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Wild! Take me to your buddha-breast, earth mother!

Like a little boy perving on Hustler, I crawled under my covers that night, clicked on a book-light and poured through The Wisdom of No Escape. “If you are alive, if you have heart, if you can love, if you can be compassionate . . . then you won’t have any resentment or resistance,” Pema purred. “Loving-kindness is the sense of satisfaction with who we are and what we have . . . fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.”

Surfeited, I laid the book aside and trembled with satisfaction. Were a cigarette handy I would have blown smoke rings and played with my chest hairs. But the following morning, bitterly ashamed, I vowed never to touch her tome again. It was schmaltz, I told myself. A onetime thing. I was perfectly happy with the husky-voiced, thick-ankled practice I’d taken vows to honor. I returned the book to the library—only to furtively yank it from the shelf again that evening.

And so I began an affair with her lush, seething dharma, cheating on my frigid-but-loyal Zen practice. On the cushion, supposedly steadfast in my zazen meditation, I was really thinking of paramour Pema’s vivacious birdsong prose and rich, voluptuous metaphors. “Go ahead,” I thought to the students, my jikijitsu practice going to seed, “move around all you want. Have a good cry while you’re at it!” Pema hit my G-spot: gentleness.

And yet it was the great soft one herself who ultimately sold me on the rigors of Zen life. Toward the end of her slim volume of talks she extols the virtues of inconvenience. “Opting for coziness, having that as your prime reason for existing, becomes a continual obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land.”

“Stick with one boat,” one practice, she suggests, and let it “put you through your changes.” If you continue to “shop around” you learn a lot about different religions, but very little about your true self.

Inspired, I redoubled my efforts as jikijitsu, refusing to don my skullcap during walking meditation one evening as moonlit frost crunched under our sandals. By the time the last winter retreat rolled around I’d contracted the dreaded flu-cold and achieved great enervation instead of great enlightenment. This, combined with my militant new desire to do everything by the book, set off a chain reaction. It led to the low point in a quota-busting winter of lows, when forty of my peers witnessed—to hearken back to my mentor’s warning—my “personal shit.”

During the evening bathroom break of the final retreat, I didn’t doff my robes and try to navigate the sea of students and their teeming bladders. Instead, I snuck down into a dank and grungy storage space behind our solar-panel shed. I made for a dusty corner and hiked up my robes to relieve myself.

After a few preliminary squirts I had an ominous, involuntary sphincter contraction, and instantly my priorities changed. I needed to get to a stall. There was no denying this call of nature; no single-pointed Zen concentration would make it go away. This point was driven home with the first round of wet gas.

“Oh, you gotta be kidding me,” I cried inside. “You gotta be friggin’ kidding me.”

I looked at my watch. The ten minute mark! Everyone was in the zendo right now, waiting for me to start the sit. Via a bowlegged crab-walk—an embarrassing proposition to begin with but made all the worse by my heavy, multilayered big-deal/Mr. Important robes—I awkwardly exited the storage shed into a flood of harsh winter light.

I contracted and released the appropriate muscles. But there seemed to be no denying it. I’d shit myself. A man’s life is made up of choices like this: Right, the zendo. Left, the bathroom. I never made it to the bathroom.

I can handle this, I told myself, slipping my boots off on the zendo porch. The shoji—the zendo’s kindly mother figure—opened the door