But you can when you learn to dive within to find stillness. And I heard Bob Roth tell a story this morning about his mentor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It stuck with me.

Bob told it through David Lynch, who was in the middle of making Eraserhead, his first film, on almost no money, over almost five years. He was doing exactly what he’d set out to do.

And he still wasn’t happy.

Everyone kept telling him the same thing: true happiness is within.

Lynch thought that was cruel to hear. Nobody tells you where “within” actually is. Nobody tells you how to get there. It’s advice that sounds true and gives you nothing to do next.

If you’re running a business right now, that might sound familiar. You built the thing you set out to do. Headcount’s real. Clients are real. And some days it still doesn’t feel like enough.

Lynch’s frustration eventually led him to meditation. His sister had learned Transcendental Meditation, and he could hear something different in her voice when he talked to her.

More ease. More certainty. Not performative.

He wanted what she had.

So he learned to meditate, and never stopped. It became the thing underneath everything in his life.

What stuck with me from Bob’s story wasn’t about Lynch. It was how simple Maharishi’s teaching was underneath it:

The surface of the mind is full of choppy waves, the noise, the noticing, the reacting.

Underneath, there’s stillness. It isn’t something you build. It’s already there.

The practice is learning how to reach it.

I see the business operators version of this constantly. Leaders spend all their energy managing the surface: the pipeline, the next hire, the client fire that needs putting out today. All of it real, all of it urgent.

But the real question, the one that decides everything else, usually isn’t up there. It’s “what do I actually want in the next two years, and does this business get me there?” That question doesn’t get answered by working harder on the surface. It gets answered by going deep enough to actually sit with it.

Meditation can’t change your life.

Diving within it can be big medicine and big transformation.