SURE ENOUGH, the first evening at camp, sitting with 37 other students on blue cushions arranged across heated wood floors, I found myself thinking as hard as I could about not thinking. Our instructor, Greg Smith, a slight 53-year-old with a gray beard who's been teaching meditation for nearly 25 years, had told us in a deep metronomic voice to "put your eyes in the middle distance and just focus on your breath. That's meditation. That's actually all there is to it." Closing your eyes all the way was strongly discouraged; you might fall asleep.

When I'd sneak a look around, it appeared everybody else already knew how to do this. The real estate agent to my left, the wildlife biologist to my right, the insurance consolidator behind me, the pharmaceutical salesman in front of me—they all looked tuned in. It was true: I was the worst meditator on the planet.

Wait, don't forget the breath.

I concentrated with all I had and managed to hold on to the sensation of breathing for exactly three full breaths. Then I had to shrug my shoulders because of a sharp ache in my back, and then I had to shift my legs, and I thought about how sitting cross-legged isn't all that comfortable, and then I remembered how the Chinese can squat for hours, and I thought about all the monks I've met in Tibet and how, through years of practice and discipline, they can sit in the lotus position on cold stones for hours, which made me start thinking about what a weenie I was, which made me absolutely certain that I couldn't sit still for one more minute . . .

When the gong finally sounded, I tried to stand up slowly and casually, as if I were waking from some perfect dream—when what I really wanted was to leap to my feet, howl obscenities, dash outside, and roll in the snow like a dog.

During the question-and-answer session that followed, I was secretly relieved to hear that others were struggling, too. When I told the group that my willful desire not to have thoughts was in itself a thought that was getting in the way of my not thinking, people chuckled in acknowledgment—or maybe pity. Smith eyed me with concern and said emphatically, "Let that go. Accept that you are going to have thoughts, just don't let them drag you around."

That night, lying in my sleeping bag in the dorm, I reread (by headlamp) portions of Turning the Mind into an Ally. "A bewildered mind is like a wild horse," Mipham writes in a chapter called "Bewilderment and Suffering." The wild horse needs to be tamed, but through gentle coaxing, not brute force. In a chapter called "How to Gather a Scattered Mind," he explains, "Holding the mind too tightly can be harmful. When our control is too tight, the mind will bolt at the earliest opportunity."

He was affirming what I already knew: I was trying too hard.

I switched off my headlamp, dressed, and slipped out of the dorm. I was breaking curfew, but I needed some exercise. The sky was black above the aspens, the snow like an ocean. Walking alone through the forest, I thought back to when I learned to ride a horse.

I worked on a ranch as a boy and was a terrible horseman. I was often reprimanded for holding the reins too tight, which would make my horse whinny and struggle and jerk its head. "Not too tight, not too loose," a cowboy once told me from the saddle, spitting brown tobacco juice and wiping his face with the back of his hand. Back at the dorm, when I picked up Mipham's book again, I noticed that "Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose" is the title of chapter ten.