Sanctuary and the Column That Said ZEN: A Guided Meditation

A college student sits in a small apartment in Davis, California, knees pressed almost against the wall, eyes open in the manner of Zen practice. The room is quiet. Then a column rises in front of him: solid, authoritative, the kind of pillar you would expect at the front of a bank. Carved down its length in black letters are the three characters Z, E, N. The teacher telling this story in the Insight Meditation Center talk does not claim to know where the hallucination began or where it ended. What he does know is that he reached out and embraced the column, and that it then vanished. That moment anchors a forty-five-minute recording that moves from a guided sitting into a Dharmette, the short teaching that begins at 29:50, in which the same teacher explains how a single image from childhood became the way he understands meditation at all.

The guided portion of the talk makes one central proposal: that the meditation cushion can be treated as a sanctuary, a place where you are out of reach of the usual machinery of the mind. The Dharmette then tells the story of how the teacher first began sitting Zen in the late 1970s, and why a vision of an engraved column felt less like a strange event than a message he needed to think through. Together they offer a compact, serious account of what sanctuary practice asks of you and what it can open into.

What does it mean to treat meditation as a sanctuary?

The teacher begins with a memory from his childhood in Europe. He had learned of a custom in which someone in trouble with the law could go into a church and claim sanctuary, placing themselves beyond the reach of the state and the police. "And this idea that there is a places in the world we can go where we're safe from something," he says, "that stayed with me as a kind of a very kind of wonderful reference point." He then carries that image onto the cushion.

The move is subtle but important. He does not say that meditation erases your problems. He says you can choose to see the sitting as a place where, for a while, you set down blame, guilt, ambition, and the pull of past and future. "Here you're safe," he tells the room (1:49). The problems do not have to be solved during the sit. In his framing, they are simply not the job of that period. He is explicit that they still need attention, and he hopes they will be addressed better afterward, coming from the clarity that meditation can produce.

There is a practical wisdom in that boundary. Many people sit down to meditate and immediately begin drafting the email they were going to write or rehearsing the argument they had that morning. The sanctuary frame gives permission to stop doing that work for a few minutes. It is not avoidance. It is a deliberate choice about where your attention is most useful.

How does the guided sitting actually work?

The sitting itself is built on the breath and on a gentle reassurance to the mind. The teacher invites you to take larger breaths, expanding the chest and belly, and then to lengthen the exhale so that you settle in. With each exhale, you imagine or visualize the things you are shedding for the length of the meditation. The instruction is less about forcing calm than about signaling to the nervous system and the thinking mind that the work of holding everything is paused.

Notice the language he uses for the mind. He refers to the way you "think and react and tighten up," and says that at least for this time you can be safe from yourself. Then comes a line that works almost like a mantra: "Don't make a problem out of the mind and makes problems. Just to reassure it, settle it, quiet." (4:13) That is a precise description of what many practitioners find hardest. The mind is not the enemy. It produces problems because it is busy, and the practice is to offer it a different relationship rather than to fight it.

The sitting also includes a gentle reminder that meditation itself can become a source of struggle. He names "even your challenges with meditation" as one of the things you do not need to fix right now. Sanctuary, in this sense, is not a demand for perfect stillness. It is an invitation to stop treating every wandering thought as a crisis.

Why extend the sanctuary to other people?

Near the end of the guided sitting, the teacher widens the frame. If the cushion has been a problem-free zone for you, he suggests, you might imagine seeing others the same way. Not as a problem, not as a source of fear, blame, or anger, but as people who can come to you and feel safe. "Whatever their problems are," he says, "that at least for you you are the sanctuary." (26:33)

This is where the practice turns outward. The teacher suggests that a few minutes of being unburdened can make more room for goodwill, kindness, and care. "Maybe just maybe you can expand the circle of your sanctuary, circle of your care and kindness out into the world." The guided sitting closes with a set of traditional phrases of loving-kindness, moving from "May all beings be happy" through "May all beings be safe," "peaceful," and "free," and ending with a line that makes the idea personal: "May each of us be a refuge for others."

"And may I be a refuge. May each of us be a refuge for others. So they have a better chance to experience for themselves happiness, safety, peace, and freedom." (the guided sitting, around 27:47)

What is useful here is the reciprocity. The sanctuary you touch in meditation is not meant to stay locked inside you. The same quality that lets you put down your own worries can, in the teacher's view, let other people put down theirs in your presence.

What happened in the Davis apartment?

The Dharmette opens the story at 29:59, with the teacher describing the weekly practice that shaped his college years. He had visited San Francisco Zen Center earlier in the 1970s, around 1975 by his recollection, and then spent a year in Norway before enrolling at UC Davis to study agriculture. Expecting that every urban center would have a Zen community nearby, he went looking in Davis, a small town, and was told there was none. He eventually learned of a small sitting group that met in the apartment of Lee and Vicki Stewart.

The Stewarts' home was modest. They had two bedrooms, one very small. Sometimes only three people came to sit, sometimes four or five. The teacher went on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and his practice was more intense than the schedule alone suggests. He meditated every day during college, forty minutes in the morning and forty before bed, a habit he describes as natural to him even if it now looks unusual for a student.

Then the physical setting becomes part of the story. Zen is practiced sitting and facing a wall, eyes open, and in the small room the wall was close enough that knees nearly touched it. That closeness is the staging for the vision that followed.

Why did a Roman column with ZEN carved into it matter?

During one evening sitting, the teacher describes a hallucination he cannot fully place in time. "This majestic authoritative, solid, serious Roman column rose up in front of me," he says, "like you'd have in front of a bank or something to show this is a serious institution." Engraved down its length were the letters Z E N. He stresses that he does not know where the experience started or stopped. He is careful not to dress it up as a revelation, even as he takes it seriously enough to tell it decades later.

The emotional logic of the moment matters. A column is an emblem of permanence and authority. Carving Zen onto it turns the practice into something as solid as an institution, which is an odd thing for a young man in a small apartment to see at the edge of his awareness. His response was physical and immediate: he moved to embrace it. Then the column vanished.

The teacher does not settle the question of what the vision meant. In his telling, he raises the possibility that he had created the image himself, and he treats that possibility with the same openness he brings to the sanctuary idea. Whether it was a vision, a projection, or simply a striking moment in a long period of sitting, it gave him a reference point that matched the one he had carried from childhood. Both images are about a place that holds you, that is safe, that stands firm when everything else moves.

Where to go from here

If the idea of sanctuary speaks to you, the practical starting point is small. Choose one sitting this week and frame it, at the outset, as a time when you are out of reach of your problems. You are not asked to solve anything in that window. Lengthen the exhale, let the chest and belly expand, and when the mind starts to tighten or reach for its usual arguments, offer it the reassurance the teacher describes: it is okay, it does not need to make a problem out of itself right now. Then, at the end, take a few moments to imagine others arriving at you with their worries and finding that, at least for this time, you are a place where they are safe.

For a deeper look, listen to the full talk and pay attention to the Dharmette at 29:50, where the Davis story and the question of the engraved column are told in full. The story is worth hearing in the teacher's own voice, especially the detail of the small apartment and the knees against the wall. It is a reminder that some of the most important lessons in practice arrive in ordinary rooms, in the middle of an ordinary week, and that a childhood image of sanctuary can become the lens through which an entire life of sitting makes sense.