My daughter said this to me when she was five. I was sitting on the floor with my eyes closed, doing what I called my morning practice. She watched me the way children watch things, with innocence rather than judgment. Then she said it.
I don’t remember what I said back. What I remember is that she was right, and I knew she was right, and I did not want to look at what that meant.
By then I had been meditating for about twenty years. I sat every morning. I had worked with self-inquiry until it felt like second nature. I could have given you a solid account of what awareness is and why identification with thought is the root of suffering. I had the experience to back it up. I was not faking anything.
And I was somewhere else. Not just during meditation. All the time.
My wife named it before I could. She said I seemed absent, like I was in the room but not in the room. I heard this as a complaint about the practice and got quietly defensive. She wasn’t complaining about the practice. She was telling me something about me.
What had happened was that the Advaita Vedāntic practice I’d been doing — the turning of attention back on itself, the finding of the witness behind thought — had taken me somewhere I hadn’t intended. I wasn’t sure I had found the witness. But I was watching my life from a slight remove, and I had convinced myself this was the point. I was very good at the remove. I was also unreachable.
The meditator who wasn’t there
You develop a capacity to sit endlessly in what seems like the right way. I had been shown by a teacher and checked. The posture was right. The attention was right. And still I didn’t get it.
There is a story from the Vajrayāna tradition I have always loved. A student spent years beside his teacher, sleeping on the floor of the same room, sitting every morning, doing everything asked of him. He was not impatient or careless. He was devoted. He simply could not see what the teacher was pointing at. One night he lay down as usual, carrying the quiet sadness of someone who has given everything and doesn’t know if it has been enough. In the middle of the night the teacher woke and sat up in the darkness. The student, out of love and reverence, sat up too. The teacher said softly: do you hear that dog barking? Yes, said the student. The teacher reached for his old worn shoe and touched the student gently on the head with it. And in that ordinary moment — a dog, a darkness, a shoe, a teacher who had never stopped watching — the student saw what had always been there.
The recognition is in every moment. But here is the thing: you do not see it as it happens. Seeing itself requires threading — the moment has already passed by the time you know you were in it. What is actually there, in the now, before thought assembles the story, is just the one who is aware, also present. The moment is shorter than an atom. But you keep returning, iteration after iteration, and slowly it begins to hold — not as something seen or named, but as an experience that has no words and no seeing. Just there. Just present.
I was very good at threading. I was also not there.
The difference between depth and withdrawal
From the inside, depth and withdrawal look almost identical. From the outside one looks like peace — magnetic, present, available. The other is quietly turned inward, enjoying the feeling of quietude, relaxing into itself. Both look still. Only one of them is actually there.
The test is not how your meditation feels. The test is whether the people closest to you feel met — whether they sense a peaceful presence that is self-actualizing, self-sufficient, and full of self-respect, expressing itself through whatever is available: a word, a smile, a kindness, a gentle movement, a quality of energy that quietly fills the room. Or whether they are simply sharing a space with someone who has gone somewhere else.
What brought me back
Dzogchen helped, though not immediately. Where Vedānta works by negation — stripping away what you’re not — Dzogchen insists that everything showing up is already the display of the nature of mind, luminous and empty. Thoughts are not obstacles. The ordinary mess of a Tuesday afternoon is not something to see through. It’s the thing itself. I wrote about this difference in more detail in the Dzogchen vs Vedānta piece. What matters here is simpler: that insistence brought me back into the room. Not all at once. Over years.
My daughter’s question did more than any teaching. There is something about the innocence of a child, and the natural love a father carries for his children — what Sanskrit calls vātsalya — that reaches places no tradition can. In the theistic traditions, vātsalya is also the love God holds for souls: unconditional, tender, asking nothing in return. My daughter was not correcting me. She was not judging me. She simply asked what she saw, out of that pure unguarded love. And it worked on me for a decade in ways that years of sitting had not.
She stopped asking when she was about eleven. I remember noticing one evening that she had stopped, and feeling something I hadn’t expected: a small grief. Not because she had stopped seeing it. But because she had learned to be like the rest of us on this planet — making stories out of moments, threading the now into a narrative, until the barking dog and the worn shoe and the darkness are just another night that has already passed.
What I’d say now
I am not enlightened. I am not a holy man. I am as ordinary and as human as anyone — the same appetites, the same impatience, the same capacity for pettiness on a bad day. I have no special status to offer. What I have is forty years of refusing to give up, and the stubborn feeling that something in this is worth passing on — not because I have reached the end of it, but because I know the territory well enough to walk beside someone in it.
If you’ve been practicing for a while and suspect the practice hasn’t quite reached your life, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re at the part where the question gets personal. That’s where the real work starts. The sessions I offer are partly for people at exactly this point — people who’ve been practicing long enough to know the difference between the cushion and everything else, and who want to close the gap.
There is more to this story. The full arc — from the question at five through to what happened in a kitchen on an ordinary afternoon when something that had been moving for forty years went still — is in Nothing in the Way. I’m not going to pretend the book resolves it neatly. It doesn’t. What it does is trace the whole thing honestly, including the parts that don’t make me look good, which are most of the parts that matter.
The full story is in Nothing in the Way, a memoir of four decades across Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen.
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