks; it always breaks, because life is not linear, life is not perfect. And immediately the mind starts its dialogue: “You failed again.” “You are not disciplined.” “You are weak.” With this sense of failure, shame, and guilt arrive. The mind immediately starts asking: “Maybe something was missing, I need to find another way to be consistent.” So you are back to seeking and searching again.
This is the quiet tragedy of willpower, discipline and forced consistency. It is used for fighting the inner mechanism — that is mind. And when we fight the mind, we give it fuel. So most people are caught in this infinite loop:
Seek → Gather information → Get frustrated → Forced action with willpower and discipline → It works for some time → Burn out → Seek again.
Both ways: seeking or forced action keeps the mind alive. One way is to indulge in the compulsive curiosity of the mind, and another is to fight with the mind. Both ways the mind wins. You remain as you are; nothing really changes. And you can go on living your whole life in this cycle for decades without realising what is going on.
The Right Way: Awareness
So we come right back to the question: How to be consistent? But before that, we have to answer why there is an inconsistency in the first place.
It is because we genuinely believe we are doing it the right way — yet we are not.
For example, the person endlessly gathering information on exercise, investment, relationships, love, and life honestly believes this is the right approach. They are not able to see that it does not work or at least that it is only half the story. Similarly, the one acting through sheer willpower and forced action also honestly believes this is the right way. He, too, is incapable of seeing that it does not truly work or again, that it is only half the story.
The real thing is seeing, seeing what actually works and what does not. And that seeing is what awareness is.
Still, many would say: Yes, I understand the concept. I understand that I am afraid of silence, that I try to fill it with the noise of information, and that I also try to force my way through the fear. I am aware, yet it brings no real change to my life. It does not bring consistency. And here I say: You are not aware. You have only understood it through your intellectual mind.
Here we touch another quality of awareness: Awareness is of the moment. It is knowing what is happening exactly when it is happening. When you understand something only through the mind, you are looking back and realising, “Oh yes, I made this mistake. I should have done this or that.” But this is not enough. Awareness is seeing in the very act, without any delay.
That is why most people think they are self-aware, think they have understood, yet that understanding changes nothing in life. So awareness has to be of the moment.
And what that means as a practical step:
Take any goal or activity in your life — better health, learning a new skill, investing, anything that requires repeating the same thing again and again until you master it. Start to look at your mind’s movement. Start noticing your mind, its thoughts, its ideas, all the time. Make it a practice that you do not miss even a single thought that passes through.
Start becoming aware of this whole cycle:
Seek → Gather information → Get frustrated → Forced action with willpower and discipline → It works for some time → Burn out → Seek again.
Slowly, as you continue, you will see that the mechanism starts losing its grip on you. It loses grip because you see that the whole mechanism is false; it is what has been preventing real, effortless, consistent action.
Slowly, you will become comfortable with the silence between repetitions. Slowly, you will start to have consistency in life.
Meditation
One way is to become aware by practising this in day-to-day life with any skill or repetitive activity you are planning. Another way is to simply sit with yourself and become aware. You don’t need any activity to become aware of it either.
Here is the technique: Sit with yourself and silence your mind.
When you hear this, the first thing you will ask is:
- How do I silence my mind? Then you will start gathering information — a lot of information on how to meditate.
- Then you will say, I will try something. You will use your own mind to silence your mind (which is a forceful way to shut it down).
- This forceful action will not last long, as it will tire you very easily.
- After a few minutes, you will feel tired, and you will again start thinking about something.
- You might think: This is not working. Maybe I don’t know how to do this. And so on.
- You will repeat this cycle again and again.
If you read back closely, you will see the same cycle that I talked about before — the one you can observe in real-life actions:
Seek → Gather information → Get frustrated → Forced action with willpower and discipline → It works for some time → Burn out → Seek again.
The key thing to understand here is that there is a mechanism in you (the mechanism of the mind) that is creating this vicious loop. Whether you come out of this mechanism in meditation (when you are alone) or in the outer world (when you are trying something outside) does not matter. What matters is that you become aware of the mechanism within you, the one that is creating this loop, that is keeping you inconsistent or making you act in a forceful, “consistent” way.
That is why meditation can be thought of as fundamental work you can do when you are alone. And once the mechanism of the mind starts losing its grip over you, you will see that your whole life changes effortlessly without you even thinking about it. Your outer world effortlessly shifts as your inner world shifts.
So here is the bottom line: Whether you become aware of this mechanism in the outer world through action or in the inner world by simply sitting does not matter. What matters is that you become aware of it. And out of this awareness, a transformation comes on its own.
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