While we are all aware of these kinds of behaviors because we see them in others, most of us do not realize that we distort our own view of the world, largely because we think we see more than we actually do.

We’ve seen a lot, and we continue to watch, to notice, to see more. What we call a ‘thinking session’ is not a methodology because it is never finished. If it is anything, it is a kind of life form. Nature is too complex for us to penetrate fully or entirely accurately. So we cannot complete it. We can only keep our eyes open.

I challenged myself over the course of a single year to write down, as accurately as I could recall, the details of at least one session every week (or every other week) when something interesting caught my eye, when I had the sense that the Buddhist element was in play. Sometimes this influence was overt: people might ask me about meditation technique, or I might spontaneously bring something I had learned from Buddhism into the conversation. And sometimes it was only a feeling: I might find myself reaching beyond traditional analysis to help someone grasp an alternative perspective on whatever issue was troubling them.

This technique isn’t guaranteed (no such techniques are), but you can see how the intention here is to allow your alternate forms of knowing—emotional, spiritual, social, intuitive—to have some room to express themselves to you, and thereby complement the evaluative, cognitive knowing, which, if you’re like most of us, is the dominant form of thinking and choosing you rely on.

As Lucy’s and Pierre’s stories illustrate, the tools at your disposal group into three kinds: experimenting with different possibilities, making new and different connections, and stepping back to make sense of what you are learning along the way.