Three Month Meditation Coaching Journey with Jimmy Wightman | That Meditation Guy

A while back, I embarked on a 3-month meditation coaching program with a student named Simon. In this email, I’ll tell you about it because, even if you have no interest in coaching yourself, you’ll get a flavour of what’s possible if you fully commit to your meditation practice for a short period of time.

During my first chat with Simon, I discovered what his motivations and goals were, and we discussed how I might be able to help him. He told me he wanted to sleep better and feel less stressed at work without sacrificing productivity because he liked his job. He also wanted to be less reactive and more emotionally balanced. He often found himself ruminating, lost in thoughts about worst-case scenarios. This sparked intense feelings of dread and worry. He would snap and be moody with family members and then spiral into shame.

Simon also told me he had an interest in Eastern spirituality. He liked my stories of meditation masters and the idea of insights and shifts in consciousness that go far beyond healing and self-improvement.

So, we got to work. In the first 3 days (3 × 1-hour sessions), I taught him my Deep Calm mantra meditation technique. This worked like a reset for his nervous system, and he reported feeling calmer and more relaxed immediately. The effect was subtle, but we were off to a good start.

We set up a time each week to meet on Zoom for one hour, and I gave him access to me via a messaging app so we could communicate throughout the week—I wanted to be able to answer his questions as they came up rather than waiting for the sessions. He committed to meditating for at least 30 minutes each day as well as bringing the practices into his life while doing ordinary daily tasks as much as possible. This is how monks train—the formal sitting period is a time for cultivating a way of being that carries on throughout the rest of the day.

In our second week together, we switched to mindfulness practice because I wanted him to develop the skills and courage to handle any difficult thought, feeling, or emotion that might arise. I taught him to meditate in a free-flowing way that enabled him to be present with whatever arose in any of the senses (with no need to focus on anything exclusively, such as the breath). He enjoyed being unrestricted in this way, as he’d always struggled to focus on his breath for long periods.

Over time, as Simon got used to being present with body sensations and emotions, he saw how emotions would trigger thoughts and how he’d subconsciously use thinking as a way to avoid feeling what was present in the body. Together, we worked on reversing that. Gently, we created a situation where he felt more and more safe to face, feel, and stay with any emotion or physical sensation that came up without letting automatic reactions take over. This skill is called equanimity (the ability to not be pushed or pulled by inner forces). It’s a superpower!

The mixture of daily formal sitting practice and informal micro-hits of mindfulness began to create positive changes in his life. For example, when his boss gave him a hard time, he felt emotions but never got lost in the story. He experienced what most people call “anxiety” as vibrating sensations in the belly with a tingly energetic quality. This became his new operating system. Instead of habitually moving into rumination and worry when difficult emotions arose, he was able to keep his attention down in the body, confident that he could handle any feeling that appeared. In fact, he told me that feeling his emotions had become his spiritual practice. It empowered him. He loved the idea that he wasn’t reacting to or suppressing his emotions—instead, he was facing them and processing them in real time, sometimes during meditation and sometimes on the go or in the background while doing other things.

Now, with his emotions under control and his nervous system in a calm state, he began to notice the programs running in his mind. Those worrying thoughts (worst-case scenarios and rumination) were nothing more than visual images appearing in consciousness coupled with mental talk (a voice arising in the mind). We did a few sessions specifically around getting clarity on the inner voice (he had a strong inner critic), and he discovered how to disidentify from it. One day, it just landed: he didn’t have to believe his thoughts, and he would never be controlled by them again. He saw how they were part of his conditioning (outdated defence mechanisms), relics from the past. (It’s not good enough to take this on as a belief; you have to actually see it in real time over and over for the brain to be rewired into a new way of operating.)

Over time, I introduced new ways of exploring his sense experience that allowed him to appreciate the texture and contour of the present moment. His meditation sessions became less like a training ground and more like a playground—a safe place to explore what it means to be truly alive in this very moment. A place to embrace reality just as it is—sometimes blissful, sometimes challenging, always alive and interesting.

As his practice deepened, he began to see how thoughts, feelings, and emotions are, in a sense, empty and don’t need to cause reactivity or drivenness. He saw firsthand why Buddhists are always talking about impermanence (it’s not meant to be a belief, but a lived experience).

Slowly but surely, Simon was waking up out of the delusions created by his own mind that kept him feeling stuck, small, and scared. Simon’s sleep improved, but he does occasionally have nights where it takes a while to fall asleep. However, rather than getting frustrated, he practises the techniques while lying there, enjoying how it feels to sink into full-body rest without wishing things were different.

Finally, as our 3-month coaching program came to an end, Simon said:

“This wasn’t what I expected. I thought we’d be using the techniques to make emotions go away or make thoughts go quiet, but I see now that true freedom is being absolutely OK with everything exactly as it is. I don’t have to keep manipulating my experience. I’m free to feel it all, and I trust myself to handle it. I can see why I normally act the way I act—all of these old programs running—but now I don’t have to follow the programs. I can open to whatever comes. And strangely, that makes me feel quiet and still inside in a way I can’t quite explain. My wife has noticed a difference too, I used to be uncomfortable with her emotions because I couldn't handle my reactions. Now I'm able to keep my nervous system regulated even when her emotions flare up."

Simon has made incredible progress during our time together, but what excites me the most is the knowledge that he’s only just getting started. He has no idea how deep and profound this journey will become.

Jimmy