I used to feel it when I was a kid in the ocean. My dad would take me out and we’d just be there, in the waves. There was no self; there was no sense of time. There was just this wave–now this wave–now this wave. I was alert to each of them, because if I didn’t calibrate myself appropriately, I would be smashed into the sand. When the monster waves came, I did one of two things: I rode them in to shore, or I ducked under them, to the calm below, and felt only the pleasure of the enormous tremor rolling over me. I loved the ocean for this exact reason, and I looked forward to our annual camping trip at the beach all year long. It was magic. Then, when I was about twelve years old, I went to the ocean, and I couldn’t get the feeling back. It was gone. I was a huge blot of a self in those waves. I felt so distressed about this. I went back to shore and sat on the sand and read my Seventeen magazine. Perhaps, I thought, if my thighs were thinner or I had certain clothes, the feeling would come back. All the women on the pages looked to be in a state of rapture, after all. Luckily, this particular type of thinking was a trap that I quickly escaped, but many women–many people–aren’t that lucky. I thought that perhaps if I could have sex with someone, I would experience that feeling of oneness again. This was the reason I was so hell-bent on having sex when I was so young. It was not because I felt lustful–I didn’t–it was merely because I thought that somehow the application of parts together would result in an alchemy of union. As you might imagine, I was profoundly disappointed when I got my wish. “Is that it?!” I kept thinking. “That’s no different than me touching my own elbow!”

When I discovered marijuana, I really thought I had found it. I was sixteen years old and we were on top of a parking deck at night, smoking, when the cops came to arrest us. I felt blissful, absorbed, happy. Everything was beautiful. I was convinced that, finally, the universe loved me. After talking to me, the cops let me go. “She’s a good girl,” they told my mother. My friend took the rap and paid the price, and I was left feeling invincible.

I went on for quite a while like this. The marijuana and other substances worked pretty well, much of the time. They gave me the illusion that I had it, again. And when they didn’t work, I was left feeling like “a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” I didn’t give up hope, though. I just made plans for the future, thinking that perhaps this job or that job, this person, that part of the country, some grand arrangement of circumstances, would allow everything to click back into place.

Then one day, when I was twenty-seven, the bottom dropped out. The pot stopped working. The man I adored left. My plans for the future revealed themselves to be laughable delusions. It was winter. It was profoundly dark and cold, inside and out. I could think of only two options: commit suicide, or try to meditate. I had a vague idea, based on reading I’d done when I was a teenager, that the latter option might be helpful. So I began to try.

And now, five months later, I wish I could forget this whole story that I have written here. My achievements, my failures, my loves and my losses, my hopes and fears–all of these, I now see, are what hold me back from union. Everything I identify as “me” is just the compulsive production of this unruly mind. My mind spins on these things and therefore I am separate. I don’t want to see the river, I want to be the river. I don’t want to lay on the rock, I want to lay in the rock.

I try to concentrate on the present moment, and my mind, like a shoddy magician trying to pay the bills, keeps pulling out bad trick after bad trick, saying, “Look over here–you like this!” “Oh, check this out! This is gonna grab you!” And usually, it does. I would like to strangle this magician. I would like to shoot her in the face. But I can’t. That would indeed be suicide. I can only, with gentleness, train my attention away from her. And some now, I’ll have it. I’ll be able to enter the ocean and move with the waves without a single thought.