A student approached the master in his zendo, bowed and reverently asked, “Master, what is Zen?”

The master replied, “Zen is eating when you eat, working when you work, and resting when you rest.”

The student was astonished. “But master, that is so simple!”

“Yes,” said the master. “But so few people seem to be able to do it.

In learning to meditate, albeit from some of the best teachers I could find, I came to appreciate that once I understood the basics, I had to teach myself how to do it. I had to take what I had learned, in terms of the formal techniques, and then make it real from the inside. Only then could I begin to appreciate what meditation could and could not accomplish.

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.

Reflecting on this session, I am reminded once again of the concept of the mind object, both Beth’s and my own. By focusing too much on the particulars of Beth’s food issues and trying too hard to make a change in her behavior, I was getting drawn back in to her closed world instead of helping her break out of it. I had lost track of Michael Vincent Miller’s essential point and was therefore, not surprisingly, sacrificing innocence for experience.

She needed understanding, verbal and conceptual framing, before she could use meditation in any profitable way. “Now when I sit I mostly have a transparent feeling; I feel sort of porous,” she says. “Is this wrong?