For me, meditation had come to mean being with my own mind no matter what state it was in. In this way, it was closer to psychotherapy than I had initially thought.

But the mindset of the West threatens to reduce our ability to truly benefit from this integration. We want a quick fix with demonstrable results. We want to see changes in our

brains. We want the experts to show us what to do and even, if we are lucky, to do it for us. In its absorption by the wellness movement, meditation threatens to become more like cosmetic dermatology than the ongoing self-examination that is its own kind of higher education.

In the esoteric Buddhist literature, female sexuality is said to embody one’s highest spiritual intelligence. In its fullest form, it represents being rather than doing. Violette’s desire to please and her perfectionism worked against her being.

As a therapist, I have been taught to pay close attention to the intimate details of people’s lives in order to help them decipher the mystery of who and what they have become. But as a meditator, I have learned that experience isn’t everything. It can just as easily obscure one’s truth as reveal it. This is the paradox I have faced in bringing these two worlds together. Traditional therapy unpacks in order to make sense. Meditation asks us to stop making sense so that we can find where happiness truly abides. Therapy examines the accumulated self, the one that is shaped by all the defenses we have used to get through life. Meditation asks us to divest ourselves of those very defenses so that we can recapture the original and intrinsic vitality we were born with.

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?