When we examine mindfulness through the lens of meditation and the metacognitive system we’re building, we’re also laying the groundwork for the mentalist paradigm—mentalism. This directly ties into Clint Marsh’s Mentalism Handbook and Stage One of the Hermetic Protocol, which teaches that “all is mind.” In other words, everything we experience originates in consciousness, and our aim is to learn to shape our own thought processes. Mindfulness is where we begin.

In classical Zen practice, mindfulness is cultivated by settling into simple meditation: attend to your breathing, notice when your attention drifts, then gently bring it back to each inhalation and exhalation. Thoughts arise like clouds passing overhead—observe them without attachment, let them fade, and return to the breath. The breath becomes our anchor whenever restlessness or distraction strikes. Today, however, mindfulness often gets reduced to a trendy buzzword—diluted by countless “how-to” voices. At its core, though, it’s always the same practice: repeatedly returning to the breath whenever the mind wanders.

True mindfulness doesn’t stop when you leave the cushion. We use seated meditation as our training ground so that, throughout the day, we become alert the instant our focus drifts. Over time you’ll start to notice subtle physical cues—tightness in your chest, a knot in your shoulders—that trace back to a specific thought or emotion, even sense the underlying neurochemical shifts, all without naming every receptor or peptide. That embodied awareness hands you the reins.

A more active phase of this training is practiced focus. While you sit in meditation, pick one external point—a spot on the wall—or an internal mantra such as “I direct my own mind.” Each time your thoughts stray, silently repeat that phrase to recalibrate. Eventually you’ll learn to deploy this cueing throughout your daily life: catching drifting thoughts, refocusing on your chosen statement, and progressively commanding your attention.

We can go further than simply affirming “I control my mind.” We can map what actually happens in our heads. For instance, during a ten-minute session, spend five minutes with pen and notebook. Each time a thought emerges, make a quick tally mark and jot a single word describing it. If possible, tag its origin—bodily, mental, environmental, or seemingly random—and note any physical sensation: where did it appear, and was it pleasant or unpleasant?

You don’t need full sentences—just a mark and a keyword—then return to observing your breath. Whenever another thought surfaces, repeat the process, then resume your breathing focus. Afterward, review your notes: How often did your mind wander? What themes recurred? Which thoughts serve you or carry genuine value, and which are mere distractions you’d rather release?

This post-session analysis gives you tangible data to steer your next steps in metacognitive and mentalism training. Some thoughts may highlight tasks you’ve postponed—a household errand, a work project, or an emotional conversation you need to have. If a certain issue keeps arising, block out dedicated time—ten, twenty, even sixty minutes—to address it fully. Other recurring patterns may point to habits you wish to rewire using NLP, hypnosis, or advanced stages of our framework. And some sensations you may decide to cultivate further.

In this way, our approach to mindfulness extends well beyond simply returning to the breath. We systematically gather intelligence on every distraction and then choose how to handle it—truly mastering and directing our own minds.

I think for most people, if you really want to get a handle on your mind, you have to start with meditation. That’s how it was for me, anyway, and honestly, I can’t see it working any other way. Meditation, mindfulness: they’re tangled up together in every self-help article you’ll ever find, but it’s bullshit to say they’re the same thing. I mean, there’s a real difference. Mindfulness is a slice of meditation—a piece of the pie. You can be mindful without ever sitting on a cushion, but meditation supercharges the whole thing. That’s why I’m starting here.

So: meditation. We’ll get to mindfulness later, when we’re ready to start picking apart how our thoughts tangle us up, but for now, it’s just meditation. Humans have been doing this forever. Buddhists, Hindus, mystics—all of them figured this out long before YouTube tutorials and wellness apps. There are a thousand ways to meditate, but most of them agree on the starting point: focus on your breath. It’s not original, but there’s a reason everyone keeps coming back to it. The breath is the anchor—the ballast keeping your boat upright in the middle of a messy, chattering ocean. If you lose your grip, you come back to the breath. It’s always there. It’s safe. It’s familiar. No matter what else your mind is doing, the breath is home base. That’s why every tradition, every wannabe guru, always starts you here: just breathe in, breathe out, just notice it.

You could make it complicated, but you don’t have to. Set a timer for five or ten minutes. Decide that, for those few minutes, you’re just going to pay attention to the breath going in and out. That’s it. Super simple. But here’s where most people crash and burn: the wandering mind. Or, more accurately, the myth that your mind isn’t supposed to wander. People think if they keep thinking, they’re failing at meditation. But the whole point is that you notice when you get dragged off by a random thought or a feeling or an image, and then you haul yourself back to the breath. That’s the practice. It isn’t failure; it’s calibration. Adjusting, over and over. Maybe if you were locked in a mountainside monastery, you could go pure blank, but the rest of us? We’re going to get interrupted by thoughts all the time. The trick isn’t to stop them. The trick is to see them, to stand back and watch the parade instead of being swept away by it.

And that, really, is where you start to get some control over your own head. When you can see your thoughts as just thoughts—as just things passing by—you can decide what to do with them. Maybe you analyze them. Maybe you let them go. Maybe you just come back to the breath and let the chatter fade to the background again. That’s the work. Sometimes you’ll spend the whole session lost in thought, and that’s fine. Every time you realize you got sucked in, you return to the anchor. No drama. No self-punishment. Just come back. That’s all that matters.

Over time, this starts to do something. Not just on some mystical level, but physically—you get a sense for how thoughts shape your feelings, how moods trickle into the body. You catch yourself feeling sad or angry or numb and, if you’re paying attention, you can sometimes trace it right back to a thought, or something you saw or heard, or just the general sludge of the day. Feedback loop, plain and simple. The more you meditate, the more you catch these links in real time, and the less you get blindsided by them. Eventually you can even see it in everyday stuff, like when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and suddenly you’re caught in a wave of emotion and you realize, shit, this isn’t even real, it’s a chemical reaction kicked off by whatever’s on the screen. The more you do this, the more you catch those moments as they unfold. You see your mind and body reacting and you realize the cause-and-effect, the triggers, the whole underlying architecture.

Meditation is the foundation. I’m not going to tell you how to do it, word for word. You can look it up anywhere. But if you’re starting, just set a short timer and focus on the breath. Don’t make it into a test you can fail. If you spend the whole time bouncing between thoughts, that’s normal. Noticing that you’re gone, returning to the breath—that’s the real training. That’s how you stop your subconscious from running the show and start getting some agency back over your own thoughts and emotions. That’s the beginning of a metacognitive mind—not because you forced your brain to shut up, but because you learned to watch it, and choose.

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The process: Dawn’s Silent Breath

The office is dark except for the glow of the monitor and the blue haze of dawn pressing against the blinds. You sit at the desk, hands tented, watching your own breath fog the cold air—each inhale and exhale a metronome for the mind. The world outside is already alive with motion, but inside this room, the only movement is the slow expansion and contraction of your ribcage.

There is a discipline to it, you think—a ritual. You close your eyes and count silently, one breath at a time. You’ve read that the Buddhists have done this for thousands of years, that the most ancient spiritual traditions use the breath as both anchor and escape. You imagine your breath as ballast, the weighted bottom of a boat, keeping you steady against the current of your own thoughts. It’s not about shutting the thoughts off, you remind yourself; it’s about noticing when they arrive, seeing them as clouds drifting across an otherwise empty sky.

At first, the thoughts come in a gentle trickle: a shopping list, a fragment of conversation from the day before, a half-remembered song lyric. But soon the trickle becomes a flood, and you’re carried off by a riptide of worries and wants. You catch yourself, and with a mental tug, return to the breath. You don’t scold yourself for drifting. This is the process, you remember. Noticing, returning, recalibrating. Each lapse is an opportunity to practice.

The timer on your phone rings out, startling in the hush. Ten minutes have passed. You open your eyes and realize your body feels different—lighter, but also somehow more present. You flex your fingers, and the sensation is sharper than before, as if the nerves have been woken from a long sleep.

Later, as you pour coffee and scroll through the morning’s headlines, you notice a tension in your chest that wasn’t there before. A story about a distant war, a viral video of someone in pain. The emotions rise in you, sharp and immediate, but you don’t try to push them away. Instead, you trace them back—where did this start? What thought or image set your body reacting? You make a note, and move on.

Throughout the day, you keep returning to the breath. In line at the bank, during a tense phone call, sitting in traffic with the sun in your eyes. You watch your mind try to sprint away from discomfort, and you practice the gentle act of returning, again and again. The anchor is always there, waiting.

By nightfall, the ritual has become less about discipline and more about curiosity. You are learning to observe your own patterns, the loops your mind runs when left to its own devices. Sometimes you catch yourself in a spiral, but instead of being swept away, you pause, notice, and breathe. The thoughts are still there, but now they are just weather.

You realize that the true work is not in achieving silence, but in developing the awareness to see your own mind at play. Each distraction is not a failure, but a chance to practice agency, to choose where to direct your attention. It’s not about control, but about understanding.

You set the timer for tomorrow morning, already knowing you’ll drift. And already knowing you’ll return.

We’ve spent considerable time examining how the self-help industry—and other influencers—aim at everyone from insomniacs (as we discussed in the insomnia chat Substack) to vulnerable groups and the general public. We’ve built a framework—and are continuously refining it alongside apps—to spot undue influence in digital media. But what about face-to-face settings? How often are we swayed when watching TV, chatting with friends, negotiating with colleagues or making major purchases—like a car or a house—without even realizing it? How can we be sure our choices are well-reasoned, free from coercion or manipulation? And even when they are, how do we guard against buyer’s remorse? How often are we being influenced by positive or negative experiences from the past that hijack our thinking, influencing us in ways we hardly register, creating emotional neurological addiction to chemical imbalances they cause? How often do we find ourselves caught up in the future, worrying about tomorrow, about conversations we are yet to have that in hindsight seldom appear? And is there any benefit to focusing on the present and thinking about not thinking?

In The Meta Cognitive Mind, I’ll share practical guidance, training, tips and lessons drawn from over twenty years in sales, marketing and the art of persuasion—bolstered by insights from behavioural science, meditation, hypnosis and NLP, plus my own life experiences. This isn’t a manual on spotting liars, narcissists or sociopaths—there are plenty of dubious experts online peddling that angle. Instead, through this free Substack, my goal is to arm you with the tools you need to think clearly and decide wisely, no matter how others around you may try to influence you. Or how your bodily addictions to unconscious fears and desires, shape your thinking, feeling and conscious experience.

Even with my background, this is as much a learning journey for me as it is for you. I, too, fall prey to hasty decisions, get baited into arguments, and sometimes find my thinking muddled. Writing and sharing these ideas helps me clarify my own mind just as much as it helps yours.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t therapy. Think of it as mind-coaching or training. If you need to work through past traumas or deep-seated issues, please seek a licensed psychotherapist—something I’m not.

You might find it ironic that I’m offering a self-help guide while critiquing the self-help industry. I’m not against self-help itself—that well-stocked section in any good bookstore is proof of its value. My target is with that focus are the self-styled “gurus” who demand fanatical loyalty, hawk unverified expensive courses, and promise mastery of life. My approach is simpler: I unpack useful tools and techniques, you test what works, discard the rest, and move on—no lifetime subscriptions, no constant upsells, no false claims of complete enlightenment. If you wish to buy me a coffee then great, I like it a lot, if not that’s cool also.

The internet would have you believe you need a side hustle, a personal brand, and a five-year plan just to justify your existence. You don’t. You’re already worthy of a good life. I ran the side hustle—I know what it costs, and in my case it cost me a marriage. I came out the other side, and I’m better for it, but the lesson wasn’t about hustle or productivity. It was about focus—specifically, what we choose to focus on and why. That question sits at the heart of meta cognition: examining not just what we think, but how and why we think it, how we speak to ourselves, and what that internal dialogue does to us psychologically, neurologically, and physically—and in turn, how it shapes everything around us.

My hope is that you’ll join me on this path, share your own insights in the comments, and maybe even start your own Substack to explore what you’ve learned from your own journey. Together, we can nurture truly meta-cognitive minds—free thinkers who recognise and resist undue influence, coercion and manipulation. If you’re ready to dive into Thinking about Thinking—and how it’s shaped—come along for the journey.

For me, the meta-cognitive training process breaks down like this:

Meditation. Then mindfulness—not silencing my thoughts so much as understanding them. Noticing whether I’m speaking to myself kindly or harshly, and becoming aware of the physical, chemical signatures those thoughts leave in the body: the tightening, the release, the residue of whatever emotion they’ve stirred up.

From there, I use that mindful awareness to examine the language I’m actually using—mapping it for what NLP calls meta-programs, unpicking the metaphors, metonyms and similes I reach for instinctively, and asking what those habitual figures of speech might reveal about my unconscious drives and desires.

Then I use NLP itself to remap and reprogram those patterns—and embed the new ones through hypnosis and manifestation work.

Some of that may sound like woo-woo. That’s fine. Test it, look into it, or don’t—it works for me. I’d love to tell you it’s all part of a crisp daily morning routine. It isn’t. Realistically I get ten to twenty minutes of some combination of the above on any given day; doing all of it properly takes hours, which most of us don’t have. Slow thinking is something I’m still working on myself.

The reason I’m laying this out now, upfront, is simple: I’m not selling anything, so there’s no reason to make you wait for the reveal. If any of this is useful to you today, why hold it back? As we go, I’ll unpack each of these steps in more depth, bring in some supporting theory—and some counter-theory—and draw on what behavioural economics, behavioural psychology and psychoanalytic thinking can teach us about how we make decisions. The goal throughout is the same: to help make our thinking and decision-making as genuinely autonomous as possible.