Stepping Into the Unknown: What I Found in the Nothing

Lately, I start my meditation with nothing. Not a mantra. Not a visualisation. Not a breath count. Just the darkness behind my closed eyes, and whatever lives in the space between.

At first, it was uncomfortable. The darkness felt heavy. My mind wanted something to hold onto, a word, an image, a plan for after. Thoughts kept arriving like guests I had not invited, and every one of them wanted my full attention. But I kept practising something simple: I let them come, and then I came back to nothing. Again. And again.

Something shifted. On some days, the nothing stopped feeling like something to endure. It started feeling like somewhere to arrive. On other days, I sit down and the gap never comes. The thoughts are louder than the silence, and I spend the entire meditation chasing my own mind in circles. I have not mastered this. I am not sure it is something you master. But I keep showing up. And I have realised that the discomfort was never about the darkness itself. It was about the loss of the self I had built. The stories, the identity, the one who always needs to know what comes next. In the nothing, she has nowhere to stand. And that is terrifying. Until it is not.

I started carrying this into my day. I ask myself, sometimes in the middle of a conversation, sometimes standing in line, sometimes lying awake at night: what is my next thought? And in the pause before it arrives, there is a gap. A tiny clearing. Not the thinker. Not the doer. Not the person with the name and the plans. Just the one who witnesses. Just awareness.

Some days, that gap opens wide and I rest in it like it has always been there. Other days, I barely find it. The thoughts are too fast, the mind too busy, and I finish the day realising I never once paused to ask the question. But each day is an invitation to practise. And stepping into the unknown does not require a plane ticket or a life-changing decision. It can start with closing your eyes and being willing to meet what is there.

Your brain was not built for nothing.

I think the reason most of us avoid nothing is because the brain genuinely does not know what to do with it.

The amygdala, the part of the brain that detects threats, cannot tell the difference between a tiger in the bushes and the absence of all input. Sitting with your eyes closed in a dark room with no plan, no task, no direction? To that ancient alarm system, it registers the same way danger does. It fires. The body tenses. And before you have a chance to think, you are already reaching for something familiar to fill the gap.

This is why we stay in jobs that have stopped feeding us. Why we reach for our phones the moment we feel bored. Why we fill silence with noise and stillness with plans. The brain is wired to prefer a known pain over an unknown possibility. Millions of years of evolution spent building a system that says: if you cannot predict what is coming, assume the worst.

And yet. Research shows that mindfulness practice, even just eight weeks of it, physically changes this wiring. It thickens the insula, the part of the brain that lets you observe an experience without automatically reacting to it. The alarm still sounds. You just learn to hear it without obeying it.

That is what returning to nothing does, I think. A thought arrives. Fear, restlessness, a story about tomorrow. And instead of following it, I ask: what is my next thought? I wait. And in the waiting, I become the witness. The alarm fades. And what remains is not silence. It is clarity.

But there is something else I have noticed about fear. It does not only show up to stop you. Sometimes it shows up to show you where to go. I think about what Fritz Perls once said, that fear is excitement without the breath. And when I sit with that, I feel it in my body. The racing heart before a big decision, the tightness in my chest before I say something that matters. Fear and excitement feel almost identical. Same heartbeat, same adrenaline, same rush. The only difference is whether you breathe with it or brace against it. Pressfield called it the compass. The more scared we are of something, the more certain we can be that it matters to us. Looking back on my life I can see that. The things that frighten me most have almost always turned out to be the edges where the biggest shifts were waiting. Fear can be an alarm. It can also be a guide.

Becoming no one, so you can become anyone.

Joe Dispenza has a phrase that stayed with me long after I first read it. He talks about becoming "no body, no one, no thing, no where, in no time." The first time I encountered it, I thought it sounded like disappearing. Now, sitting in the darkness every morning, I think it might be the truest thing anyone has said about what I am practising.

Because that is what it feels like. Our identity, the person we walk around as all day, is mostly a collection of habits, memories, and emotional loops that have been running on repeat for years. The same thoughts. The same reactions. The same choices. Nerve cells that fire together wire together. We wonder why life feels like it is on a loop, and then we think the same thought we thought yesterday about why it feels like a loop.

When I sit in nothing, when I let the thoughts come and return to the darkness, the version of me that was built by my past has nothing to hold onto. She loosens. And what is left is not less. It is more. It is the space that was always there, underneath the noise.

Dispenza calls it the quantum field. The space of pure potential that exists before we collapse it into the known. I do not know if I would use those words. But I know the feeling.

I once wrote about something close to this, about the flow of life and the ego's loop, about how the thinker is just another thought and the stream keeps moving whether we name the observer or not. But this practice of nothingness has taken me somewhere that flow did not. Flow taught me to stop gripping. Nothing is teaching me to stop being anyone at all. And when I ask myself throughout the day, what is my next thought, I am practising that dissolution with my eyes open. Creating a gap. Losing the constructed self, even for a second. And every time I find that gap, I feel closer to something I can only call essence.

The mystics would not be surprised.

What the mystics practised, neuroscience is proving.

In Sufism, they call it fana. The annihilation of the ego-self. The separate self dissolves into divine unity, and on the other side, the Sufis say, you do not disappear. You become more fully present than you have ever been. They call this state baqa. You lose the small self to find the larger one.

Meister Eckhart, a 14th-century Christian mystic, arrived at the same place through a completely different door. He spoke about Gelassenheit, a German word meaning "letting-go-ness." His teaching was that union with the divine requires a radical emptying. A willingness to release everything, including your attachment to who you think you are. Scholars have noted that Eckhart's letting-go-ness sits remarkably close to the Zen concept of "no-mind" and the Taoist principle of wu wei, effortless action.

And then there is Lao Tzu, writing over two thousand years ago: "If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up."

I used to read teachings like these as philosophy. Beautiful ideas to nod along with over tea. But sitting in the darkness each morning, returning to nothing, finding the witness in the gap between thoughts, I understand them differently now. They were not speaking in metaphors. They were describing an experience.

And modern neuroscience is beginning to map that experience from the other side. Neuroplasticity research shows that the brain forms new neural connections when we step outside what is familiar. It does not grow by repeating what it already knows. It grows by encountering what it does not. A 2026 study described a type of neuroplasticity that rewires the brain after a single experience. One meaningful encounter with the unknown can reshape how the brain processes information going forward. One experience. That is all it takes.

Stepping into the unknown, it turns out, is not just a spiritual practice. It is how the brain builds the architecture for who we are becoming.

The mystics emptied themselves and found God. The neuroscientists scanned the brain and found growth. I close my eyes each morning and return to nothing. And in the nothing, something keeps meeting me there.

Every meaningful chapter began with stepping into the unknown.

I think about this in my own life. The people who changed me. The places that felt like home before I even understood why. The conversations that stayed with me long after they ended. The decisions that made no sense at the time and turned out to be the most important ones I ever made. None of them could have been planned. None of them showed up because I had a map. They appeared because I was willing to walk without one.

Looking back, the moments I am most grateful for all share the same quality: I did not know what was coming. I was scared. And I went anyway.

The unknown asks something different from us than the known does. The known asks us to repeat. The unknown asks us to trust. And trust, real trust, does not mean knowing what will happen. It means being willing to take a step before you can see the whole path.

Lao Tzu wrote: "She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren't trustworthy. This is true trust." I think life works the same way. We can trust the moments that feel clear. We can also trust the ones that feel uncertain. That is true trust.

Fear will show up at that edge. It always does. It will tighten your chest, speed up your thoughts, and try to convince you that the known is safer than whatever lives beyond it. I have stopped arguing with it. I let it speak. I thank it for trying to protect me. And then I take it with me. Fear can come along. It just does not get to sit behind the steering wheel anymore.

The emptiness inside the cup.

Lao Tzu also wrote something else that I keep coming back to. We shape clay into a pot, he said, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

I think about that every morning when I close my eyes. On the good days and on the difficult ones. I am not adding anything. I am not learning a new technique or achieving a new state. I am just getting empty enough for something to come through. And on the days when emptiness finds me, what comes through is not nothing. It is everything that was waiting for me to stop filling the space with noise. On the days when it does not, I sit anyway. That is the practice.

Maybe that is what it means to lose yourself in nothing. You are not disappearing. You are making room. For something you could not have imagined. For someone you have not yet become. For a life that only reveals itself to those willing to keep stepping into the unknown, again and again, trusting that the path is there even when you cannot see it.

Every step is on the path. Even the ones you cannot see.

What is the unknown asking of you right now? I would love to hear.

If you are ready to explore what it means to step beyond the familiar, to quiet the noise and listen to what is waiting in the stillness, Breathe and Bloom was created for exactly this.

Further reading:

• Lao Tzu — Tao Te Ching

• Dr. Joe Dispenza — Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

• Meister Eckhart — Selected Writings (translated by Oliver Davies)

• Rumi — collected poetry (translations by Coleman Barks)