Meditation: A Return to Self - Alejandro Franco, Co-Founder - Kaffe Bueno

We live in a world that constantly propels us into the future – towards goals, milestones, and delayed dreams of happiness. We’re trained to chase the future as if peace is waiting behind a milestone. Often to realise there is yet another milestone. 

Even when we get what we thought we wanted, happiness or peace often remain elusive.

Why?

Because we search for it outside ourselves. We delay it. We make it conditional. 

The same happens with the past. Some of us live imprisoned by it - filtering every present moment through memories, regrets, or nostalgia, unable to fully experience what is.

This piece is a reflection on my journey with meditation - how it’s shaped my life as entrepreneur and human, my inner world, and my capacity to meet both with presence. It’s not a guide, or a pitch. It’s an invitation. To be here. To remember that everything you’re chasing may already live within you.

How it all began, for me… The Entrepreneur’s Paradox

I began meditating in 2018, two years into my entrepreneurial journey. 

The practice surfaced a quiet irony in the “founder mindset”. We dream of “freedom” - work on our terms, spacious time, early retirement. And we willingly walk through the opposite: uncertainty, long hours, postponed personal lives.

When I started Kaffe Bueno, I invested everything I had. Borrowed from family. Lived with my co-founders for five years. The first three months, I shared a bed with one of them. We had no salary for four years. I was struggling - and still, some part of me was happy. I didn’t appreciate it then; my expectations about the future were defining my present.

Today I share a bed only with my wife. I have weekends, a salary, and a more “normal” life. Yet I’m still far from the end goal I drew ten years ago – the one that was supposed to finally make me happy. Instead, I’ve found something sturdier: inner peace.

The workload and stakes are higher now, and the problems are more complex. I’ve seen it crush people going through the same. Paradoxically, I’m more grounded than ever. Not because I don’t feel stress, but because - no matter what comes my way - I can return to the peace and clarity meditation gives me.

A Reflection

When your happiness or peace is no longer dependent on external outcomes, your decisions are no longer governed by fear - fear of what might happen, what might be lost. Instead, you act from clarity. You lead from purpose. You trust that it’ll be okay, no matter what gets thrown your way.

Meditation, for me, is presence. It is the moment when consciousness meets existence. It is a path to return to inner truths, inner calm, no matter the turbulence of life and running a business. When I sit, close my eyes, and breathe, the fog and illusions clear and I can see. 

It’s the realisation that the only time that truly exists is now. The future hasn’t arrived, and it never will. The past has already passed. Only the present exists. You may see the present as a gift you can always give yourself - again and again.

Meditation made me realise and appreciate the beauty of the now and the power of within.

As long as you keep looking for peace outside yourself, you will remain at the mercy of life’s unpredictability.

You might argue some people are simply more resilient. And I’d respond: yes - and they often meditate. They widen perspective and loosen the grip of the small, fearful “I.”

The Illusion of Identity

Meditation gradually dissolves the illusion and prison of a fixed identity. You begin to realise:

• You are not your thoughts.

• You are not your emotions.

• You are not who others think you are.

• You are not who you think you’re supposed to be.

• You are not the self your past imagined, nor the future self you fantasize about.

Identity is not static. It is fluid, in constant movement, as all else in the universe. Just like everything in nature, you evolve. You are only who you are now. And that is enough. 

You are already whole.

When you confine yourself to a rigid identity, you limit your freedom. Your actions become derivative of questions not from and about yourself, but rather about what would the predefined concept of who you are would do in this unknown context. You limit how you meet the unknown.

You condition your actions to match a version of yourself that may no longer exist (or maybe never did).

Meditation lifts that veil. It raises your consciousness. And with it, returns your freedom. Not the freedom you chase, but the one that’s always been yours.

A twominute reset

Wherever you are:

• Notice your natural breath. Don’t control it. Watch it enter the nostrils and travel.

• Straighten your spine. Breathe slowly and deeply into your belly. Feel ribs and belly expand.

• Exhale and soften: forehead, eyes, jaw, shoulders.

• Catch the tiny moment where inhale becomes exhale - life’s quiet pivot. Touch it five times.

Congrats. You just meditated. 

Yes, it’s that simple. No retreats, no gurus, no apps. Just breath and awareness.

Tomorrow, do it 10 times. 15 times the day after. And so on. 

For seasoned practitioners

• Decision breath: Before a highstakes choice, take ten slow breaths while asking, What’s true right now? Act from the answer that leaves your body softer, not tighter.

• Conflict as practice: In hard conversations, anchor attention in your belly or feet. Feel both your body and the other person’s words. Respond from contact, not reactivity.

• Focus weaves reality: During deep work, keep attention on one anchor (breath, sensation, sound). When thoughts pull you, return gently. The return is the rep.

With time, the practice can and will take you out of your body. But that’s a topic for another time.

Demystifying the breath

“If it’s just breathing, what’s the fuss?” Fair. 

The breath is the portal, not the point. What grows is awareness - and awareness spills into everything. Founders (and anyone else) who meditate don’t stop having problems; they stop letting problems decide their state of mind. Attention becomes selfauthored instead of outsourced to the noise.

• The world tells us to constantly do. Meditation trains us to be - so our doing is cleaner and intentional.

• Energy follows focus. Move your attention with intention and your energy follows.

• When thoughts crowd, notice the moment one thought becomes another. In that gap, wholeness peeks through the emptiness.

The Autopilot and the Return

Most of our lives are lived on autopilot. We’re constantly doing, reacting, consuming. Meditation breaks that loop.

Over time, it brings clarity. It quiets the noise so you can hear your own voice, your genuine thoughts, your origins, your values. Not the one shaped by culture, stress, or social media—but the deeper voice beneath it.

Sometimes you’ll find peace. Sometimes just stillness. Sometimes you’ll touch bliss or deep quiet even in chaos. Sometimes nothing at all. But that “nothing” is everything.

You begin to realise: no external factor can manufacture peace for you. It’s already within you.

Try it. Five breaths. Then ten. Thank yourself later.

Continuity (or why people quit)

A lot of people think meditation requires you to be in a zen environment. Since we live in a chaotic world, it’s easy to fall into the self-built trap that makes you believe you need to find a zen garden, retreat or guru 10,000 km away from your home to find peace and quiet. So then you can meditate…

In reality, it’s the opposite. Meditation is connecting with your inner zen in the midst of chaos. For most people, closing their eyes and facing their restless selves feels like torture. If you relate to this, great. It means you’re ready to face the inner chaos to find order. 

Just observe, don’t react. Breathe.

Meditation is like training a muscle. Before it becomes a routine, it feels foreign. Once integrated, it’s hard to imagine life without it. 

Many quit because expectations get in the way: they expected fireworks and got silence.

The paradox

Meditation invites you to let go of expectations. If disappointment arises, notice it. Name the one who’s disappointed - often the ego - and come back to your breath.

What stands in the way becomes the way. If your expectations are the compass for “success,” you’ve already left the present.

Remember when you were a child and everything was new? You didn’t expect things to give you anything - you simply experienced them. That hasn’t changed – only the lens you’re using. That presence, that child still lives within you. Let it guide your practice. Approach practice (meditation and all else) with a beginner’s mind. Feel more, think less.

Approach meditation with curiosity, not judgment. 

Play with your attention. Notice how it shifts your energy.

Pause. Breathe. Begin again.

One last practice

Try a playful body scan:

• Place attention at the crown of your head. Don’t describe it; just feel.

• Move to the center of your forehead. Breathe in; on the exhale, let go of any tension.

• Shift through eyebrows, cheeks, jaw, neck, shoulders - down through the body.

• With each inhale, imagine oxygen arriving exactly where attention rests. With each exhale, picture softening and release.

You can’t do it wrong. 

There’s only noticing, returning, and, eventually, remembering who you are beneath the noise.

A simple closing

I’m a founder who used to postpone peace until after the next milestone. Meditation gave it back to me now. If anything here serves you - whether you’re a founder, CEO, an investor, or just a human with a breath - then this practice has already started its quiet work.

If you take anything from this, let it be these;

• Reality is only as narrow as our awareness. How narrow or how wide are you willing to make yours?

• Energy follows focus. Ask yourself, where is yours now?
  

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Alejandro is one of the speakers for Pause for Purpose on World Meditation Day. Get Tickets for Pause for Purpose here.