I met with a client for a few weeks. She always felt somewhere else, as if there were always something more important for her to listen to. But this distraction held nothing blissful or light in it; it was full of tension and nervousness instead. It was as if she were being pulled off into far distances without her permission, and every time she had to start from scratch to recover her focus.

For weeks this part of her behavior only slightly bothered me, but I took it as my own bias and moved on—as a teacher, I am constantly dealing with easily distractible people. It was when I realized that she was the first to be bothered by it that I decided to intervene.

She was trying to complete her own thoughts and describe the feelings gathering around that experience, but it was like a dance. She would start talking, then get lost without words, then move again toward a new fragment of the same speech. When I asked her if there was anything bothering her, she said: "There are a lot of thoughts today."

She said it the way you'd remark on the weather. An observation about the state of things.

"A lot of thoughts about what?" I asked.

She smiled and didn't know how to explain. Then she looked at the wall, as if to gather focus. "I don't know yet. I'm still looking at them. They're not all for me. Better to choose a few, or the space runs out."

I have sat with that sentence for a long time. I'm still looking at them—not I have them, not they're mine. She was watching her thoughts the way you'd watch something pass by the window—the leaves, a plastic bag lifted by the wind, both at once. In my years of practice I have almost never heard anyone speak of thought this way. Most of us possess our thoughts. We........

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