Breaking Patterns: The Hidden Purpose of Deep Meditation
Why Stopping The Mind Is The Key To Healing Ancient Impressions
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Think back for a moment to the last time you had a brand new fresh idea.
Maybe it was in your work - a new creative way to do things.
Maybe it was as you were cooking - suddenly thinking of an ingredient to add you've never tried in that recipe before.
Maybe it was combining clothes into an outfit you'd never worn before.
Or a clear new insight into a dynamic going on in a relationship.
What do all these have in common? They bring a moment of joy and exhilaration, like a deep breath of fresh air.
But why do we feel that little jolt of joy?
It's because, for the majority of the day, we are stuck in loops of the mind, thinking the same thing over and over and over. Maybe minor word changes sometimes, but the loops carry a weight of monotony that absolutely dulls the mind until everything feels tarnished — like you're walking through your day under a film you didn’t know was there.
If that weren’t true, new thoughts would not feel like shocks of joy — they’d feel ordinary. But in fact everyone experiences that a fresh thought brings joy - because of the contrast with our normal thinking.
How often do we have fresh thoughts?
The shocking, research-backed answer is:
Only a tiny fraction of the time.
Modern cognitive science estimates that:
We have about 60,000–70,000 thoughts per day, and about 90–95% of them are repetitive.
In other words:
New thoughts — actual, original, never-before-seen patterns — make up less than 5% of our mental activity.
That means 95% of the mind’s energy is just the autopilot, recycled loops.
The mind doesn’t produce thoughts, so much as it reproduces them, like a playback machine.
What's up with this?! Why does the mind run in these compulsive loops?
Yoga theory has a word for it: Samskaras, which means impressions.
My teacher Mark Griffin would blow our minds by making this so concrete. Once he said something like:
“By the time you’ve thought of something the same way ten times, there is no chance you’re going to have a fresh thought about it on the eleventh time.”
Doesn’t that make it so startling and clear?
Just ten repetitions, and we’ve already begun to forge a groove.
Just like a deer walking in the woods —
by the tenth time it’s taken the same path through the forest,
you can easily see the trail it’s made.
The leaves pushed aside, the grass bent, the pine needles flattened.
The mind is the same.
By the tenth time you’ve thought something the same way,
you’ve already surrendered your freedom of response.
You’re no longer choosing a fresh road — you’re just tracing the groove you already carved.
You become bound by a very subtle inertia —
the mind becoming captive to the very grooves it created.
Most people move through their day entirely under the momentum of samskara.
And this idea of an impression becoming hardened is not just a psychological concept. This is actually happening on the level of the subtle body. These samskaras are actually deposited along the nerve channels of the etheric body, to the extent that someone with the clear vision of a seer can actually see them. My teacher Mark had gained this ability and he said they look like small grains of rice, adhering to the nadis, the energy body’s nervous system. Some of them were dark gray, some light gray - some were even white.
And because these samskaric impressions are in the subtle body, they actually go with us from lifetime to lifetime. That's why you see two children, born from the same parents who are so fundamentally different as they grow up. It's not just different dynamics in their immediate family, it's that each person carries their own impressions with them from past lives, which end up shaping their current life.
You don’t even have to believe in subtle anatomy or reincarnation to understand this. You’ve felt the weight of an impression in your own system, how some memories feel heavy, others bright, others sticky. You know what it's like, being in the maze of your mind, and every turn you make looks the same: been there, thought that, been there, thought that, been there, thought that.
What can we do about these impressions? How can we stick our heads above the clouds and see the sun with every thought - not just those rare fresh moments?
One approach it to try to go after the deep impressions one by one and heal up the grooves. This is basically what people do when they engage in various modalities of therapy. They address a deeply set wound or loop their minds and emotions are running in and they try to unravel and unpack that impression to gain some healing and freedom from it.
This is great - it works because it's like taking the needle that runs on the grooves of a record on the phonograph table and jumping it to a different spot in the record, or to a different record.
But what about all the other impressions? You have a vast library of different records.
Remember - we're talking about recovering 95% of our thoughts - all stuck in repetitive looping and robbing us of our vitality and joy.
Is there a way to deal with ALL of the impressions - all at once?
Yes - moments of quiet touch all impressions all at once. Sometimes we have an experience filled with awe, and we emerge from that feeling that so much has shifted. And it literally has, because it loosens some of those samskaras that grip us. Moments of extreme shock can do that as well.
And of course, this is exactly what meditation is designed for. The work of purification, as it is often called, is the bread and butter daily job of meditation. Because each time you quiet the mind, you help it break free from its looping tendencies, you help attention expand beyond what it's familiarized with every day.
But there's something you can only do in meditation - that has the effect of intentionally blasting all samskaras - all at once.
And that is: stopping the mind.
Not quieting the mind.
Not relaxing the mind or trying to manage it.
I mean stopping the mind.
That moment where everything collapses into silence, where the whole system shuts down.
Something extraordinary becomes possible in that stillness.
It's in that totally stopped state that samskaras truly and permanently resolve and dissolve and leave.
To visually see why I say this, I have a perfect analogy to share with you.
There’s a scene in the movie The Matrix — and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably watched this film a dozen times — there’s a scene that, for me, is one of the most perfect metaphors for what it really means to stop the mind, and to witness the effect it has on samskaras.
Whether you've seen the movie or not, let me try to take you there.
Our hero, Neo and the crew are flying through these old maintenance tunnels in the ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. The ship is rattling, sparks are flying, alarms are going off, because the tunnel has suddenly become filled with the Sentinels, metallic octopus-like machines, that spell certain destruction.
The Sentinels are swarming the ship, they’re latching onto the hull, one by one, drilling through the metal with those blinding-white cutting torches. You can feel the tension rising.
And then the captain Morpheus gives the order.
“EMP — charge it.”
EMP is the electro magnetic pulse weapon.
It’s a last resort. It’s the one thing they can’t use lightly, because the EMP doesn’t just destroy the machines — it kills the ship's own power too. One push of that button and everything electronic goes black.
And so they wait — because timing matters.
They wait until the very last instant, the moment right before the metal is breached, the moment right before the ship is torn apart.
And then they fire it.
A burst of pure electromagnetic force radiates through the ship, and suddenly — every machine drops. The whole swarm falls off the hull, limp and lifeless, and clatters down into the darkness.
Let me show you this in a way you will never forget.
[insert movie scene]
In that blackout, something sacred becomes possible.
Silence.
Stillness.
Nothing moving.
Nothing crawling.
Just one clean, unbroken moment where all the noise is gone.
[I return on screen]
And I want you to hold that image.
Because that is stopping the mind.
Not the slow erosion of thought.
Not the polite hope that maybe your thinking will “settle down a bit today.”
Not the little reductions in stress we get from breathing calmly.
Stopping the mind is like detonating the inner EMP.
It’s a total shutdown of the mental field.
It’s instantaneous.
It’s complete.
It drops everything clinging to your subtle body — the samskaras, the old patterns of conditioning, the impressions we’ve collected from birth until this very moment.
You can’t win that battle Sentinel by Sentinel individually.
There’s only one thing that works:
A moment of total silence.
A moment of absolute cessation.
A moment where the entire mental field shuts down at once.
And in that silence — the samskaras loosen.
They lose their charge and fall away.
This is why the yoga sutras have said for thousands of years:
Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodhah
meaning, Yoga is the stilling of the thought waves of the mind.
The great sage Patanjali meant nirodhah literally — the complete arrest of activity.
He meant zero - like the EMP.
A complete powering down.
And here’s the interesting part:
You don’t live there permanently.
No one does.
Just like the ship comes back online, your mind comes back online after experiencing the cessation of true yoga in deep meditation. The lights flicker, the systems reboot, the engines hum. You come back into your life.
But something is different.
Every time you taste that full shutdown, even for a second, the entire configuration of your subtle body shifts. The samskaras don’t come back with the same grip. The Sentinels don’t instantly reattach. The grooves of your conditioning aren’t as deep. The emotional patterns aren’t as automatic. The identity structures aren’t as rigid.
If that happens with a momentary EMP kind of shutdown, in a moment of meditation - think of the profound purification that is accomplished when you gain the mastery to stop the mind for long periods of time at will.
This is the real work of yoga, and the reason I offer my sequential training at StopTheMindMeditation.
This is the real reason behind why we sit, day after day after day.
Not to feel calmer.
Not to become “more mindful.”
But to set the conditions for these moments of absolute stillness, the moments where the mind stops — where everything unnecessary drops away — and the deeper truth of our existence is revealed.
Just like that ship, in the quiet after the EMP, floating in the dark, surrounded by stillness — you discover that what is left is clarity, strength, presence, and freedom.
So when you sit to meditate, remember this scene.
Feel it in your bones.
Feel the swarm on the hull.
Feel the heat of the torches.
Feel the pressure building.
And then feel the stillness.
Feel that pulse of total shutdown.
Even if it lasts only a heartbeat — that heartbeat is transformational.
Because in the silence when the mind stops…
Your true nature stands revealed.
what remains is not silence but the pure awareness of the Self
