As you meditate, and even just as you go through life, it’s very likely that you are going to have experiences that seem like they are in the direction of Fundamental Wellbeing.

We think of the transition to Fundamental Wellbeing as a battle for resources between competing parts of your brain. Up to this point in your life, you’ve developed habits that have created and supported your current sense of self. These habits are enshrined in your brain in many ways, for example in the form of thicker versus thinner regions, more or fewer connections within and between areas, and so on.

The areas, connections and so on within your brain that you’ve been supporting with your current sense of self are strongly established. They’ve had a lot of support from you in the past. In turn, they have supported you by keeping things heading in your old, familiar direction.

Every action and experience has communicated what you want to your brain over your lifetime and built the capacity for you to experience it. At the same time, as that infrastructure of support was built up in the brain by those actions and experiences, your brain became increasingly locked in and limited in terms of what it allowed you to experience.

It’s likely that your brain felt it was doing this in symbiosis with you. That it was helping to support you in what you wanted, as best it knew how to do. This was true for both the best of times, and the worst of times in your life, including how it responded to traumas.

The transition to Fundamental Wellbeing involves a new way of experiencing life, and in many ways a new sense of self that goes along with that, one that is very different from the way of experiencing life that comes before it.

If you’ve been trying to reach Fundamental Wellbeing for a while, you’ve probably noticed the tendency of your brain to want to keep you locked into your old or normal experience of self. This can be quite frustrating, but it just thinks it’s doing what you’ve been asking it to for your entire life.

Even if you spend some of your time meditating, or learning about Fundamental Wellbeing, or whatever, the reality is that you’re spending nearly every other moment of your life communicating to your brain, via your actions, that you want it to support the sense of self you have been collaborating on building up over the course of your lifetime.

One of the most important things you need to do to successfully transition to Fundamental Wellbeing is find ways to communicate with the brain in its own language. The primary language of the brain, is the language of experience. That’s one reason why one of the 10 Myths debunks the idea that learning more about Fundamental Wellbeing is a good thing. You need to be taking actions to get there, not be spending your time trying to learn more about it. It might seem to you that the brain exists in large part to hold your intellect, but it’s actually far more rooted in experience.

As you meditate, and even just go through life, you will probably have experiences that sound like things you read in The Finders , or our core academic paper on Fundamental Wellbeing , or seen in one of the videos on this site that cover it .

For example, perhaps you’ll experience yourself as somehow, maybe oddly feeling expanded beyond physical body. Or, perhaps you’ll experience an unusual sense of internal spaciousness that you never have before. Or, maybe you’ll have a moment of intense love that goes beyond anything you’ve previously experienced in intensity, or that just feels unusually impersonal. Or, maybe you’ll experience an unusual feeling of aliveness in the body. Or, any one of many other things we describe as being part of Fundamental Wellbeing.

We recognize that those things may not be real for you right now. In fact, you may have no idea what they feel like, and once you do you’ll realize that the ideas your mind has about them and how they will feel are totally wrong.

However, by reading the book or absorbing some of our other materials about Fundamental Wellbeing, you can at least be on the lookout for these types of things and put yourself in a position to better recognize them when they occur.

That’s important, because when they do occur you can put and hold your attention on them, and that’s by far the best way to let your brain know that you want more of that type of thing to occur. By putting your attention on an experience, you’re communicating in the brain’s language. You’re telling it, “this is the type of experience that I want to have occur more often.”

Because each of these mini-experiences relates to aspects of what Fundamental Wellbeing feels like, each points in the general direction of Fundamental Wellbeing itself. So, what you’re communicating at a deeper level is that you don’t just want that aspect of the experience, but you want the full experience of Fundamental Wellbeing.

In many versions of our experiments, we use words like “isness” or “beingness” or “presence” as key things to ask people to be on the lookout for. Now, The Finders is out so you have much more nuance in terms of what you can keep an eye out for. However, these original terms are still very powerful.

We originally used several of them because different people had different types of experience. The experience of “isness” might make sense to one person, for example, but not another. These words, isness, beingness, and presence, are literal descriptions. They aren’t metaphors. When you have the direct experience of “isness”, you know it. The same for beingness and presence. They all point to a very foundational experience. And, having just one is all you need.

Think of it this way, a chair might have many attributes. It could be brown, have a back, have 4 legs, have a cushion, and so on. All of these attributes, though, sit above the reality that it either exists or doesn’t as a chair. It either is, or is not. Either it has an isness or it doesn’t.

Similarly, you have a seemingly endless array of attributes and other things that are true about you. You spend nearly if not all of your life focused on them, so much so that you never really get down to the core experience of just being. Or the fact that, despite all that other stuff, you just are. That there is an “isness” to your very essence. A beingness. A presence.

That’s what these types of words try to convey, not so that you can obsess about them and your mind can figure out what they mean and create an object from that in your mind that you can experience, but rather the exact opposite. So that your mind will be able to recognize these things when they occur. It will never be able to understand or create this type of experience. What’s being referred to here, Fundamental Wellbeing, contains the mind – not the other way around.

This is important because it’s very likely that at some point, you’ll have one of these experiences. When you do, it’s probably the single most important thing that can happen to you, and you want to stop whatever else you are doing and just put your attention on it. Getting to this experience, so that you can increasingly focus on it is the reason you are meditating and using other practices in the first place.

Let me say that again, because it is a very important point. The only reason to meditate and do other practices is so that it can lead to one of these types of experiences. When it does, your only goal should be to rest your attention on the experience for as long as it occurs, or as long as you have time for.

This is the most important secret about how to reach Fundamental Wellbeing.

It’s important to note that you have to be careful about how you do this. For years in our research programs, we’ve referred to this process as “sinking in”. If you imagine the feeling you get when you’re immersed in a very pleasurable experience, such as taking a warm bath, you’ll get what I mean by this phrase.

While in the bath, there’s a way that you can just let go and sink into and become immersed in the pleasure of the experience. You’re relaxed, but still attending to the experience. Your attention is definitely on it, but there’s a quality to that attention. An appreciative, sinking in kind of quality to it. That’s exactly what you’ll most likely find is called for here.

What happens if you put another kind of attention on that bath? For example, what if you bring an analytical form of attention to it? It’s not as pleasurable is it? It’s a totally different kind of experience. You can feel the difference right now in your imagination, can’t you?

In one example, you’re sinking in and immersing yourself in the experience and the pleasure it gives you. In another, you’re paying attention to it, analyzing it, and so on but the result is that you are mostly distancing yourself from the actual experience itself. You’re still in the bath, feeling it to some extent, but what you’re actually doing is making a mental object out of it that is increasingly separating you from the actual, lived experience rather than immersing yourself experientially in the moment to moment richness of it.

Far too many people do the latter when they have glimpses of Fundamental Wellbeing or one of its components, and the same thing happens. Instead of communicating to their brain that more of the experience is desired, they communicate that the experience is to be distanced from, analyzed, objectified in the mind, and understood as a mentally represented experience, not had as a deep lived experience. This only makes it harder to get back to, and it’s the opposite of what you want to do.

So, when you experience something that is in the direction of Fundamental Wellbeing, a glimpse of the thing itself, or even a prolonged experience of it that has the possibility to become persistent, the single most important thing that you can do in those moments is sink into it.

Whatever you are doing, even if you are doing your daily 1 hour of practice, stop and just sink into it like you would that warm bath.

Let your brain know, this is what you want for your life now. Put attention on it, in the correct way, so that the new connections in your brain are formed and strengthened, and the old ones begin to wither.

Do it in this ‘best practice’ kind of way so that your brain itself becomes a willing partner in the process not an adversary that is trying to make the experience go away, all the while thinking that it is helping you to get back to your prior way of experiencing the world, because you have communicated so consistently to it that you this is what you wanted over your entire life up to that point.

Again, there is literally nothing more important for you to do if your goal is to reach Fundamental Wellbeing. You do whatever your chosen practices are in order to finally find the right one that gives you the glimpses you need, then you sink into the glimpses when they occur until Fundamental Wellbeing is persistent for you.

For some, their transition to persistent Fundamental Wellbeing happens on the very first glimpse, for others it takes sinking into many glimpses from many different angles before they reach Fundamental Wellbeing, and for still others it happens at every degree in between. Regardless of which is true in your case, this is the path to persistent Fundamental Wellbeing that has worked for so many others who came before you, and will work for you as well.