THE PRACTICE OF BECOMING FINDABLE is the art of not chasing what you want but creating conditions that allow what you want to find you.

Imagine making yourself visible to opportunity. Visualize positioning yourself in luck’s path or sending up signal flares into the dark.

You can’t control what comes, but you can influence what sees you, recognizes you, and knows where to look.

Maybe the work isn’t pursuit but preparation.

Maybe you should ripen rather than hunt. What if becoming ready is how you become found? This applies to enlightenment too.

Let’s talk about manifestation and goal-setting and all the hustle-culture clichés. Much of it is based on the exhausting premise that you have to chase down all the good things. With fire in your eyes and heroism in your heart, you force reality to bend to your will through sheer determination and positive thinking.

The spiritual industrial complex does the same thing with awakening. It sells you the idea that enlightenment is a prize you achieve through the accumulation of meditation hours, retreats, purifications, the reading of holy texts, and maybe even some mortifications thrown in. too. If you just push hard enough, you’ll break through to the other side.

But there’s another way.

Think about how a flower attracts a pollinator. It doesn’t chase the bee. It doesn’t run around the garden trying to convince insects to visit. Its brilliant strategy: to become so vibrantly, undeniably itself—so fragrant, so colorful, so rich with nectar—that the pollinators can’t help but find it.

The flower’s work isn’t pursuit, but becoming more flower.

What if the playful work of flirting with enlightenment has similarities?

Imagine this possibility: Awakening isn’t a possession you hunt down and capture, but an act of grace that finds you when you make yourself findable to it?

This inverts the usual spiritual narrative. Instead of “How do I achieve enlightenment?” the question becomes “How do I become the kind of person enlightenment recognizes? How do I position myself in awakening’s path? How do I send up signal flares that reality’s deeper nature can see?”





Here’s how it works:

First, you get clear about your signal. What are you actually broadcasting into the world? Not what you hope you’re broadcasting, but what you’re actually emanating through your presence, your choices, your attention, and your energy?

Maybe you say you want awakening but you’re still performing the small self’s drama: chasing status, accumulating grievances, defending your righteousness, clinging to your wounds as identity.

In that case, you’re unfindable. You’re camouflaged as your false self. Enlightenment can’t see you because you’re dressed up as exactly what enlightenment avoids.

But you begin to emit a different frequency if you soften those defenses, question those certainties, loosen your grip on being right, and get curious about your own resistance. You become more visible to what’s seeking you.

Mystics call this “spiritual ripening.” You can’t force it, but you can participate in it. You can’t make the fruit ripen faster by yanking on it, but you can make sure it’s getting sun and water.

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Second, you position yourself in the path of awakening. This isn’t about “manifesting” from your meditation cushion. It’s about going where enlightenment is likely to pass through.

You want to wake up? Study the people who’ve done it, not as celebrities to worship but as field guides to the territory. Practice some form of contemplation, not obsessively but consistently. Put yourself in situations that crack your habitual consciousness—like nature, art, service, deep conversation, wild dancing and singing.

You’re not chasing enlightenment. You’re becoming the kind of person who lives in enlightenment-rich environments. You’re positioning yourself in the ecosystem where awakening circulates.

The musician doesn’t get discovered sitting alone in their apartment. They get discovered playing every open mic, every jam session, every dive bar gig they can find. Similarly, awakening doesn’t usually find you while you’re scrolling Instagram and complaining about your ex. It finds you when you’re positioned where lucidity and illumination like to hang out.

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Third, you prepare yourself to recognize awakening when it arrives. This is the part many seekers neglect.

Enlightenment often comes disguised. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday while you’re washing dishes. It appears in the pauses between thoughts and the spaces between breaths. Maybe it swoops down on you when you momentarily forget to maintain your story about who you are.

Let’s hope you’re not rigid in your vision of what enlightenment looks like, expecting white light and cosmic consciousness and permanent bliss. If you are, you may miss it when it shows up as simple, clear, ordinary presence.

The Buddha’s enlightenment happened under a tree, but countless people have sat under trees and nothing happened. Why? Because they weren’t prepared to recognize what they were seeking when it arrived looking like just sitting under a tree.

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Fourth, you remove the obstacles that make you unfindable to awakening. Is there anything blocking your signal?

Maybe it’s spiritual ambition. You’re so obsessed with achieving enlightenment that you can’t see you’re already in it. Maybe it’s perfectionism.

You’re waiting to be pure enough, good enough, transcendent enough. Maybe it’s bitterness. You’re so armored against disappointment that grace can’t reach you. Maybe it’s distraction. You’re so scattered across a thousand desires and fears that the simple truth of what you are can’t get through.

The Zen tradition has a term for this: “stink of enlightenment.” It’s when your pursuit of awakening becomes another form of ego building. You’re not trying to wake up; you’re trying to become the kind of person who’s awake, which is completely different and completely toxic.

Becoming findable to enlightenment might require subtracting more than adding. It may mean clearing the static of spiritual ambition and saying no to the practices that are actually just ego in robes so you can say yes to the simple presence that was there all along.

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Fifth, you trust the timing that isn’t yours to control. This is the hardest part.

The seed germinates when conditions are right.

The breakthrough comes when it comes. You can’t force it faster by wanting it harder or meditating longer or being more disciplined.

You can’t control the timeline. Your job is to keep doing your work—not the grasping work of achievement, but the patient work of preparation.

Keep practicing and questioning and softening. Even when nothing seems to be happening.

Here’s a secret: Becoming findable to awakening is a practice that works on a time scale you can’t see. You’re creating conditions whose effects might not be visible for years. You’re ripening in ways that aren’t measurable or visible or impressive to others.

The person who has a sudden awakening at 50 years old didn’t just get randomly zapped by grace. They were becoming findable for decades, though questioning, practicing, failing, surrendering, and preparing. Then one day, the conditions aligned. A touch of enlightenment descended upon them because they had positioned themselves where awakening could find them.

This is the opposite of the spiritual hustle narrative that says you have to grind yourself into transcendence through sheer force of will. The practice of becoming findable says: What if you stop chasing enlightenment and start ripening toward it? What if you stop hunting awakening and start blooming in ways that awakening recognizes?

What if you stop trying to force the doors of perception open and started standing in doorways?

The Taoist concept of wu wei—effortless action, non-forcing—is pointing at this. You don’t achieve enlightenment. You allow it. You don’t capture awakening. You become capturable by it.

You plant the garden, but you don’t make the seeds grow. You practice meditation, but you don’t force awakening into existence. You show up, you prepare, you position, you signal—and then you allow what wants to find you to arrive.

Think of it this way: Enlightenment is already looking for you. It’s been looking for you your whole life. The universe wants to wake up to itself through you. That’s not poetry. It’s the actual mechanism of how consciousness works.

But enlightenment can only find you if you’re findable. You’re camouflaged if you’re hiding behind your personas, your spiritual ambitions, your idea of who you should be, and your story about your unworthiness. You’re unfindable.

But if you start showing up as you actually are—confused, earnest, broken, seeking, willing—you become visible. You emit a signal that awakening recognizes: “Here is someone who’s ready. Here is someone who’s positioned themselves in my path. Here is someone who’s prepared to recognize me when I arrive.”

And here’s a final secret, which makes all of this both simpler and more profound: The practice of becoming findable to enlightenment isn’t separate from enlightenment itself. The preparation and positioning and ripening comprise the awakening.

You’re becoming findable because that’s what awakening looks like in process. The seeking and the finding are not two different things.

Every moment you soften your defenses, you’re awake. Every moment you question your certainties, you’re awake. Every moment you choose presence over distraction, you’re awake.

Enlightenment isn’t a destination you arrive at after sufficient preparation. Enlightenment is what’s happening when you prepare yourself to be found.

It’s what’s happening when you position yourself in its path—when you clear the obstacles and trust the timing and keep showing up as yourself.