AS IT HAPPENS, a world-renowned institution of meditation, the Shambhala Mountain Center, sits just down the road from my Wyoming home, across the state line in Colorado. Founded in 1971 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Buddhist lama exiled from Tibet after the 1949 Chinese invasion, the SMC is an idyllic 600-acre Buddhist campus. Located at 8,000 feet in the Rockies, amid meadows and ponderosa forests, with a meditation hall, dorms, and a magnificent Buddhist shrine, the SMC is a place where Western idealism and Eastern spiritualism happily coexist. The center hosts 10,000 overnight visitors a year, most of whom are participating in personal quests, from three-day yoga seminars to monthlong meditation intensives.

I signed up for an introductory weekend retreat in shamatha, or sitting, meditation. The SMC program description promised a regimented schedule—multi-hour sittings each day, relieved only by meals, a bit of walking meditation, and discussion. Yoga, the only optional activity, started each morning at 6:45 a.m.; lights-out was at 10:30 p.m. I booked a bed in the bunk room and bought the recommended reading, Turning the Mind into an Ally, by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (son of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and spiritual leader of the Shambhala Mountain Center). I read it twice, underlined obsessively, and started training. Yes, training.

I admit it: I was scared. I don't think twice about climbing an unknown mountain in Uganda, tramping through waist-deep slime in the jungles of Burma, or riding horseback across Afghanistan, but the idea of driving less than an hour from my home to sit quietly in a room for three days freaked me out. I worried about keeping absolutely still, surrounded by a bunch of serious people, thinking serious thoughts when I shouldn't be thinking any thoughts at all.

So, as often as I could get up the nerve, I'd unroll a deep-green Tibetan rug on the hardwood floor of our living room and sit. I'd sit still on the wool rug amid its 12 lotus flowers and attempt to focus on my breathing, and I'd fail. One thought after another kept popping up, like those damn gophers in the carnival game—this story's due in two weeks, I'm thirsty, why aren't I outside climbing?—and I'd try to clobber every one with a fat mental bat.

I knew I was in trouble.