The Light That Stays

2. The Boy Who Got Lost (and a Different Way Out)

There’s a scientist named Andrew Huberman. Today he’s a professor at Stanford and millions of people listen to him explain how the brain works. But when he was a teenager, he was lost.

His parents got divorced when he was around thirteen, and after that his home felt unsteady and lonely. He stopped caring about school. He skipped classes so often that, in tenth grade, he ended up sent away to a place for kids who were getting into serious trouble. He’d fallen in with a crowd that drank, used drugs, and got into fights. From the outside, he looked like a kid throwing his future away.

Here’s the part worth slowing down for. What turned him around was not luck, and it was not someone yelling at him to shape up.

It was talking to someone — a therapist, week after week, starting at that very program. It was writing things down, putting his messy thoughts onto paper until they got clearer. It was finding a few good people, mentors, who treated him like he was worth something. And somewhere along the way at that program, somebody handed him a book — a famous mindfulness book called Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He’s said it sparked an interest in meditation he’s still carrying decades later. (You can read that same book yourself, by the way; it’s still in print, and it’s still good.)

Slowly, he came back to himself. He found a passion — first skateboarding, then, of all things, the brain — and he chased it all the way to becoming one of the most listened-to scientists alive.

I’m telling you his real story, not a polished fairy tale, for two reasons.

First: being lost is not the end. A kid who got removed from school became a Stanford professor. Where you are right now is not where you have to stay.

Second — and pay attention to this one: the thing that helped him most was letting other people help him. Talking. Being honest with a grown-up whose job was to listen. If you’re carrying something heavy, the practices in this book can make you calmer — but they are not a substitute for telling a person you trust. The strongest, bravest people are the ones who ask for help. Huberman is proof.

He still sits, every day, for between five and eleven minutes. Think about that: the most listened-to scientist alive about brains and bodies has chosen, as his daily meditation, the kind of short, simple session anyone could do before breakfast. He sometimes adds an afternoon practice he calls non-sleep deep rest — different name, same family as what you’re about to learn. The lost kid grew up to study, and to live by, the very quiet we’re going to practice together. (For anyone curious for more, he’s had a long meditation conversation with Sam Harris, one of the best-known meditation teachers alive.)

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