Girl in a Box: Seeking Enlightenment as a Tibetan Buddhist Nun

Therapist Collins (A Couple’s Guide to Sexual Addiction) chronicles in this candid memoir her long, rocky relationship with Tibetan Buddhism. After her marriage fell apart when she was 26, the author became interested in meditation, seeing in it a “way out” of the mental suffering that had long plagued her. At 34, she visited a friend at a Tibetan monastery on the Hudson River in Upstate New York and wound up staying for five years, drawn to the sense of security provided by the program and its spiritual teachers. Eager to become “the best student ever,” she threw herself into Buddhist practice, even as she recognized how it sparked an unhealthy sense of competition with other participants. After taking vows to become a nun, she embarked on a three-year retreat where participants engaged in rigorous, painful practices like sleeping cross-legged in a three-square-foot meditation box. But in her attempts to “pretzel myself into some version of an ideal nun,” she slowly came to realize she’d paradoxically rejected the central tenet of Buddhism—namely, that one must find acceptance in oneself rather than in external approval—and left the monastery. In lucid prose, Collins acknowledges the beauty of Buddhism while emphasizing the flexibility of a spiritual tradition where pursuing awakening can mean turning away from institutional practice. It’s a frank, refreshingly nontraditional take on what spiritual growth looks like. (May)