I Tried to Reach Enlightenment Before Dinner. Here’s What I Learned

There was a morning I sat down on my meditation cushion and made a decision: I was not getting up until I was enlightened.

I had just dropped my children off at school. I remember thinking, confidently, that I had a solid window before pickup. If the Buddha could sit under the Bodhi tree and stay there until he awakened, I could do something similar between 8:30am and 2:45pm.

My heart was heavy with a frustration that I imagine many of you know well. It is the kind that builds over time for those who pour themselves into spiritual practice and wonder why the universe is not pouring back. I had been doing the “work” for years. Hundreds of courses and workshops, thousands of books, years of meditation and discipline. I felt disconnected. I felt like I was knocking on a door that no one was answering.

Where was the connection I had been reaching for? Where were the answers I was seeking? 

So I sat in my meditation space, I closed my eyes, and I asked a single question, over and over, into the silence:

Who am I?

The Moment Everything Dissolved

What happened next is difficult to describe without diminishing it. 

The boundaries between me and everything else dissolved. I felt as if I was the grass outside my window,  I became the wind that caused it to sway, and the empty space between each blade. I was both the entirety of a stream and a single drop of water within it. My heart expanded beyond anything I have words for. There was no longer separation, there was no fear, and there was no searching. There was only an immense love that had apparently been there the whole time, waiting for me to stop looking past it.

I opened my eyes, and something had genuinely shifted. The room was the same, but I was completely new.

The experience lived within me, alive and vibrant, for a week, and then life arrived. The bills returned, the stress came back, and the programming in my head played once again.

I remember thinking: wait. Didn’t I just wake up? How am I back here?

This confusion turned out to be the most important teaching of all.

The Truth About Awakening That No One Tells You

The word awakening can be misleading. It implies a before, when you were asleep, and a permanent after, when you are finally, forever awake. Many of us carry this idea like a destination on a map: that one day something will click, and we will have arrived. We will be enlightened. At peace. Done!

But here is what I know to be true: awakening is not a destination. It is a direction. It is the daily, sometimes unglamorous, always courageous practice of returning to stillness, to truth, to the version of yourself that existed before the world began to tell you who to be. 

It is a journey. To be human is to experience the full range of it. The highs and the lows, the expansion and the confusion. The goal is not to eliminate the downs. The goal is to gradually reduce the grip they have on you, so that you move through them more quickly, more gracefully, and with more compassion for yourself in the tumbling. I equate it to a roller coaster ride. The ups and downs do not stop; after all, what fun would a flat ride really be? Instead, awakening makes the lows not dip so intensely and last so long. You catch yourself before falling so deeply and consciously choose another path, another state, another way of meeting the moment. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

You Were Already Whole

Before you had a name, before you had a story, before your family handed you their fears and your culture handed you its limitations, you arrived here as pure possibility. Unlimited potential. Infinite capacity for love, for joy, for wonder.

You were not taught to be in awe of life; you were born in it. Watch any infant encounter the world for the first time. There is no self-doubt, no comparison, no sense of being too much or not enough. There is only presence, only openness, and only the extraordinary miracle of being alive.

Somewhere along the way, life began to layer itself on top of that original truth. Experiences became stories, and stories became beliefs. Beliefs became the invisible architecture of your inner world, the glass through which you see yourself and everything around you. Some of what was layered on you was beautiful. Some of it was not. Trauma, self-doubt, the accumulation of you can’t, you shouldn’t, you’re not enough. All of it builds a version of you that is often mistaken for who you actually are.

But that original self, the one who arrived with an open heart and wide eyes, did not go anywhere, and it is not lost. It is simply waiting beneath the layers, patient and whole, for you to find your way back.

Awakening is that return.

Your Brain Has a Narrator, and You Are Not It

Here is something neuroscience has discovered that has assisted me on my awakening journey.

Your brain has a network of regions that activates specifically when you are not focused on a task, when you are at rest, drifting, or absorbed in thought. Scientists call it the Default Mode Network, or DMN. What does this network do? It talks about you. It replays yesterday’s conversation and rehearses tomorrow’s worry. It constructs and reinforces a continuous internal story about who you are, what you have done wrong, what might go wrong next, and whether you are enough.

That voice, the one that narrates your life, judges your choices, and defines your limitations, is not your truth. It is a network. It is a pattern of neural activity that was shaped, over time, by every experience you have had, every belief you absorbed, every wound that went unhealed.

Neuroscientists now have a name for this distinction. A 2024 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology identified two distinct selves operating in the brain: the narrative self, built from autobiographical memory, self-referential thought, and persistent inner dialogue, and the experiential self, which is grounded in present-moment awareness, beyond the story. The narrative self is the voice of the DMN. The experiential self is what remains when that voice grows quiet.

Here is what that means for awakening: the question I asked on that cushion, Who am I, was a neurological shift. In the moment you turn awareness back on itself, you step out of the narrative self and into the experiential one. You stop being the story and become the one who is witnessing it. That space, however brief, is where the true self lives.

The practice does not require years to begin working. Research published in Scientific Reports found that just 31 days of consistent mindfulness practice, in complete beginners, measurably increased connectivity between the DMN and the brain’s attentional networks. The brain was already learning to notice when the narrator took over, and to choose differently.

This is what the ancient traditions have always practiced, and what science is now confirming: the mind can be trained to return. Not to silence the narrator permanently, but to no longer be governed by it. Each time you pause, each time you notice a thought and choose not to follow it, each time you ask who is doing the noticing, you are strengthening a new pathway. You are building your way back to the self that was always there beneath the story.

The programming is not permanent, and the narrative is not you.

Where Awakening Actually Happens

So what does this look like, practically? How do we actually do the work of awakening, not just in peak moments of meditation, but in the ordinary moments of daily life?

Here are the steps I found after the oneness faded and life showed up anyway.

Step 1: Recognize What Is Running

The first step in any awakening practice is awareness, not judgment, just honest observation. Most of us move through our days run by the narrator, reacting to life from patterns we did not consciously choose. The DMN is doing exactly what it was trained to do, playing the old story on repeat. These patterns were installed early: by caregivers, by experiences, by culture. They include the beliefs you hold about your worth, your safety, and your capacity to receive love or success.

Begin to notice, with curiosity rather than criticism: Where do I contract? What triggers a reaction in me that feels disproportionate to the moment? What do I tell myself when things go wrong? These are programs, and programs, by definition, can be updated.

Step 2: Return to the Original Question

When you feel lost, reactive, disconnected, or small, return to the question I asked on that cushion: Who am I, beneath the role, the worry, the story?

Sit with it in silence. What arises when you stop identifying with the noise? There is a version of you that is not anxious, not diminished, not at war with the present moment. It is you who existed before the world had its way with you and is still here.

Step 3: Practice Being, Not Just Doing

One of the most powerful shifts you can make is to move from asking what I should do to asking who I want to be in this moment.

The state you inhabit is not incidental to your life; it is the substance of it. Reality reflects back the energy you bring to it. When you move through your day from a state of fear, lack, or unworthiness, that is the lens through which you experience everything. When you consciously shift into a state of expansion, of trust, of openness, of connection to something larger than the current circumstance, you are literally creating differently. My mantra is “I AM, reality reflects it back.” So ask yourself, who are you being?

This is not about toxic positivity or pretending your pain or circumstances are not real. It is about choosing, as often as you can, to return to the version of yourself who knows that you are more than the challenge in front of you, more than the trigger that wants you to respond, and more than the situation attempting to limit you.

Step 4: Use Micro-Moments of Intention to Rewire

You do not need hours of meditation to do this work. Research shows that even brief, consistent practices create neurological change over time. The key is repetition and presence. Each time you pause and return to yourself, you are interrupting the narrator’s loop and strengthening a new pathway. You are training the brain to recognize when the DMN has taken over, and to consciously redirect. There is no need to fight the voice; you simply choose not to follow it.

Try this: pause for just 72 seconds several times a day. Place your hand on your heart. Take three slow, conscious breaths. Then hold a simple, embodied question:

What if I am already enough? What if everything I need is already within me?

Do not try to intellectually answer it; instead, let the question live in your body. Feel what opens. This is neurological training, each repetition activating new neural pathways and gently overriding the old programming with a more truthful story.

Do this consistently, and the brain will respond to what you rehearse.

Step 5: Choose Peace as a Discipline

Perhaps the most radical act of awakening is not the mystical peak experience. It is the ordinary, daily choice not to stay in the story.

The narrator will always build a case. It will gather evidence, assign blame, and make the story feel urgent and real. Your job is not to argue with it. Your job is to notice it, name it, and choose differently. When someone disappoints you, notice the impulse to build a case. Then ask: do I want to be right, or do I want to be free? When grief or frustration arrives, let yourself feel it fully, without pushing it away. Then, when you are ready, choose where you place your attention next. This is the discipline and the practice. It is not the absence of difficulty, but the growing capacity to not let difficulty define you, to not let the lows of life take hold.

Over time, the waves still come. But you find your footing more quickly. You return to yourself with less effort, and in those moments of return, however ordinary they may seem, you are awake.

The Soul Calling You Forward

None of us have fully arrived. But arriving was never the point. The lightning bolt, the morning where everything dissolves into oneness, the aha moments are gifts. They are not the destination. The destination is the path itself. The daily choice to return to who you truly are beneath the noise, beneath the story, beneath everything the world layered on top of the infinite possibility you arrived here as. Even the Buddha did not reach enlightenment in a single moment. He walked the path every day of his life. So do we. Awakening is the soul calling you forward in daily practice, here in reading this article, in the ordinary Tuesday where you choose, one more time, to come back to yourself.

TAKE ACTION: Awakening is always better in community. Tiffani shares reflections, science, and conscious-creating on Instagram at @tiffanichurchill.