I used to think that being “successful” in meditation meant clearing the mind of every scrap of thought, sitting still and motionless, the mind as pristine and empty as a cloudless blue sky on a summer’s day.

“You’ll never be any good at that,” I told myself. As an over-thinking Enneagram 6, my mind revs as fast as the engine on my husband’s high-powered sports car. I feel like it’s perpetually “pedal to the metal” in there, even in the middle of the night.

And yet I kept feeling a deep hunger to quiet my mind, to shut down the engines of anxiety and worry, to silence the incessant odometer of things-I-need-to do that clicks off like the miles on a cross-country trip.