Marc Lesser's Blog, page 7

What Is My Offering?

What is my offering is today’s episode. We begin with a short guided meditation on warmhearted curiosity. Then Marc talks about the difference between helping, fixing, and serving – with an emphasis on practices for discovering your own offering.

Today’s Zen puzzler is using this phrase, What is my offering, as a Zen koan, or a support for going deeper into this realm of discovery.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a bi-weekly podcast featuring conversations with leading teachers and activists and an exploration of Zen teachings and practices. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net/donate. [music]

What is my offering is today’s episode. We begin with a short guided meditation on warm-hearted curiosity. Then I talk about the difference between helping, fixing, and serving with an emphasis on the practice for discovering what your own offering is. Today, Zen Puzzler is using this phrase, what is my offering, as a Zen koan or a support for going deeper into this realm of discovery. What is my offering? I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

[pause 00:01:06]

Let’s begin with a few minutes of stopping and sitting together.

[pause 00:01:22]

[bell rings]

Yes, just noticing. Noticing the body and bringing attention to the sense of arriving and softening, relaxing, giving attention to the shoulders and back, softening the belly. Just noticing what it’s like to be here. This sacred practice of pausing, of stopping, and just being here. All of our to-do lists, they’ll be, they can wait. They don’t need us right now. Just bringing our full attention to being here, breathing, being alive, and nothing to accomplish. No sense of judgment or no need to make judgments or evaluations. Just letting that all go and being here, letting go of any ideas of certainty or uncertainty.

[pause 00:03:41]

Keeping it simple, bringing attention to the breath. Breathing in and breathing out. Breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I’m breathing out, and dropping in, noticing what your approach is, how you’re feeling, what your mood is. Noticing. No need to try and change anything. No need to make anything different. Just noticing what is it like to be here, what is it like to be breathing, what is it like to be alive right now. I think bringing a sense of warm-hearted curiosity to this time so we are cultivating this beginner’s mind, curious mind, but not neutral, but with some sense of warm-heartedness or appreciation, of valuing this moment, this time together.

[pause 00:05:34]

Letting thoughts come and go, and I can always come back. I can always come back to the breath, to the body, to a warm-hearted curiosity.

[pause 00:06:07]

Nothing hidden. This is one of my favorite dialogues, and this is from Dōgen, 13th century, where he asks someone, what is practice? What is it like to be a full, flourishing human? This teacher of his, who’s a head cook of a monastery, says, nothing in the universe is hidden. Nothing is hidden. Opening. I’m going to ring a bell and make a shift, but you, of course, are welcome to keep sitting.

[pause 00:07:21]

[bell rings]

[music]

I’m going to talk today about the difference between helping, fixing, and serving. I want to begin with a short story about a time when I was called in to help facilitate a two-day retreat of business leaders who were, these were CEOs of a variety of for-profit and non-profit companies, and they were there to do a strategy meeting. There was a board meeting, and I was called in to do like a couple-hour session right in the middle of this two-day retreat.

As I entered the room, someone from the retreat came out, and one of the CEOs came out to greet me and said, this retreat is not going well. Welcome, but people are stressed and frustrated. That was quite the beginning. Now, I walked in and I could feel the tension in the room. They’re about 16, these CEOs, men and women. I immediately said, let’s do some sitting practice. Of course, I noticed several women came right to the front to sit. Other people in the middle decided to join. In the back of the room were maybe three men, I think, who were scowling and arms like, why are we doing this?

I led a short meditation practice for just a few minutes, emphasizing curiosity and warmheartedness. Then I suggested that we get into small groups, and I got them into, I think, four groups of four. My instructions were that each person should do a monologue where people wouldn’t

ask them questions or interrupt them. The suggested topic for each person to talk, to address for maybe like five minutes was, why are you here on the planet? What is your offering? Why are you here? What is your offering? How’s it going? The third question, what changes do you need to make based on how you answered the first two questions? I was really moved and a little bit relieved and surprised how much these leaders entered these questions. I could see the level of concentration and even some tears as people were engaging in this question, especially, right? Why are you here? Why are you here and what is your offering? That’s really, I think, the essential way to access and cut through this distinction between helping and fixing and serving and to see how from one perspective we are all here to serve. Ultimately, we are here to serve.

Sometimes, of course, helping and fixing can be needed and useful. What I want to really talk about here is the practice, the practice of serving. One thing to be careful of, when our life’s work is about service and activism, it’s often people burn out, feel a good deal of anxiety, never feeling like they’re doing enough. There’s a beautiful quote by Rachel Naomi Remen, who’s the author of The New York Times bestseller, Kitchen Table Wisdom.

She says, helping, fixing, and serving are three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see it as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. I really appreciate this distinction. The language that we use is powerful, and there can be really strong unconscious habit energy around helping and fixing. Helping and fixing sends a message that something is lacking or missing. Often, in how we see deeply, unconsciously almost see ourselves and others or the world. These words about helping and fixing create a sense of distance and separation.

On the other hand, serving, serving adds richness, connection, and a dimension to how we show up by including more curiosity, more acceptance, more warmheartedness and openness. Thinking of our work and our life as service is huge, is important. Whatever we’re doing, even often in so much of our work lives involves some form of sales or selling. Instead, I think there’s something about reframing sales and selling as offering. Again, stepping back and looking at whatever we’re doing, all work in some way is serving, is serving people, serving through products or services.

How do your work and what you do? Are you helping, fixing or serving? How do each of these labels feel or influence your approach? Whilst while offering our work as a service, we can feel really good at times. Sometimes it feels easy. Sometimes it feels like we are really making a difference. We seem to be wired for looking at what can go wrong. There’s no shortage of what can go wrong. There’s no shortage of not doing enough, and to be careful, even in this realm of serving to be careful about the negativity bias.

A good dose of optimism as well as hope can be useful. I’m not talking about the rose colored glasses optimism, but rather the sense of leaning into, imagining, visualizing what’s possible. How can we through our service make a positive change? I often come back, this is one of my favorite quotes that I come back to, I know over and over again is the Wendell Berry, be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts. Be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts.

There’s so many facts in our lives about what’s working and what’s not working and how all of our views and opinions, but there’s something about just the joy of being alive, knowing that one day we will lose everything and yet, and yet not turning away from what is painful, difficult, challenging. To be able to write in the midst of all of the challenges, come back to serving.

What is it, what are some of the practices that can support living a life of service? I think, again, my own experience and bias is meditation and mindfulness practice. I can’t, I can hardly imagine not having a regular meditation practice, not having a regular mindfulness practice. Just having this daily, regular time of, in a way, it’s feeling like I’m radically serving and being served just by stopping and feeling my own sense of completion and wholeness.

Then it’s also, I think, really important in living a life of service to find lots of support, to regularly connect with good friends. I think it’s useful to have a therapist, a coach, a body worker when we’re running and running a business or leading people. We’re so much involved in influencing that it helps to have ongoing support. I now have two different people that I do regular co-coaching with. I also so appreciate my Zen teachers, my therapist, regular study, regular study and exposure to engaging with, especially good, deep spiritual books.

I’m once again reading and studying Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I’m also really appreciating beginning to study another book that is less known by Shinryu Suzuki called Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness. It’s some talks that he gave at Tassajara about a Zen poem called the Sandokai, The Harmony of Difference and Equality. Again, I think coming back to this question, what is your offering? What is your offering and what practices and support do you need to be able to come back, come back to this simple, deep, profound question?

One of the things I’ve been doing is more and more is listening to music as a way of supporting myself, my practice and I was recently introduced to a song by Adrianne Lenker called Steamboat and has really beautiful lyrics. As she says, well, I’m a stranger. I’m only a walker. I guess I’m human, but sometimes I feel like I’m only a ghost.

Like I’m only a wall. You come around, honey, I’ll probably just follow you home. Because it’s all that I know how to do. I was born by a body, and I’ll die by one too, and places are going if they ain’t got you. Oh, I wish I was better at being alone. Still, every night, I call you by phone., I wish I was more than my skin and my bones. Oh, I wish I was more than my skin and my bones. I love– Oh, I wish I was better at being alone. Still, every night, I call you by phone. Oh, I wish I was more than my skin and my bones. Oh, I wish I was more than my skin and my bones. Of course, we are. We are so much more than our skin and our bones. Wishing, wishing you some hope, a touch of optimism, and experiencing the richness of our lives, experiencing the richness of your life.

Coming back to this question, what is my offering? Why am I here on this planet? What is my offering? How am I doing? What changes might I make based on how I’m asking and responding and feeling about these questions? Coming back and asking and answering these great questions.

[music]

Welcome to The Zen Bones Puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story or a Zen koan or a poem. Something to contemplate, to think about. A story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice. A meditation in daily life.

I’m pleased to be introducing today’s Zen Puzzler, where I take some traditional, non-traditional, modern Zen stories, or just lines from a reading or a poem, and look at how can we best utilize these stories? These stories are meant to cut through our usual, rather limited thinking, our mistaken beliefs, erroneous beliefs, the things that we hold on to, and help bring us to a more generous, awake place. A place where we can transform challenges and difficulties without ignoring them, but transform them into possibility.

I think as today’s Zen Puzzler, I want to continue with this topic. The line for today’s puzzler is, what is my offering? What is my offering? I was just on a call with an old friend who is dealing with cancer, and is really unsure how much time she has to live. Within that, she found her calling. She found a project that is just so bringing her alive, and it’s a legacy project which will be around for a long, long time. It’s a beautiful thing, this sense of finding your own calling.

This is something that I am working with myself right now, this question of what is my offering? In some way, I think it’s important to start from a place that there’s nothing lacking that if I were to die this day, then everything is perfect just as it is. I’ve done my best. I’ve given it my all. I think that’s a really important place to begin the work of engaging with this question of what is my offering? It’s not from a place of something missing, lacking. If I don’t do this, then no. It’s starting from a place of there’s nothing lacking, and is there something that wants to grow from that, without forcing it, without needing anything.

It’s interesting. This is beyond, it’s beyond helping and fixing. We’re not helping ourselves or fixing ourselves or others, but we’re opening to what’s possible. What is my offering? What might bloom? Often, so it’s interesting, in my compost pile in my backyard, there is lots of kale blooming. I think it’s quite beautiful, right? Often it’s out of the smelly, difficult compost. The compost of our lives is often where we can find the sense of what our offering is.

What can we do to influence the people around us? It’s not always about scale. It’s interesting, the tension that we often feel about depth and scale. Our offering can be helping one person at a time. It can be a great offering. Teachers and therapists and doctors, emergency workers, firefighters, so many ways to make an offering one person at a time. It’s one of the things that I love about writing, that I feel like my words and my books go out there and I have no idea who they can reach. Yet, there’s something powerful about the offering of our creativity, of our spirit, of our words.

Yes, so this is the Today’s Zen Puzzler, modern koan, which I think in a way, this is what this question, at least for many of us, is what brings us to practice and what sustains our practice is to keep coming back to this question, what is my offering? What is your offering? Thank you very much.

[music]

I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit marclesser.net. This podcast is offered freely and relies on the financial support from listeners like you. Please donate at marclesser.net/donate. Thank you very much.

[00:28:42] [END OF AUDIO]

The post What Is My Offering? appeared first on Marc Lesser.

I’m Doing What I Can

I’m doing what I can is today’s episode. We begin with a short guided meditation. Then I give a short talk about pessimism, optimism, grief, and joy, and address ways of cutting through the dualities of our modern life and doing what we can, with spaciousness and possibility.

Today’s Zen puzzler is Pai Chang’s fox, a traditional Zen koan, about not avoiding cause and effect, or finding our freedom while being fully immersed in the world.

"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":6977,"3":{"1":0},"9":0,"11":4,"12":0,"14":{"1":3,"3":1},"15":"Arial"}">

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a biweekly podcast, featuring conversations with leading teachers and activists, and an exploration of Zen teachings and practices. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net/donate.

[music]

I’m Doing What I Can, is today’s episode. We begin with a short guided meditation, and then I do a short talk about pessimism and optimism, grief and joy, and cutting through the dualities of our modern world and life, and doing what we can with spaciousness, and with possibility. Today’s Zen puzzler is a traditional Zen kōan called Pai-chang’s fox, and it’s about not avoiding cause and effect, and finding our freedom right in the midst of being fully immersed in this world, by doing what we can. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

Let’s begin by doing a few minutes of sitting practice together.

[music]

[pause 00:01:30]

Gently, bringing attention to the body, and relaxing the jaw, relaxing the muscles in the face, opening the chest and shoulders, and being embodied, feeling our bodies. If there’s any place where there’s any tension or holding, giving that some attention. Relaxing and using the breath as a focal point, and anchor as well. Yes, breathing in, I know that I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

[silence]

This approach and attitude of a nothing, and nothing to accomplish. What a relief, nothing to accomplish right now. Now, there’ll be plenty of time later for accomplishing, but for now, I’m letting it all go. Yes, with each exhale, a little bit more relaxed, and a little bit more alert at the same time. This practice is about waking up, letting go of our usual judgments, and limitations, criticisms.

[pause 00:04:00]

Yes, I was feeling a little unmoored this morning, and it’s okay. Sometimes, as we feel the changes, a little bit less holding on, a little bit more of letting go.

[pause 00:04:52]

Letting thoughts, of course, letting thinking mind to do its thing, but no need to follow patterns of thinking, and gently coming back to the breath, to the body.

[pause 00:05:34]

Yes, no other time than right now. No other time, and no other place than right here. The whole world is right here, and nowhere to go. Nothing that needs changing, or that needs to be accomplished. [silence] Allowing a sense of acceptance and love, self-love, and love for the people in our lives. Both giving and receiving. Becoming more and more receptive with each breath, and keeping it simple, just breathing in, and breathing out here, alive.

[pause 00:07:19]

I’m going to ring the bell, and change gears, but you can feel free to continue with this practice of just sitting.

[pause 00:07:45]

[bell rings]

[music]

I want to talk about, I’m Doing What I Can. Only this line from Rumi [unintelligible 00:08:30] just came into my mind, “Let the beauty be what you do. Yes. It’s okay to kneel and kiss the ground.” Feeling the beauty of being alive. I notice these days, living in the world on my own, I’m reading a lot. I’m writing a lot. I sometimes feel angry. I sometimes feel happy. I’m grieving. I’m doing what I can to take care of myself.

Sometimes I’m quite pessimistic about things. Sometimes I’m quite optimistic about things, and I’m– At the heart, I’m doing what I can do, and I hope that you are too. There’s so much to be upset or angry about. The thinking of the racism, young Black men being needlessly harmed. What seems like the endless gun violence, and the silence, and lack of courage of our leaders. Easy to be angry or frustrated about so many of our systems, our financial systems, our food systems, our financial systems.

Again, what a world that we live in. Sometimes, I am aware of my own sense of grieving. Grieving for our country that refuses to engage with our history, and refusing to find ways to fully acknowledge and embrace, and heal. Sometimes grieving for how some companies treat their employees, the power of greed, the loss of community, the loneliness, and I’m doing what I can.

One of the things that I’m doing a lot of is reading. I’ve been studying Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryū Suzuki. Coming back to that book again and again about the power of meditation, and non-duality. I’m reading a book called These Truths by Jill Lepore. I’m actually re-reading this book for the third time. It’s a book about American history through the lens of greed and hate and delusion, as well as love and compassion, and possibility.

I’ve been reading a book called Vasubandhu’s “Three Natures”, Vasubandhu, a Zen teacher in India from the 1st or 2nd century. It’s a deep and mysterious, and practical text, again, about cutting through the dualities of this and that, of holding on, and letting go, of success and failure. Then, there’s my daily habit of reading The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

I love this combination of starting my day with meditation practice, clearing the decks, clearing the way. Then, stepping into the world of what’s happening in our world, what’s happening in my own life, and doing what I can to take care of myself. I generally like to start every day with some stretching and exercise after my morning meditation. I like to go for a four to five-mile walk each day.

I love my practice of cooking, and enjoying having meals with family and friends. I meet each month with a group of my peers. It’s a group of CEOs that’s been meeting for about 15 years. Important to have an ongoing peer group. I’m really good at my practice of sleep, making sure that I get my seven, seven and a half hours of sleep every night. I also try to make sure to have ongoing connective conversations with family and friends.

With all of that, I sometimes feel quite pessimistic. It doesn’t take much to be alarmed by what’s happening in our world. Again, I think of what I’ve been calling my inner Homer Simpson, right? The, “Why does everything have to be so hard? Why does everything have to be so hard? Why is change and healing, positive change healing, why is it so difficult?”

At the same time, I notice, I can’t help but be optimistic, feeling some passion and creativity about people doing amazing things all around me, the work that’s happening. Slowly, of course, around healing and racism, and climate change, the amazing things happening in the world of music, in socially responsible business. I’ve been doing some work.

I’m preparing right now for a retreat that I’m helping to lead of wildland firefighters, these young elite athletes, who have devoted their lives to helping through working skillfully with fires in the world of socially responsible business that I course in, and I feel inspired and optimistic by the creative and amazing things that I see. I’m doing what I can. I attempt to keep an attitude and approach of possibility, transforming difficulty and pain and challenges into possibility, in my writing, in my teaching, in my Zen group.

Though, it often doesn’t quite feel enough, I keep coming back to, I’m doing what I can with anger, with grieving, with reading, with self-care, sometimes pessimistic, more often optimistic. I hope that you are doing what you can. I hope that you are taking care of yourself. I think of a beautiful poem that epitomizes self-care and well-being called the Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage by Zen teacher Shitou, who lived in China during the ninth century.

The poem is in a book called Inside the Grass Hut. It’s a translation book by Ben Connolly, in which the first two lines are, “I’ve built a hut where there’s nothing of value. After eating, I relax, and enjoy a nap.” Then, the last portion of the poem says, “Let go of hundreds of years, and relax completely. Open your hands, and walk innocent. Thousands of words, myriad interpretations are only to free you from obstructions.”

Let go of hundreds of years, and relax completely. Open your hands and walk, walk with innocence. Thousands of words and myriad interpretations, they’re only there to free you from obstructions. I suspect that life in ninth-century China was immensely challenging and stressful. I love Shitou’s advice of napping, relaxing, opening our hands, walking with innocence.

I appreciate how he frames living our lives as one interpretation after another, and finding freedom from these obstructions. I think one of the key practices here in, I’m doing what I can and we are all doing what we can, I hope, is seeing what is, and feeling a sense of spaciousness, practicing spaciousness and possibility. Sometimes we need to work with a sense of focus and urgency.

Even then, even is it possible? I used to feel that, especially, in my time working in the Zen kitchen with a sense of urgency and focus. At the same time, there was a sense of spaciousness, just doing what I could do in that moment. This image of making an offering, this image of producing great meals, and coming back to the spaciousness of body, breath, mind. Staying optimistic in the midst of the stresses and challenges of our daily lives, doing what we can with spaciousness.

[music]

Welcome to the Zen Bones puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story, or a Zen kōan or a poem. Something to contemplate, to think about, a story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice, a meditation in daily life.

[music]

I’m happy to introduce today’s Zen puzzler. Again, these are my taking some traditional and non-traditional Zen stories, and using them as a way to support us, help us in our daily lives in this modern world. A friend asked me this morning, “What is a Zen kōan anyhow?” I said that these are– Traditionally, there are several collections of Zen stories. Mostly, the traditional Zen stories come from sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth-century China, the height in Tang Dynasty China.

There is a whole school of Zen, the Rinzai. Rinzai tradition that uses these kōans very formally actually as the path toward awakening. Essentially, these are stories or dialogues that are with the aim of helping us cut through the dualistic world of this or that, of life and death, of success and failure, cutting through how easily we get caught. Also, I think they are meant to bring us deeply into our heart center, getting out of our intellectual way of seeing things, and entering our hearts, which again, it’s really my hope and aspiration for this podcast and these talks.

Zen Bones, ancient wisdom for modern times. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from a very traditional kōan called Pai-chang’s fox. It’s a long story, but the key to it is this, I think somewhat renowned Zen teacher is asked, it’s I think probably after he gives a traditional Zen lecture. Someone asks him, “Does a fully enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not? Is a fully enlightened person, do they still live in the world of cause and effect? The world of karma, the world of influence, being influenced, and influencing?”

In this case, the teacher says, “No, a fully enlightened person is no longer subject to cause and effect.” This story is that, this person is turned into a fox, and apparently, in China during this time, this was not a good thing. This was a very punishing negative consequence of saying that a fully enlightened person is not subject to cause and effect.

One of the commentaries, a verse in this particular kōan, the person who’s collecting the story says, “Not falling, not evading, two faces of the same die. Not evading, not falling, a thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.” Then, at some point in this story, the same teacher somehow is given another chance, and is asked to answer this question.

This time, he says, “Yes.” When asked, does a fully enlightened person come under the subject to cause and effect? He is released from the body of a fox, and he comes back to being himself in the human form as a Zen teacher. I think this is very much connected to the topic here of, I’m Doing What I Can, and that we live in this crazy mixed-up world, where there are so many difficult, often horrible things happening, so many ways to get caught from our– Whether it’s our gender, or our ethnic background, or our politics, our views, our views about things.

I think this story is saying, we have to somehow take on and integrate all of the things in our world, all of the things in our relationships. I’ve often heard people say, “If you want to see how someone’s Zen practice is going, ask their wife, or their husband, ask their children.: That we can’t help living in this human world of cause and effect, of influencing and being influenced, and somehow, finding the freedom and spaciousness, and possibility right in the midst of working with all of the causes and effects of all parts of our lives.

Finding freedom, finding spaciousness, cutting through, finding our real positive power, positive influence, right in the midst of living fully, fully with our families, with our friends, with our work, with our communities. Finding freedom right in the midst of the world of cause and effect.

[music]

I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work, and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit marklesser.net. This podcast is offered freely, and relies on the financial support from listeners like you. Please donate at marklesser.net/donate. Thank you very much.

[music]

[00:27:28] [END OF AUDIO]

 

The post I’m Doing What I Can appeared first on Marc Lesser.

More Acceptance, Less Unnecessary Effort

This episode is More Acceptance and Less Unnecessary Effort. We begin with a short guided meditation, followed by a talk on the practice of saying yes – opening and accepting whatever comes our way. It means noticing and saying yes to the pains and possibilities, our resistance and our joy.

Today’s Zen puzzler is based on a traditional Zen dialogue. What is the Way? Everyday mind is the way.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a bi-weekly podcast featuring conversations with leading teachers and activists and an exploration of Zen teachings and practices. Please support our work by making a donation at Marclesser.net/donate.

[music]

How to Appreciate Your Life. We begin this episode with a short, guided meditation on the practice of confidence and humility. I then do a short talk based on one of my favorite talks by Shunryu Suzuki from Zen Mind, Beginners Mind that he calls Nirvana, the waterfall. A talk about a profound and accessible view of birth, life, and death. A way of practicing and contextualizing the meaning of our lives. Really, how to appreciate our lives. I use the same talk and image for today’s Zen puzzler about letting go of extra erroneous beliefs and patterns. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

Let’s begin with a short sit. A short meditation together. [silence]

[bell rings]

Stopping and pausing. Seeing if it’s possible to be still. Having the body as still as you can. Such a simple, profound practice. I think especially these days, where we seem to be, many of us are doing a lot. Just a few minutes of stillness. A few moments of not doing anything other than just being here. Bringing awareness, bringing attention to here. The body, the breath. Using the breath as an anchor. Allowing breathing to be full, unrestricted, fluid. Noticing a thinking mind. Allowing thoughts. Thoughts may come and go, of course, but gently letting them go and coming back to the breath, to the body.

This sense, this sense of being still, it takes some awareness. A sense of cultivating a deep feeling of confidence. Confidence, humility, without any real effort. Just letting go. Letting go of the usual judgments, comparisons. No worries. No worries at all about doing it right or wrong or better or worse. Letting go of the success and failure. Instead, here with stillness. Warm-hearted stillness. Warm-hearted curiosity. What is it like right now to be here? Breathing, being breathed really, alive? This practice of studying the self and letting go. Going beyond the usual ego concerns and comparisons.

Embracing ourself and letting go is a practice of deep confidence. Nothing to improve or attain, just this ordinary mind. Ordinary mind is the way right now. [silence] Keeping it simple. Breathing in. I know that I’m breathing in, and I’m breathing out. I know that I am breathing out. Breathing in, I can feel my own confidence, and breathing out, I feel my own humility. Not knowing what will happen next yet, and yet just here. Please feel free to continue this sitting practice. I’m going to ring the bell and move on.

[bell rings]

[music]

I’d like to talk about the practice of how to fully enjoy our lives with an emphasis on unpacking and using one of my favorite talks from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. A collection of talks by a Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, who I consider my root teacher, although I never met him. I came to the San Francisco Zen Center a few years after he died. His teaching, so permeates, I think, many years that I spent that I lived at the Zen Center and that I’ve been practicing. This particular talk is called Nirvana, the Waterfall.

It has these lines in it, “Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life.” When you realize this fact, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was and how much useless effort you had been making. You will find the true meaning of life. It just blows me away. Suzuki Roshi’s teaching and language. It’s so, I think, accessible, profound, important. In this talk, he also says, “You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling without knowing just how this feeling is created. When you don’t realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe.

You have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and have no actual difficulty in our life.” These are two passages from this talk. To back up a bit, he’s describing in this particular talk going to Yosemite and watching Yosemite Falls, and he has this insight as he’s watching the waterfall, and he notices that at the top of this waterfall is the stream and that he is describing that this stream represents our lives before we are born. He uses the metaphor that our lives are like the time of the water coming out of this fall, out of the stream, out of oneness, and that we become these separate drops.

He says, “I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, a long time for the water to reach the bottom of the waterfall. It seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life, but at the same time, I thought it was not originally separated but was one whole river.” Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. Yes, so before we were born, we had no feeling. We were one with the universe. This is called mind only or essence of mind or big mind.

After we’re separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated, separated by the wind and the rocks, then we have feeling. He goes on again repeating this, that, “It is because we have feeling that we attach to this feeling, that we lose the memory, the body sense of our oneness with the river, and that at the same time, we are separated into drops, but we’re also one with this river.” Then he says, “When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it. It resumes its own nature and this is a composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river.”

If this is so, what feeling will we have upon our death? This is the true, perfect composure. He says that to talk about this understanding is quite easy but to have the actual feeling of this oneness, this sense that we are part of the river before we are born, during this lifetime the mirage of our separateness, and then the sense that when we die that we will return to this river. I’ve read this passage many times during memorial services or funerals. When you can sit with your whole body and mind and with the oneness of your mind and body, with a universal mind, you can easily attain the right understanding.

Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life. When you realize this fact, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was. Interesting. I think we all have our own interpretation of how we see our birth and our life and death even if we haven’t articulated it. Here he’s articulating a particular view, painting a picture of reality from the perspective of Zen mind or big mind or the mind of great generosity. The sense that understanding our feelings and seeing, this is where a Zen practiced, what’s called emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is really the study of our feelings and noticing the relationship between our thinking and our thoughts and our feelings and how they all seem so automatic. Suzuki, I think, is suggesting through this new interpretation of a birth and life and death, it gives us a little bit of space in not seeing how we create our worlds better, helping us understand our feelings and our thoughts and our emotions from this perspective of cultivating a greater sense of freedom. Of fully feeling what we’re feeling and not being tossed around or thrown into the usual dramas of our feelings and life, but instead feeling it without the usual attachment, without the usual drama.

When the water returns to its original oneness with the river it no longer has any individual feeling. It resumes its own nature and finds composure. Our practice is to aspire to find this sense of composure, this real deep sense of oneness composure and to use it to cultivate our own compassion from this place, from this letting go of our erroneous beliefs and assumptions. We then have the ability to help others to whip through our presence, words, deeds, and actions. When you can sit with a whole body and mind, and with the oneness of your mind and body, with a universal mind, you can attain the right understanding.

Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life. When you realize this fact, you will discover the meaninglessness of your old interpretation and how much useless effort you had been making. Together let go of that useless effort and see through that old interpretations of our life and feel this profound sense of being safe, satisfied, and connected. Thank you very much.

[music]

Welcome to the Zen Bones puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story or a Zen poem or a poem, something to contemplate, to think about. A story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice. A kind of meditation in daily life.

[gong dings]

Always makes me happy to introduce this Zen puzzler, kind of a lighthearted way of using and building on, and playing with traditional and non-traditional Zen koans. I think Zen koans are what I’m calling Zen puzzlers, are meant to be a way to help us integrate practice. Really the core of Zen practice, the core teaching, the core practice, is meditation is sitting still and learning about our own bodies, minds, feelings, and thoughts. Then the other core Zen practice is integration. How we take what the material, the lessons, the learnings, the challenges and opportunities that comes up, while we’re being still, and how we integrate, how we take this into all parts of our lives.

Seeing that everything is a cauldron for practice. Then taking that into our meditation practice. For today’s Zen puzzler, I want to return to the subject of the talk of Nirvana, the Waterfall, because I think it is a beautiful Zen koan, Zen story, worthy of staying within and using as an integration. The practice would be to feel our own sense of oneness that we all come from the same stream, we all return to the same stream, the stream of life. That seeing that this short time that we are here alive on this planet. It’s like being the feeling, the seeing deeply this sense of it’s just we are temporarily separate and we temporarily have feeling.

Using this image, using this koan, this teaching, as a way of feeling the profound sense of connectedness and oneness, and knowing that we can use this image, this explanation to let go of the erroneous and mistaken beliefs that we have about being separate. The erroneous and mistaken beliefs that we have about our feelings and emotions. Instead to be just super curious about the stories that we’re telling ourselves and to come back to this image and this teaching of the waterfall. I love his words, Shunryu Suzuki’s words, that your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an erroneous interpretation of life. Letting go of useless effort and finding composure, finding the true meaning in our lives. Thank you very much.

[music]

I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit Marklesser.net. This podcast is offered freely and relies on financial support from listeners like you. Please donate@Marklesser.net/donate. Thank you very much.

[music]

[00:24:31] [END OF AUDIO]

 

The post More Acceptance, Less Unnecessary Effort appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Say Yes to Everything, Part 2

In this episode, Say Yes to Everything, we begin with a short guided meditation, followed by a talk on the practice of saying yes – opening and accepting whatever comes our way. It means noticing and saying yes to the pains and possibilities, our resistance and our joy.

Today’s Zen puzzler is based on a traditional Zen dialogue. What is the Way? Everyday mind is the way.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a bi weekly podcast that features conversations with leading spiritual teachers and activists. And it’s an exploration of how Zen teachings and practices can inform and support your everyday life. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net.

It would be most appreciated. Thank you.

Today’s episode is called Say Yes to Everything. We begin with a short guided meditation, followed by a talk on the practice of saying yes, opening and accepting. Whatever comes our way, it means noticing and saying yes to the pains and the possibilities, as well as our resistance. And of course, our joy. And today’s Zen Puzzler is based on a traditional Zen dialog.

What is the way? Everyday mind is the way of another form of saying yes to everything. I hope you enjoy this episode. And let’s begin with just a few minutes of sitting together. You know, just stopping, pausing, noticing whatever’s happening right now, checking in, checking in with the body, noticing any places that need some attention. For me, it’s often my shoulders up or back, relaxing the muscles in the face, relaxing the jaw and the whole body taking in the whole body, noticing, and of course, noticing that breathing is happening, perhaps taking a few deeper than normal, clearing breaths.

Yeah. So checking in with the body, checking in with the breath, noticing whatever is happening with thoughts, with thinking, mind, with the mind is busy or calm. Just noticing and noticing whatever feelings, whatever mood feelings you’re bringing to this time and just shining the light of your awareness on what it’s like to be here. A very ordinary and extraordinary This human mind and body consciousness.

And of course, also maybe checking in with what is in your heart right now, mixed in or holding or below the underneath the surface of our awareness.

Yeah, the heart. The heart. What’s coming up for you as most important, compelling thing right now? Yeah. Zen. Zen practice uses the language of a small mind and big mind an entire. This heart awareness takes us closer to big mind. And I think a big mind is in some way letting it all go. So with maybe practicing with every exhale, letting go of judging, naming, expecting anything, what does it feel like?

What is it like when we can just be here? Just noticing again? Starting by stopping. Checking in with the body, with the breath, thoughts, feelings. And then as much as possible, letting it all go. It’s ordinary, ordinary mind and big mind. Studying the self and going beyond the self and just appreciating whatever, whatever is there. Noticing. Dropping. Appreciating.

Allowing your own sense of love to arise. Once we get out of the way and feel free to continue sitting or I’m. I’m going to ring the bell and shift into doing some little bit of talking.

So I want to talk about one of my one of my favorite practices, which is the practice of saying yes. Maybe saying yes to everything. And it reminds me of I’ve I’ve done many improv classes, you know, improvizational theater classes. I’ve taken improv one on one many times. Safe. I jokingly say that I’ve failed it and had to retake it and what I really like about Improv 101 is that it emphasizes saying, Yes, the main lesson is to whatever comes your way in, whatever, whatever someone proposes to you.

And when you’re practicing improv, the practice is to accept it and go with it and say yes to it and see what happens. And I think this is a really exceptional, interesting practice in our lives, right in all of our relationships. You know, the I was also someone was asking me, what’s the most important practice for leaders, for people, for entrepreneurs, people starting companies, people leading companies.

And I was surprised that when I was asked that question, I responded by saying learning to say yes to everything. Right. And in some way, it’s a way of simple and profound way to open our hearts and our minds to the gifts and many challenges, possibilities. Right. The and the pains and possibilities, the gifts, the suffering, whatever it is to say yes to it, to open to it, to not turn away.

And, of course, you know, it’s a practice also that allows us to recognize and feel our resistance and to work more skillfully with our resistance. Because it’s not easy. We we it’s easy to block to say no, to change the subject. So saying yes, even to our resistance by fully letting in our fears, our discomfort. And then part of this part of this practice of saying yes to everything is allowing and transforming fears and discomfort to allow them to become a connection and possibility again through through not turning away through this practice of saying yes and seeing what happens.

And this expression saying yes to everything emerged fairly recently when I was having a conversation with my friend and poet Jane HIRSHFIELD. And we were Jane and I were exploring in poetry, poetry, Zen and and well-being. And Zen then brought up this phrase of saying yes. And she said, Poetry and Buddhist practice offer a way to stay inside the difficult moments, how to be open to every possible weather of our existence, and to understand that these lead to the moonlight shining through the ruined house roofs.

It’s the beauty of poems married to the difficult circumstances that lead to the experience of the fullness of life. A life that is more satisfying. So this practice of saying yes means to become more familiar with, as Jane puts it, the weather, the weather of our existence. And this can be a way of cultivating confidence and humility, becoming more skillful and effective in the practice of leadership relationships, life know.

And and as I was applying, applying this to the practice of management or leadership, and I was thinking of the, you know, the most common elements that I find I’m engaging within leaders. And those those elements are decision making, inspiring and influencing others healthy and effective communication, teamwork and collaboration, achieving results and innovation and managing change. So just unpacking these quite briefly, but one at a time.

So decision making, right? So saying yes to becoming more aware and more clear about how how we make decisions. Noticing in what way do our decisions benefit the greater good benefit ourselves. But seeing seeing decision making through the lens of saying yes, yes to how does this decision benefit my own well-being and how is this decision benefiting the greater good?

Yeah. So the second the second practice is inspiring and influencing others, Right? So saying yes to expressing what matters, saying yes to positive influence. And so the third is healthy and effective communication, Right? So saying yes to having genuine conversations, saying yes to having cultivating more meaningful relationships.

The fourth is the practice of teamwork and collaboration. Yeah. So saying yes to building great teams and cultivating healthy cultures, coming back again and again to that and the fifth practice is achieving results, right? So saying yes to closing the gaps between whatever your end vision is and where you are now. When I come back to this, this practice again and again of having the clarity and the courage of going after things, achieving great results.

But it means noticing and staying with saying yes to that discomfort, of seeing the gaps between what those visions and plans and expectations are and wherever we are now. And the sixth practice is about innovation and change, right? Saying yes to seeing the world through fresh and new eyes and appreciating, appreciating change, appreciating uncertainty and managing skillfully managing transitions.

So how’s it going? How are you doing with this practice of saying yes to everything? Can you open your heart and mind to saying yes to the challenges, the pains, the grief and the possibilities and the joy by saying yes to letting go of habit energy, of regrets and missed opportunities, saying yes to all of the gifts of your life, to loss to death, and to the many possibilities for extraordinary and ordinary health, wellbeing and healing.

Yeah. So exploring exploring this practice of saying yes to everything. Welcome to the Zen Bones Puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story or a Zen cone or a poem, something to contemplate, to think about a story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice, a kind of meditation in daily life.

And so today’s today’s Zen Puzzler, right? So this is and I so appreciate it, looking at looking at, you know, I think Zen Zen is often very, very serious. And I’m I’m taking these very serious Zen teachings, the traditional Zen koans and using the word instead of koan, using the word puzzler as a way of adding a bit of humor to the practice.

I think I think humor was and Zen has a way of not taking itself so seriously, which is one of the things that really attracted me to the practice. Right? Tremendous seriousness, looking, looking at life and death without turning away and at the same time being able to laugh at ourselves, to see the amazing humor and to find the ability to play right in the midst of this tremendous serious seriousness.

And so in some way, the same practice, you know, in some way many of Zen koans are about saying, yes, as I was just talking about. So there’s a famous one of the most famous Zen stories, which I keep coming back to, is where the student asks the teacher, What is the way, what is the way, and how can I find more calm, clarity, equanimity, wisdom, whatever it is, and and this this particular response is ordinary mind.

Ordinary mind is the way which feels to me a lot like saying yes, right. Not not blocking, not making things difficult, not looking for something outside of ourselves, but ordinary mind. Ordinary mind is the way ordinary mind. The mind of seeing uncertainty and change, of also seeing, you know, what we are certain about and the changeless right to the depths of our minds and hearts.

And and as I’m saying this, I’m hearing the sounds of some birds outside my window and I’m anticipating the garbage trucks that pull up every Friday morning in my my home. Ordinary, ordinary mind is the way what is the way ordinary mind saying Yes, same yes to yourself. Yeah. And, you know, part of this part of this traditional koan is not being caught by yes and no thinking by knowing or not knowing.

Right. There’s a line. Right. Knowing knowing is arrogance and not knowing is stupidity. So what is the way? The way is to say yes. The way is to say yes to ordinary extraordinary mind. So you might try practicing this week with ordinary mind coming back to trusting, unpacking, cultivating that ordinary mind is the way. Thank you very much.

I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit my website marclesser.net. This podcast is offered freely and at the same time it relies on financial support from listeners like you. Thank you very much.

 

The post Say Yes to Everything, Part 2 appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Appreciating Change, Uncertainty, and Transitions

In this practice episode Marc talks about working with change, uncertainty, and transition. He unpacks the teachings of Zen teacher Dongshan who describes 3 strateggies for working more skillfully with change: the bird path, the mysterious way, and the open hand. — leaving no trace, appreciating the unknown, and living with an open hand instead of a closed fist. Today’s Zen puzzler is about control, and letting go of control as a path to finding greater ease and freedom.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a biweekly podcast that features conversations with leading spiritual teachers and activists. It’s an exploration of how Zen teachings and practices can inform and support your everyday life.

Please support our work by making a donation @marclesser.net, M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net. It would be most appreciated. Thank you.

[music]

In today’s practice episode, I talk about working with change, uncertainty, and transitions. I unpack the teachings of Zen teacher, Dongshan, who describes three practices. He calls them The Bird Path, The Mysterious Way, and the Open Hand.

Leaving no trace, appreciating the unknown, and living with an open hand instead of a closed fist. Today’s zen puzzler is about control and letting go of control as a path to finding greater ease and freedom. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

Let’s begin today with a short meditation, a short sitting together. Yes, just stopping, pausing. Noticing what it’s like to be here. Bringing some awareness to the body and to the breath. Breathing in and breathing out.

Breathing in. I am aware that I’m breathing in and breathing out. I am aware that I’m breathing out.

This is one of the earliest teachings of the historical Buddha where he says this is the path to finding freedom. Just awareness. Awareness of the breath, awareness of the body, awareness of our thinking, and awareness of the deep connections and patterns of consciousness and of life and keeping it simple.

Just being here. No other place than here. No other time than right now. Feeling the flow of the breath and letting go of our usual to-do lists and judgments and just opening the mind and the heart. Allowing our minds and bodies to function fully without resistance or without anything extra.

Letting go of doing anything extra. Just being here. Feeling the simplicity and the beauty of being alive. Nothing to get or change or improve. Allowing big mind to arise and letting small mind drop away as much as possible.

Big mind, right? The mind that cuts through our usual judgments, criticisms, sense of lacking. Nothing lacking right now. Please feel free to continue sitting. Or you can join me as I continue on this journey. I’m going to ring the bell.

[music]

I want to talk today about appreciating change and uncertainty. Certainly, we are living in a time of tremendous uncertainty, tremendous lack of clarity, and seems even heightened by the pace of change, and the questions about how can we find our own sense of ease in the midst of the challenges of our daily lives, of making a living, of caring for ourselves and for our families.

Finding equanimity and freedom in the midst of uncertainty is a core important practice in the world of Zen.

Again, I think of Zen as a code word for being fully human or for self-actualization and helping others. Finding freedom as a means to benefit everyone, especially the benefit and influence of the people that we love, the people we live with, the people we work with.

I’m often coming back to different Zen teachers for some guidance on how to find more sense of freedom, equanimity in the midst of change and uncertainty, and transitions.

One of my favorite teachers is Dongshan, who’s one of the greatest Zen teachers of all time, who lived in 9th-century China, which was known as the golden age of Zen. He taught what he called three ways of navigating change. These were the Bird Path, the Mysterious Way, and the Open Hand.

I suspect that even during the 9th century in China, there was great, great uncertainty. I think it’s part of how we humans live and exist in the midst of great challenges and drama, emphasizing the need for the bird path, the mysterious way, and the open path.

The bird path, he describes, as the practice of leaving no trace in the midst of activity. It’s like the opposite of a leader or a person who leaves great emotional wakes. The people who seem to live and create stress or anger or feelings of lack of equanimity, feelings of lack and scarcity.

The bird path means communicating with clarity, with conviction, with connection, and with love. For our work, for ourselves, for the people that we influence and are influenced by. It’s about communicating without creating confusion, without anything extra or anything missing.

This bird path starts by noticing and being aware of your emotions. When we feel impatient, explore this feeling, this emotion. When feeling impatient, it’s easy to blame, to communicate dissatisfaction, to put others down.

The bird’s path is to turn these feelings like impatience into a sense of awareness, into care. Recognizing a need to make changes, to shift, to be more clear. This bird path is challenging. It requires, I think, some aspiration to practice.

On a deeper level, this practice, I think, goes beyond clear communication. It’s the practice of being so comfortable in our own skins that we widen our perspective. That includes caring for others. That includes an embodiment of selflessness.

The bird path is a way of acting, more full functioning, cultivating an unhindered body and mind like a bird soaring effortlessly and effectively.

The second practice that Dongshan recommends is the mysterious way. This involves appreciating how much we don’t actually know and finding comfort in this not knowing. At its heart, this is a powerful way to develop greater comfort and effectiveness, right in the midst of change and uncertainty, a skill that we all need right now.

Practicing and embracing the mystery allows us to find our way with more ease and greater confidence, even when there aren’t the usual road signs or patterns to rely on. We’re often making lots of decisions throughout our day in our business lives, in our personal lives, without knowing what will happen.

We weave together the stories to make decisions. We live our lives to make things as explainable as possible. Underneath, we know there is tremendous uncertainty, that the world is mysterious, and that fish swim in the sea, the sun rises and sets.

We start businesses and work collaboratively with people, and things change, and things change. This practice of the mysterious way reminds me one of my books, Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Practice number three is, don’t be an expert.

That none of us are experts in the realm of relationships, human emotions, consciousness. This is part of the mysterious way. When we appreciate the mystery in these realms, we can be more adventurous, learn to thrive, live with gusto right in the midst of not knowing.

The third of Dongshan’s practice is what he calls the open hand. This is a simple and powerful practice. It’s the opposite of working and living with a closed fist. I’ve noticed that many people often, without even realizing it, have their fists closed, their minds and hearts closed, working, living, approaching things with a sense of scarcity, avoiding stress and uncertainty.

This practice of the open hand involves noticing. It means noticing when our fists are closed, noticing our own clinging and rigidity, and having the skill and courage to open your hand to yourself, to others. Opening your heart and your mind.

The practice of the open hand means seeing your work and your life as an offering. Responding generously to needs and problems. Cultivating an attitude of care and service. How do we work with these practices?

One way is to bring to mind current challenges, situations at work or at home where something needs to be changed.

Then to consider how you might integrate and work with these three approaches. You might do some journaling or just talk to someone about what does the bird path look like? What does it mean to leave no trace in the midst of working with these challenges?

How might you use your energy more like a clean bonfire than a bonfire as Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says? Then second, you might write down and list the ways in which you can find ease and confidence right in the midst of uncertainty, right in the midst of the mystery of how things happen. Noticing causes and conditions, being aware of outcomes, but appreciating the mystery.

The third practice is, again, bringing awareness to any time you’re showing up with a closed fist. Noticing and opening your hand. You might even literally close your hand and make a fist, and then slowly open it. Noticing how does it feel when your hand is closed in a fist? How does it feel when you’re opening?

I want to end with a short poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that expresses, I think, this spirit of this Dongshan teaching about working with uncertainty. The poem is called Burning The Old Year.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes, friends tied to the doorknob. Transparent scarlet paper sizzle-like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems, orange swirling flame of days.

So little is a stone. Where there is something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses, and leaves. Only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.

Where there is something and suddenly there isn’t an absence. Shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses, and leaves. Only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Zen Bone puzzler where I will regularly be presenting a story or a Zen cone or a poem, something to contemplate, to think about. A story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice, a meditation in daily life.

I want to introduce today’s Zen puzzler. This is one of my favorite parts of having done and doing this Zen Bones podcast is introducing some lightheartedness and humor. I’m always happy to talk about the Zen puzzler.

To take an expression or poem or thought from the traditional or non-traditional Zen expression and see how we might apply it to our everyday lives, to our relationships, to our work. Today’s Zen puzzler is an expression from Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind that I come back to.

Where he says, “The best way to control your sheep or your cow is to give it a wide pasture. The best way to control your sheep or your cow is to give it a wide pasture.” Interesting. This is much like what I was talking about in terms of how to work with uncertainty and change and transition.

We generally want more control. Of course, sometimes we need to control, sometimes we need boundaries to set clear boundaries. There is often the right place in time for a certain amount of control. Here, he’s suggesting this paradox of controlling by letting go of our usual sense of control and instead creating a wide pasture.

This might even start with ourselves. Instead of trying to control our own thinking, what if we open our– create a wide pasture for our own thinking to have the courage and trust to see what happens?

This is also, I think he’s mostly here talking about in our important relationships with our loved ones, with family, with people we work with, when we have a sense of discomfort and wanting to control, to try creating a wider pasture. Giving people more space.

I think in this talk he says, “It’s important to pay attention. It’s important to really, really pay attention to what happens when we try to control. What happens when we move from trying to control others to giving a wider pasture? That we express and give our care and our attention and our hearts, but letting go of trying to control in the usual way.”

This is the Zen puzzler. The best way to control your sheep or a cow is to give them a wide pasture. See how that might go for you. Maybe try practicing with it this week. Thank you very much

[music]

I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit my website, marclesser.net, M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net. This podcast is offered freely and at the same time, it relies on the financial support from listeners like you. Thank you very much.

[music]

[00:24:50] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Appreciating Change, Uncertainty, and Transitions appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Awe In Everyday Life with Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center.

In this episode we unpack the power of awe – seeing the world fresh and new and how it can benefit our well being, our relationships, and help heal the rifts in our culture. Dacher tells heartfelt personal stories about his own life and the role of awe. We touch on the relationship of mindfulness and awe at work and leadership and in all parts of our lives.

 

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Dr. Keltner is one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists. He is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has over 200 scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. He has written for many popular outlets, from The New York Times to Slate. He was also the scientific advisor behind Pixar’s Inside Out, is involved with the education of health care providers and judges, and has consulted extensively for Google, Apple, and Pinterest, on issues related to emotion and well-being.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]

[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. This is Marc Lesser. Zen Bones is a biweekly podcast that features conversations with leading spiritual teachers and activists, and it’s an exploration of how Zen teachings and practices can inform and support your everyday life. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net. M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net It would be most appreciated. Thank you.

[music]

Dacher Keltner is an American Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. He’s also the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. His new book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. In today’s episode, we unpack the power of awe, seeing the world fresh and new, and how it can benefit our well being, our relationships, and help heal the rifts in our culture. Dacher tells some heartfelt personal stories about his own life and the role of awe. We touch on the relationship of mindfulness and awe at work and in leadership and in all parts of our lives. I bring you Dacher Keltner.

[music]

Dacher, it’s such a pleasure to see you.

[00:01:34] Dacher Keltner: It’s great to see you, Marc, and be in conversation with you again.

[00:01:38] Marc: I was recently asked to write an article for a major CEO magazine, and the topic that they wanted me to write on was how to work effectively with workplace conflicts. I started writing this article, and I said, “The secret sauce, really, to working with conflicts is mindfulness.” Then I proceeded to write about a little exercise of looking at your hand as though you had never seen your hand before.

[00:02:16] Dacher: That’s cool.

[00:02:17] Marc: I was trying to give them a little taste of awe. It made me wonder about ways, without drugs, to give people a taste of awe and also how any thoughts or research or stories you want to tell about conflict, awe, and its relationship to helping us more skillfully meet other people and work skillfully with conflict.

[00:02:48] Dacher: Well, you got to, I believe, the central mindset, if you will, or cognitive orientation to finding awe, Marc, just to see things like you’ve never seen them before. That’s obviously a very Buddhist idea that you’ve been teaching for a long time. We did a study where we asked people to go out on a walk and basically do their regular walk, what we now call an awe walk, with that orientation to what you’re walking through. It brought a lot of awe. It brought a lot of joy. It made these elderly participants in our study experience less pain.

This basic orientation of don’t go into the world with preconceptions, biases, but just imagine things as if you had never seen them, brings you awe to answer your question. Then the other thing for our audience to know we’ve done a lot of research, 26 different countries and you can find awe through this orientation in what I call the eight wonders of life in my book, Awe, which is the moral beauty of other people, collective movement, nature, music, visual design, spirituality, contemplation, and then ideas in life and death.

I think, Marc, if you can adopt that stance toward the world of, “Man, imagine you haven’t seen this before,” and then apply it to music or nature or somebody near you, you’re on your way to a lot of good awe. One of my favorite studies that I report on in this book is we find that brief experiences of awe lead people to polarize their political opponents less and polarize debates over police brutality or abortion less or gun rights. What that means is awe is this antidote, like you suggest, to polarizing conflict, which is one of our real social problems today.

[00:04:48] Marc: I think of it as again, this article that I was writing was about basically saying that even though I was using– Interestingly, I was using the word mindfulness. I think a big component of what we call mindfulness is awe, or is seeing the world fresh is stepping out of our usual patterns. I’ve been rereading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Every time I read it, I see it new. I’m amazed at– There’s a line in there where he says, “The world is its own magic.” In that talk, he says that we see the world in a certain way because everyone around us sees it that way, and that’s why it’s so hard. People don’t generally go around with a sense of awe.

[00:05:45] Dacher: I think that it’s a miracle of human cognition to develop shared understandings of the world. It’s essential to culture and collectives, but at the same time, those shared understandings become expectations and preconceptions and biases and prejudices and can lead us to miss the wonders of the world.

I think that one of the exciting things about awe, and I’ve written a bit about this, and I think people are really contemplating this in the contemplative world is that awe alongside mindfulness, what awe orients you to is all of the systems around you that constitute the world. Ecosystems, pollinating systems, tree systems, social systems, musical systems. Awe adds a layer to our contemplative life of putting you in relation to these systems that really are what I believe to be life. There’s a lot of magic and wonder there at that stance.

[00:06:43] Marc: I want to come back to what you were saying just a few moments ago about the power of doing an awe walk. Again, it’s like, “Why would we walk in any other way?”

[laughter]

[00:06:59] Dacher: Thank you for that reminder.

[00:07:03] Marc: I think especially when we’re in the midst of our busy lives, it’s just an opportunity to make a giant shift. It’s interesting. I generally do that. I think of walking meditation, as they should just call it an awe walk.

[00:07:23] Dacher: [laughs] Yes. You have this mysterious emotion, an ineffable emotion, some people believe rarefied awe. Turns out people feel it a lot, two to three times a week. It’s actually an everyday emotion there to be cultivated as you were suggesting. Virginia Sturm and I, she’s a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco, we’re interested in, like, “How could we just get people to feel awe in the most basic of activities?”

We devised the Awe Walk, and it has your instructions, which is go somewhere new and imagine you hadn’t seen it before and you were a child, and what would you think about it? It produced awe, and it’s just this easy way to find awe, whether you’re in a city or in a beautiful rural area or walking through a garden like Charles Darwin used to do. I have to tell you, it’s interesting that simple activity is really powerful.

When my daughter Seraphina was about 10 or 9 or 8, and this is the origins of the Awe Walk, she first freaked out about the idea of infinity. She’s like, “Oh, my God, space is infinite.” Then she immediately got to like, “Oh, my God, we all die.” [laughs] She had this anxious response, like a lot of young people do to the big ideas. We took awe walks at night. Every night, we would have this ritual of walking up the street, looking at the homes, commenting, the foliage, and then we would touch this cedar tree and think about its life and it gave us awe. I think that’s what awe walks are there to do. Help us find meaning as you were saying.

[00:09:00] Marc: Yes. I’ve been spending more time in Missoula because I have a daughter here, and outside my home here is this amazing linden tree. I can’t help but feel awe seeing this tree. I walk out– The trees here are amazing. Just it’s like they’re different sense than Northern California tree. One of the assignments I often will do is not only see the world through fresh eyes, but see if you can find an object that you never realized was there, find an object and bring it back and we’ll put it on the altar and talk about this object.

I mean, the world is filled with objects as well.

[00:09:46] Dacher: It’s interesting, Marc, I love your example of the hand, too. I’ve had four or five epiphanies just looking at the hand like, “Oh, my God.” One of my favorites so powerful that has emerged in the conversations around awe, one of the things we find is people are really moved to awe by the moral beauty of fellow human beings. How we sacrifice, how we’re courageous, how we overcome poverty or racism.

One of the reliable sources of that, is this everyday contemplation of other people where you just look into a stranger’s eyes. I remember in London was giving a talk on awe and this guy said, you know, he started tearing up like, “Wow, I was on the tube here and I just looked over and made eye contact with this woman and we almost teared up. Wow, there is shared humanity here.” That’s just looking afresh at what is around us to find awe and really stuck with me.

[00:10:45] Marc: Also in the trainings that I used to do really regularly at Google and other places, we’d have to work up to it. It’s funny, I remember in the beginning we tried having people look into each other’s eyes too early on, and they would go running out of the room because it would flop. By the second day we could then get people to create a little bit more safety and l ooking into another person’s eye, we did it with a just me kind of meditation. It was meant to be experiencing empathy but really what really did it was an experience of awe, even though we weren’t using– there was I think an unintended consequence of looking in another person’s eye and doing a just like me guided meditation was this feeling of awe.

[00:11:40] Dacher: Yes. One of the really interesting new discoveries in the science that I write about in Awe is this inner subjective sense of collective self that develops early in a child’s growth. I think it begins with eye contact, mutual gaze, and then the synchronization of physiology, the activation of vagal tone, and suddenly through mutual eye contact done right, as you suggest, you’re in this shared mental state which is a pathway to awe. It’s profound that we can find it so easily on a London tube to go to a talk.

[00:12:18] Marc: Interesting too the connection between awe and the word sacred. Seeing the world as sacred. Again, how this has a role in being more effective with conflict or as you were saying, not getting so caught in our divisive, the divisiveness in our country and politics. If we could just find a way to give everyone a taste of the sacred, a taste of the awe. Man, you got work to do.

[00:12:51] Dacher: I’m going to give psychedelics to the congress and get them to feel collective or no. I’m excited. This work on awe has really opened up just as you were suggesting that a rereading of Zen Buddhism– I just had some anesthesiologists reach out to me like, “Wow, surgery and anesthesiology is all awe. It’s this radical alteration of a mental state. You come out of it, and how to guide people to appreciate that.” There’s a lot of good work with awe right now in trying to get communities to recognize what’s sacred and to revere it, so I think it’s a useful idea.

[00:13:28] Marc: Well, you mentioned psychedelics but I don’t really want to go there because where I really want-

[00:13:32] Dacher: Neither do I.

[00:13:33] Marc: Where I really want to go is without drugs, and this is the simple things about awe walk, seeing your hand. It’s interesting what you mentioned about your daughter, and the connection of awe and this larger question of how we swim and live in birth and life and death. It’s interesting this is where in this talk on the world is its own magic, that Shunryu Suzuki does.

It’s all kind of a setup toward getting us to experience that. He makes this statement actually that we’re always here. We’ve been here before we’re born, and we’ll be here after we die. That it’s a delusion to think that we appear and can disappear. He goes on to say that if we can embody that reality, we will live without fear. Which I think is a beautiful aspiration for how to actually live in the world.

[00:14:37] Dacher: Yes, thanks for bringing that up, Marc. I wrote this book, and you’re friends with my dad, and we lost my brother Rolf. He and I had this magical wonderful childhood raised in kind of a counterculture type family, and he was in some sense my moral compass. He provided me a bearing in life, and when he passed away, when watching him die, I felt a lot of awe at the mystery of it all and it caught me off guard.

Then I fell into a state of awelessness where I just was lost without him. Went in search of awe and the ways that we’re talking about real contemplation, observation, reflection, soul searching. It led me to what you’re saying, which is I’m a scientist, a biological reductionist, but I felt him in me, I sensed him around me. His being continues, it goes onward and outward as Walt Whitman says, and led me to a different view, much aligned with what you’re saying which is that life always continues. It’s just this cycle that we’re part of.

I have to say, Marc, I’ve been in some ways genetically an anxious person, and in that process I don’t feel fear about a lot of things that I used to feel fear about. I really grasped with my very narrow linear western scientific mind the idea of cycles and it changed me, so I’m glad you’re bringing it up.

[00:16:10] Marc: No, thank you for sharing that and your own vulnerability talking about your brother and your feelings about that. It’s so interesting that you talk about yourself as the scientific mind, and writing a book about awe. It’s like I’m trying to put these things together.

[00:16:29] Dacher: So am I. [laughs] It’s just what has been forced upon me. That was what was really– and it’s interesting and thanks for bringing that up. I had all this great science on awe, and it’s just a fertile time for the scientific study of awe. We’re learning a lot about the nervous system and it’s place in human evolution. I think the core of the book is stories like we’re telling here.

That first person stories, first person experiences were– as William James understood when he wrote about the ecstasy of religion, and is cultivated in a lot of Buddhist thinking. Those first person stories really get to what awe is, and so I had to gather a lot of those too alongside the science to understand this amazing emotion.

[00:17:18] Marc: I’m also thinking about– I was watching a new series on Netflix yesterday, and I was just in awe of how creative we human beings are.

[00:17:31] Dacher: Oh my God.

[00:17:31] Marc: Putting together– just amazing, the creativity. I’ll share with you. One of the shows I was watching that– I had to watch it by myself because it’s too dark for my wife to watch it, but the show is called Barry. Which-

[00:17:48] Dacher: I’ve heard about it. I haven’t seen it.

[00:17:50] Marc: It’s about a hitman who stumbles into an acting class, and really wants to get out of being a hitman and wants to be an actor, and the characters you realize of course– so stepping back, they’re all just acting. There’s all these layers and the hit men are over the top characterized characters. I was almost in tears watching just how amazingly– who wrote this? Who thought of this? We human beings and so much that’s on is just awe inspiring if we are– but we have to I think– it’s like seeding awe in our own being so that we can see everything through that lens.

[00:18:44] Dacher: Awe is a lens upon reality, and it’s a way that we can construct our lives. When I was in grief having lost my brother, I had the realization that you just described, Marc. We live in many ways in the best of times for awe. We can find it in art from around the world, music from around the world, incredible dramas that are the reflection of human creativity, scientific discoveries of the cell and gene editing that are mind blowing.

I had to put that lens on my eyes, that I’ve got to go listen to music that brings me meaning and awe. I’ve got to watch shows. I watch Game of Thrones again, just like whoa, whoa, whoa just the spectacle of it all. I think that’s in some sense a contemplative choice we have, that the science tells us is really good for us. I agree with you, there’s so much to marvel at right now.

[00:19:43] Marc: Yes. Well, is there anything else that you would like to bring into this time right now? Anything you want to do, or offer, or say about this practice, or this being, or any story you want to tell?

[00:19:56] Dacher: I guess it’s so fascinating, Marc, because my dad gave me Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind when I was in high school, I think, and it blew me away. I read it several times. I’ve been very influenced by Buddhism, thankfully. It was interesting to do the science of awe over my career and write this book. Some of its core ideas align with what you’ve been teaching. It’s everywhere. Awe is everywhere. It’s the world. It is about pausing and reflecting and looking at things anew, as you said.

All I’ll add is the science tells us is it’s so good for our minds and bodies. It reduces inflammation. It’s good for your heart. Helps us handle conflicts, which we started with. It makes us feel less stressed, makes us feel like we have more time. I just feel, in this work, this is good news for our hard times. It makes you more environmentally friendly. Eat less red meat when you feel awe. It’s a good emotion to be talking about and I’m grateful you’ve brought it into the community.

[00:21:04] Marc: I’m grateful for the science. It’s one of the things that somehow, I guess it was now, I don’t know, 15 years ago I found myself standing up in front of rooms of Google engineers, co-teaching with scientists. I became in awe of science.

[00:21:20] Dacher: I love science. 

[00:21:21] Marc: Interesting the realm of science and the realm of what’s in our experience and where those things are vastly different and where they overlap. Man, so awe, I think. That’s why I so love the work that you do, which is that the rigor of the science and yet you bring in this childlike quality of not knowing even what the science will show you.

[00:21:48] Dacher: Thank you. It’s funny in the end, the word that kept returning to me in writing awe is mystery. Awe is an emotion that is animated by mystery. I don’t understand this. Then the idea is that it takes you to unfold into other mysteries. I was really grateful for that because I’ve often shied away from mystery and awe opened me up to how wonderful that is.

[00:22:18] Marc: Well, thank you, Dacher. Thank you for just who you are and your good work.

[00:22:22] Dacher: Oh.

[00:22:23] Marc: May your good health continue.

[00:22:26] Dacher: To you too, Marc. It’s always good to be with you. Thank You.

[00:22:28] Marc: Take care.

[00:22:29] Dacher: Bye-bye.

[music]

[00:22:35] Marc: I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work and my new book, Finding Clarity, you can visit my website, marclesser.net, M-A-R-C-L-E-S-S-E-R.net. This podcast is offered freely, and at the same time, it relies on the financial support from listeners like you. Thank you very much.

[music]

[00:23:07] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Awe In Everyday Life with Dacher Keltner appeared first on Marc Lesser.

The World is Its Own Magic, Part II

In this episode we do a short meditation on finding more spaciousness, as a way of being. Marc gives a short talk on integrating the ordinary world and the sacred world, including the practice of setting an intention, practicing spaciousness, accountability, and ongoing learning. Today’s Zen puzzler is about seeing the world through the lens of non-duality.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones. Ancient wisdom for modern times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. The world is its own magic. In today’s episode, we begin with a short guided meditation and then I give a talk on the topic, the world is its own magic.

Unpacking this core zen teaching of non-duality, and how when we let go of our usual sense of gaining ideas and the dualistic world, a world of magic, the world of reality opens up to us. If we could just embody this teaching, this way of being, will have more courage and less fear. Today’s zen puzzler is on the same topic, seeing the world through the lens of non-duality. The world is its own magic. I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

Marc Let’s begin with some sitting practice.

[bell rings]

[silence]

Marc In this practice of pausing, stopping, dropping in. The theme for today is, the world is its own magic. I’ve always appreciated this expression from Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki or Suzuki Roshi, the world is its own magic. Can you feel it right now? Starting just by bringing attention to the body, bringing attention to your breath. Interesting the duality of our language. Your body, your breath. I usually prefer the body, the breath.

Somehow there’s something a bit more magical, awesome, extraordinary about this sense of our bodies and our breath. No sense of belonging. For right now, starting just keeping it simple, letting go of the busyness of the day and being here, checking in. Checking in with the body. Checking in with the breath or just noticing what it’s like to be here, alive, breathing or being breathed, being embodied in this body right now. [silence]

Can you feel it? Can you feel your breath? Sense of the breath touching your nostrils. The air slightly cooler as you inhale, slightly warmer with each exhale. Bringing attention to the breath, using the breath as an anchor. Noticing the full cycles, even starting with one full cycle of an inhale and an exhale. [silence] As much as possible, cultivating an approach, an attitude of curiosity. Curiosity about this breath, this body. Warm-hearted curiosity.

Part of this practice is reducing, scanning for threats, reducing our inherent judgments, negativity bias, and instead cultivating more warm-heartedness, acceptance, self-love, self-compassion. See if you can allow those warm feelings to arise. Not forcing anything, just allowing. You can always come back to the breath, to the body. Playing and experimenting in this realm of ordinary and extraordinary. The world is its own magic when we can get out of our way.

I invite you to continue with the sitting practice or you can accompany me, I’m going to ring the bell and make a shift.

[bell rings]

[music]

Marc: The world is its own magic. I often begin leadership trainings and workshops by asking two questions that are designed in a way to go deeper, to clarify intentions and one’s personal visions. The first question is, what brings you here? This is a question about naming what’s most important in this moment and looking at the ordinary world. What are you seeking to accomplish during this time? What is your vision of a successful use of our time together right now?

The second question is, what really brings you here? This question asks you to articulate your larger, even existential goals. Again, it might be, what brings me to this profession or to this life? I ask this question in workshops because. I want people to look more deeply. To be more aware of values, to cut through the usual gaining ideas, the usual business speak about analysis and to go more deeply into your heart, to get a bit more real, a bit more vulnerable, to touch something with a little bit more depth.

I’m reminded of a time several years ago when I was asked to facilitate a few hours of a two-day retreat of a group of 16 CEOs. As I entered, this was, I think the early part of day two of this retreat, someone came out and said, “This retreat is not going well. Welcome.” I walked in and looked around at this group of CEOs and I could feel the tension. Apparently, they were working together to try to come up with a strategic plan for an organization in which they were all on the board of.

It was they were having trouble aligning. There was a good deal of tension. I decided, of course, to do what I am best at and I said, “Let’s sit.” We started with a few minutes of just being quiet. Then I got them into small groups, and I gave them three questions for each of them to spend about five minutes asking and answering in the group without being interrupted. Those questions were, why are you here on the planet? How is it going? What actions will you take in response to your first two questions?

I walked around, noticed what was happening in each of these four small groups of four people. Most people really entered this question. There were tears and real, real deep feeling about, why are you here on this planet? Why are you here? How’s it going, and what will we do? These questions have a way of shifting from the ordinary world to a more sense of depth. There’s many, many motivations for why we meditate, why we do what we do, why we come to workshops.

Sometimes in the work world, people come because the boss told them they had to, or they want to pick up some leadership tools. These motivations maybe emerge through this first question of, why are you here? The second question, why are we really here allows us to go deeper. Even this question of here. Here’s where it gets a bit magical. That there’s a way in which in reality, we humans are not quite so rooted in time and space.

What do we mean by here? What do we mean by here? What do we mean by now? We are magical creatures. Our ability to live outside of the usual constraints of time, usual constraints of space. You might practice a little bit with these two questions, what brings you here? What really brings you here? Maybe do some journal writing. Maybe take a few minutes. 12 minutes, I’ve noticed is a perfect time for writing in one’s journal. You might explore what brings you here, and what really brings you here.

Again, you can define here in several ways. Why are you here writing? Why are you with your current partner or family? Why are you here with your job or your company, your profession? Then step back, what is it that brings you alive? Why are you here now on this planet? You might consider various major arenas in your life and ask, what brings you here? What really brings you here? I love how Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki talks about this topic of the world is its own magic.

He says, “You are living in this world as an individual, but before you take the form of a human being, you are already here. Always here.” We are always here. You think before you were born that you were not born, but how is it possible for you to appear in this world when there is no you? Because you are already there, you can appear in this world. This is rather amazing. It just makes so much sense, but we somehow get [unintelligible 00:14:18]. This is not how people generally think.

We were not trained and brought up to consider, to think, to embody this sense that we have always been here, and will always be here. This is not some made-up thing. What’s made up is the way that we usually live, the way that we generally think of past, present, and future. The way that we think of here and there. He goes on to say, “It’s not possible for something to vanish.” You may think that when you die, you disappear, that you no longer exist.

Even though you vanish, something which is existent cannot be non-existent. The world is its own magic. He goes on to say that if we can embody this, we will live with tremendous courage and tremendous sense of fearlessness. Not that we won’t have problems. We’ll have plenty of problems, but we will have a completely and utterly different approach to how we engage in our lives. How we engage in the world with our problems. The world is indeed its own magic.

I want to share a poem by David White, that I also think is beautiful way of bringing out the magic, especially the magic of here. The magic of place and time. The poem is about, Camino de Santiago, the sacred journey in Spain. The poem is called The Road to Santiago.

For the Road to Santiago
Don’t make new declarations
about what to bring
and what to leave behind.

Bring what you have,

You were always going
that way anyway,
You were always
going there all along,

So bring what you have.

Bring what you have is a way of encouraging us to appreciate everything. It’s an invitation to start over. To let go of our usual narratives and enter into a dialogue with the known as well as the unknown. The line, “You are always going there anyway.” Says to me, “Let go. Trust. Take a look at your life from a deeper vantage point. See the threads and connections of our deepest sense of our lives that don’t change, that carry us from birth and death.”

Again, this same message, same underlying message as Shunryu Suzuki, the world is its own magic. Bring what you have, bring what you have. Allow yourself to be ordinary, extraordinary, magical right now.

[music]

Marc: Welcome to the Zen Bones Puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story or a Zen poem or a poem. Something to contemplate, to think about. A story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice. A kind of meditation in daily life. I want to introduce today’s Zen puzzler. This is one of my favorite parts of having done and doing this Zen Bones podcast is introducing some lightheartedness and humor that’s also combined with some sense of depth as well.

Introducing traditional and non-traditional kind of Zen stories or some particular line that comes from the Zen tradition and making it more actionable. Something that we can integrate into our daily lives. Today’s Zen puzzler is this line from a talk that Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki gave. The talk was one called, right effort. The line that jumps out at me in today’s Zen puzzler is the world is its own magic.

You might just write that down or even in your morning or whenever you do your daily meditation, allow these words to arise and see what comes up. Whatever might emerge for you in this expression, the world is its own magic. In the talk that he does, he starts out by talking about effort. He says, “If your effort is headed in the wrong direction, and if you’re not aware of this, this is diluted effort.” The effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to nonachievement. If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality to it. Just to do something without any particular effort is enough. This is very tricky, beautiful, complex, and simple territory. Something about, I’ve noticed that when I’m cooking, for instance, I envision the food, the meal that I want to create, and I gather all the ingredients. Then there’s something beautiful about then just being in the moment, and a sense of just enjoying chopping and cutting and cooking.

Then I come back, I come back to my original vision, and I notice how little by little my vision might change, I let go of it. I come back to it. I think there’s something about this in how we show up in all parts of our lives. He says, when you make some special effort to achieve something, some excessive-quality, something extra is involved. We should try to let go of excessive things. He says this point is really important and quite subtle.

He says, because all of us are doing the same thing, we make the mistake of not even realizing how much we are caught by our extra effort. This creates problems. He talks about not being involved in a dualistic idea and making our practice less dualistic. He then somehow ties this to this profound idea of life and death and saying, it’s not possible for something to vanish. You may think that when you die, you disappear. You no longer exist.

Even though it looks like you vanish, something is existent. Something that exists cannot be non-existent. This is where he adds that line in this talk on right effort, the world is its own magic. Part of this magic is seeing that we’ve always been here. We’re always in the stream of life. Even before we were born, we were here. We’re here for this short time when we look like we’re separate, when have feelings, when have problems, and then at some point, we will return to this stream that we were in before we were born.

This is the one way to talk about the world is its own magic, but I’m really interested in you exploring it and what does it mean to you? There’s no one answer these Zpuzzlers are meant as ways of opening us, helping us to go deeper and explore. Try on for this day or this week, or this life, the world is its own magic. Thank you.

[music]

Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:24:12] [END OF AUDIO]

The post The World is Its Own Magic, Part II appeared first on Marc Lesser.

The Power of Commitment with Lynne Twist

Lynne Twist has been a recognized global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability for more than forty years. She is also the cofounder of the Pachamama Alliance and founder of the Soul of Money Institute.

In today’s episode Lynn and Marc explore the power of commitment – on many levels, personal, relationships, work, and most of all the power of living a committed life, working toward something larger than ourselves. Lynne talks about how she arrived at the work of environmental education and her commitment to end the climate crises.

 

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Lynne Twist is the founder of the Soul of Money Institute and author of the best-selling book The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life, and her newest book, Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself.

Over the past 40 years Lynne has worked with over 100,000 people in 50 countries. Her clients include: Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, the International Unity Church, Charles Schwab, United Way, The National Black theater of Harlem, Harvard University and others.

She has been a featured speaker for the United Nations Beijing Women’s Conference, State of the World Forum, and Synthesis Dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, among others. Lynne is the recipient of the prestigious “Woman of Distinction” award from the United Nations.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]

[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

Lynne Twist has been recognized as a global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability for more than 40 years. She’s the co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance and founder of the Soul of Money Institute. In today’s episode, we explore the power of commitment, on many levels, the personal and relationships in our work, and most of all, the power of living a committed life, working towards something larger than ourselves. Lynne talks about how she arrived at the work of environmental education and healing and her deep commitment to ending the climate crisis.

[music]

Lynne, it’s really a pleasure to be with you. It’s been a while and always I’m really happy to see you.

[00:01:22] Lynne Twist: Happy to see you too, Marc. Thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. I’m delighted to have a conversation with you.

[00:01:30] Marc: I love the topic of both of your books are topics that are, I think, close to my heart and also, I think, immensely important in today’s world about money and the right use of money, the soul of money, and your latest book about living a committed life. It’s interesting, in a language that’s sometimes used, and I’m curious as to what you think of this, in the Zen world, they sometimes say living a life of vow and that one way that a big shift in our way of being is from living from habit energy to more freedom, more a life of vow.

As I’ve been reading your book about it’s interesting the relationship between commitment and freedom, that somehow, once we’re committed, we’re more free. How does that strike you, the language of vow and freedom and commitment?

[00:02:39] Lynne: Oh, interesting. I’ve never heard the life of vow. Is that a Buddhist term?

[00:02:43] Marc: It comes from the Buddhist world. There’s a book that was written by a Buddhist Zen teacher, the book is called Living by Vow. It has parallels, of course, with your book. Yes, it’s an emphasis, I think, on the inner journey. What I love about your book is that it’s the inner journey and the outer journey as well. Actually, the connection between our vow and taking action in the world.

[00:03:16] Lynne: Yes. Wow. That’s so interesting to hear that word vow. It sounds different to me and more religious than commitment, more secular, but also can be obviously very, very deeply rooted to people’s faith, whatever it is. The word vow just brings up all kinds of different images for me when I think about it. Maybe because I was raised a Catholic and priests and nuns were part of my childhood. I always thought, “Oh God, you’re supposed to do that.” That’s what you’re supposed to do. [chuckles]

[00:03:54] Marc: Commitment. It will stay with commitment.

[00:03:57] Lynne: I love the word vow. That’s beautiful. My experience, really, which I write about, my own experience and the experience that I’m having in the observing or knowing or engaging with or collaborating with people that I deeply respect is that they, and hopefully me, are living what I call a committed life, which is that we’re not governed by the whims of our desires or the negative/positive thoughts that run around your brain so much as we are by a deep and profound commitment or calling.

When you’re rooted in a deep and profound commitment or calling, you have the courage and wherewithal and through line, you could say, to use a normal word, to not be seduced as easily. It’s not that you don’t get seduced from time to time. I love French fries and I love sleeping in and I love all kinds of things. You don’t get seduced as easily by the powers that push us around in the culture, patriarchy, colonialism, powers that have framed life for so long.

We’re all struggling with those things. They’re huge, huge systems and structures of thinking that we’re all caught in. I was just on a call about that. That’s why it’s coming up for me. Also, habits like interrupting people and not listening to them fully because you’re in a hurry and you want to get your thing in, you want to say what you want to say, or being grumpy and taking it out on other people and blaming them.

All these things that are so human, I do them regularly, like we all do, but I don’t find them as seductive if I’m rooted in my own commitment, my commitment to a world that works for everyone with no one and nothing left out, a commitment to give and receive love in every interaction, a commitment to, from the Pachamama Alliance, an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. I find myself realizing that I’ve been so fortunate in my life to take on or to be given and then receive big commitments that put my petty concerns about myself in the background and my commitment in the foreground.

That’s what I call freedom when I say freedom. Because when I’m not in touch with my bigger commitments, my commitments larger than my own life starring me, I do get bombarded and pushed around and manipulated by, does she like me? Did I say the right thing? Am I too fat? Am I getting too old? Thoughts that debilitate and hamper and obstruct and obfuscate your relationship with the beauty and joy of the world. When I’m in my calling, in my this is why I’m alive, this is what I came here to contribute to, this is who I am, I feel free to express myself. I feel trustworthy and so then I trust myself. I stop doubting and questioning and worrying, and I’m in action.

It’s often like I say, worry is a form of negative prayer. Have you ever heard that phrase that comes from Michael Beckwith? I love that. When I realized when I’m worried about my kids, worried about whether or not I’m going to be able to raise the money that I need for my target, and I put the worry in the background and I just get into action, I don’t have time to worry. I’m in action raising the money. I’m in action talking to my kids about the things that I need to tell them. I’m making the world work, whether it’s on a small scale or a large scale.

I’m suggesting in my book, and I’m suggesting, maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but I found it to be so useful for myself and some of the many, many thousands of people I’ve worked with, that having a big commitment that calls to your soul, that makes your heart sing, brings you close to tears, rather than something to be afraid of because you’ll get stuck in something and your options will shut down.

When we try to keep our options open, we’re going sideways. Which option should I entertain? Which option should I keep open? It’s almost like going sideways. You find yourself free to flow into the future toward what you’re committed to. Then suddenly everything is clear and the choices are obvious. It’s not should I or shouldn’t I, it’s I am. That’s the long answer to a short question.

[00:09:17] Marc: I can’t help but think about the various levels that commitment operates on. There’s committed to myself or committed to my own growth and character building. There’s committed to my relationships in a marriage or any important relationship. It’s interesting, as you were saying, how different it is when we’re committed versus looking around for other options. The work that I do these days working inside of companies and with executives, it’s amazing the difference between someone who’s fully committed to the workplace, their particular team, their particular organization. Then you’re talking about, what you were aiming at I think was more our life energy, our life commitment.

I want to just say just a couple of words, people who are listening, some may, some may not know about one of the major projects that is a big part of your life, the Pachamama Alliance, and what I think of it as the commitment toward both helping these Indigenous people in Ecuador, and then out of that, training people in environmental education as a way of shifting the consciousness and actions of the world in terms of making some real traction in the climate emergency that we’re facing, and beautiful, the stories and your life, the way that you’ve been for so many years committed and taking action in this realm on a very large and important scale.

[00:11:08] Lynne: Thank you. It’s been a privilege to be able to really declare that I’ve been called to the Amazon. It wasn’t something I had on my agenda, so it’s a beautiful example of what I’m saying. Because I was working on hunger and poverty and I really dedicated myself to ending world hunger, that was a call for me, still is, but there was a whole series of events that I think I’ve told you about of mystical signs that I received and dreams and visions that came from the Amazon rainforest where I’d never been.

I didn’t speak Spanish. I wasn’t even thinking about the Amazon. The Indigenous people from the Amazons, almost all the tribes, I think probably 100% of them in the Amazon are what are called dream cultures. The way they communicate is through dreams, both dreams that we have at night, and they dream people to them. I was lucky enough, fortunate enough, blessed enough, I don’t know how to phrase it, but to be dreamed to the Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

That was so life-changing for me and also my husband, Bill, that we did what we needed to do to disengage from what we were doing and completed in a way that we didn’t leave it in the lurch and begin to take on this request, invitation, partnership with the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Out of that engagement, out of that collaboration, we now work with 30 Indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon. 30 nations actually, that straddle Ecuador and Peru, in an area called the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon rainforest.

Sacred Headwaters, meaning this is the place at the base of the vast Andes mountain range on the western side of the continent where the waters come out of those mountains, many of which are active volcanoes, snow-capped active volcanoes, dynamic waters that flow out of those mountains that have actually begun and source the entire Amazon rainforest and river system that stretches all the way across the South American continent. It’s larger than the United States. It spans nine countries. Is a giant part of our ecosystem and ends up being the source of that ecosystem, which is the source of our climate system.

We feel so grateful. Really, almost makes me tear up telling you this. I’ve said this a million times, I think we’ve been called to work at the source of life, to preserve the long-term sustainability of life on this planet by preserving the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon, which source the Amazon system, which sources our climate along the oceans. I feel deeply, deeply called to that work, and had no idea how to do it. No clue. How do you save the Amazon rainforest? How do you preserve it? How do you get the world to wake up to the way we’re living that’s destroying the very life support system on which we depend?

Not knowing how to do it is actually useful because then your own agenda doesn’t get in the way because you have to surrender to what I’ll call source, what I’ll call the commitment. Once that commitment is made, as the famous Murray quote, all manner of things start to show up to support you in fulfilling your commitment. It’s like a magic wand gets waved over your head and suddenly the right people appear and circumstances start to shift and things start to show up that guide you, particularly when you don’t know what you’re doing, which is the case for me.

It’s miraculous. I don’t mean it’s without its challenges, there’s plenty of them, but challenges that you know you can meet, or that you feel you will meet with some measure of humility.

[00:15:44] Marc: The power. I’ve experienced several times the power of commitment. I started a calendar greeting card company called Brush Dance, and I completely threw my heart and soul into that. Investors showed up and executives showed up to help me run it. The same was true back in the beginning of starting Search Inside Yourself. Amazing how the power– People I think feel it and are drawn. You’re describing, I think there’s maybe a mystical element but also a very practical element. I think that the energy of commitment is almost contagious.

[00:16:34] Lynne: Yes, I agree. I’d love to hear your story about Search Inside Yourself. I’m sure people have heard it from your podcast, but it’s amazing that you were at the very heart of that. My God, and the beast. [unintelligible 00:16:50] the beast.

[00:16:51] Marc: From the outside, sometimes we look like, “Oh, we’re just a training company. We’re doing mindfulness and emotional intelligence trainings in the corporate world.” The deeper commitment was around scaling meditation. What if we could really get millions or billions of people around the world to live a more sacred life, a more mindful life through the practice of meditation?

Again, it’s I think very similar to the work that you’re doing, but from a slightly different vantage point. I think we need people doing the work that you’re doing, protecting the Amazon, working with Indigenous people, and scaling environmental awareness and environmental education. Your trainings very much include the inner work, that inner shift. Part of that is alignment and helping people feel their own commitment toward the planet, toward our environment. There’s something about stepping outside of our day-to-day concerns and working towards something larger.

[00:18:17] Lynne: It’s very healthy, it feels good, and it creates a field, a field for participation. It’s almost like a magnet. I once had a mentor, she’s still my mentor in many ways, Joan Holmes, who was the CEO and president of The Hunger Project. She used to use this wonderful metaphor. She said, “If there’s a bunch of iron filings on a table, if you can imagine, little iron filings just scattered all around the table. Then you go get a magnet and you put it at one end of the table, the little iron filings start to line up with the direction of the magnet. That’s when the vibration is pure and sourceful. There’s a field, and things start to line up with that field.”

I learned that from The Hunger Project because Werner Erhard, who created The Hunger Project and really invented it with Buckminster Fuller and John Denver and some others, but Werner’s special genius and Bucky’s special genius really created that if we made a commitment to end world hunger, if the worldwide community could commit to it, we would start working on it so differently. We wouldn’t be feeling sorry for hungry people and being sentimental about it and doing the best we can and pitting them, we would realize they’re on the front lines of something that we can all participate in.

That a billion people are hungry all the time, most of them children, is an indictment of the human family. What’s wrong? What is off about the way we’re living that we would allow that? If we commit to ending it, we’ll start to work on it in a way that’s effective and powerful. It’s true, once that commitment was made, first by The Hunger Project, but we can’t take credit for it exactly, there was a field, and then CARE, UNICEF, Save the Children, the big giant organizations with billions of dollars and millions of people started to speak and work in a different way.

Now, when I started working at The Hunger Project in 1977, the deaths were 44,000 a day on a planet with just over 4.3 billion people. Now we have eight billion people and the deaths are almost twice as many. The deaths of hunger and starvation are down from 44,000 people a day, most of them children under 5, to 12,000. That was not predictable. Not predictable. 12,000 is still way too many every day. Oh my God, on a planet that’s twice as populated. It’s incredible.

Now, I’m not saying The Hunger Project produced that result, I wouldn’t ever presume that, but we were in the business, you could say, of generating a worldwide commitment out of which new kinds of thinking and action and participation would begin to emerge. It did. It’s incredible.

[00:21:46] Marc: I love how you told the story of the metal filings and then you illustrated it with the real-world commitment toward hunger and how all these energy organizations, money, like those filings all came together and produced some– I hadn’t heard those statistics. As you say, it’s sad, why is anyone going hungry today, and amazing the progress that’s been made over the years.

[00:22:17] Lynne: It’s so important in today’s world to acknowledge progress because our world is in such disarray with so many breakdowns. When we acknowledge progress and we really see the magnitude of the progress, it creates the strength and courage to deal with the magnitude of the challenges.

[00:22:40] Marc: Yes. It’s one of the things that I appreciate about your book around commitment, the talking about, not ignoring the pains and challenges, but also not ignoring the progress and the possibilities and the hope. Those might seem obvious, but I think they’re enormous, I think. Because it’s hard to really feel the pain, to really feel it, to really see it, whether it’s hunger, the racial divides that are still with us. The article I just read in today’s New York Times about how there’s plastic in our bodies, there’s just micro– It’s like, “Oh man, it’s horrible,” yet we keep finding solutions and possibilities for the big, big problems and phenomenal possibility and solution.

[00:23:40] Lynne: There’s lots of work to do. We’re not going to be bored. [laughs]

[00:23:51] Marc: I wonder, Lynne, of all of the things that are happening, what is one thing that gives you hope right now? What gives you some sense of possibility and gives you a sense of hope in your life or this world?

[00:24:08] Lynne: Well, I’m standing for ending the climate crisis. Ending it, not mitigating it, not doing the best we can, not figuring out how to adapt. All of those things are included, but I think that like ending world hunger, ending the climate crisis, really saying so, we can do it since we created it. We really did create it. It’s a human-caused problem. We can not only reverse it, but we can restore this planet to a livable, thriving, pre-industrial-level thriving world. I think that’s what I want to commit my life to now. It inspires me to even think that thought.

I’m in my senior chapter. When I look at that opportunity to work at that depth of what’s possible and generate that possibility, I want to generate that not only for myself but for people younger than myself. I’m lucky enough to have connections and opportunities, as you do, with my own children and grandchildren, but also with large organizations that are populated by people in their 20s, 30s, 40s who are in the prime of their productivity.

I call myself someone who hasn’t retired and never will. I keep getting re-fired up by the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and I will probably till I’m in my grave. I’m so inspired by the energy and the power of young people and their command of the use of technology. While I struggle to get myself on the right microphone for this call, it’s just natural, it’s like breathing for them. Our technologies, as scary as they are for someone like me in my age group, they’re so amazing what they can do when you’re conversant with them, when you as you are, because your years with Google, when they’re at your fingertips, they almost extend your capacity to be useful.

With the energy of source, I’ll call it, the energy of, you might call it mindfulness and integrity, what we can do with all this is just astounding. I’m super inspired by that. When I get afraid of AI and ChatGPT and blockchain and all that stuff, I need to pull back and say, “Look, this is here. It’s not going to go away. Let’s love it into being that which we use to transform the world, rather than fear it and try to mitigate its power, keep it away from our little ones.” I have done that. I’ve done both, but it’s here to stay. It’s not going away. It’s not like we can stop it. We can use it. We can harness its beauty, its power. We being particularly people younger than I.

I feel very inspired by, I think as every generation in my age group for eons is always inspired by the youth. That inspires me too. I’ll say that. Then I’ll also say, I’m seeing and hearing from the biggest, most egregious corporate powers a revelation and recognition that they have to totally, with some humility and with some courage, make such enormous changes that it looked impossible to them for so long and now they know they can’t put it off for one more minute. I love that.

I hate that it’s so late, let’s say that, to be honest, but it’s never too late. It’s never too late. No matter what we say the window is, it’s never too late to commit to transforming your business, your life, your way, your consciousness. I’m really inspired by that. The people that used to be the most troublesome for me have become the way through, could be very much the way through, coupled with this enormous surge of power of technology and the enormous surge of commitment and beauty and love for this planet that’s coming from younger generations.

Finally, that we’re all on the playing field together. There’s never been a time in history that I know of where so many generations have been on the playing field, not one turning the baton over to the other, no. Look at you, look at me, we’re not, “Good luck, kids.” No. We’re on the field. That intergenerational power of it looks like you could say four or five generations working together, maybe for the first time in history, is probably what we need and also such a beautiful time to be alive. I’m inspired by all those things.

[00:29:59] Marc: I love the commitment to ending, to solving this climate crisis. I think it was probably many people, but I think of Paul Hawken who said something like, “If you’re not pessimistic, you’re not paying attention, but if you’re not optimistic, you’re not paying attention either.” I don’t know why, but as you were speaking the thought, a book that really has inspired me from years ago is a book about the Wright brothers and this crazy commitment they had to figure out how humans could fly.

People really thought they were insane. Like, “Humans can’t fly.” Now that we take for granted getting in an airplane and flying across the world. Of course, it turns out that flying is a miracle and has its shadow side. It’s part of spewing carbons into the air, but we’re now, I think, committed to solving some of these huge problems. The power of commitment on all levels.

[00:31:15] Lynne: It’s incredible, the power of commitment. Really incredible. It’s really how everything really ultimately evolves, I think, through the power of commitment. Not luck, not even destiny, just being committed and allowing the commitment to move through you in a way that you are an instrument of something greater than yourself.

[00:31:41] Marc: Lynne, I want to thank you for you’re such a shining example of this deep commitment. Because partly, it’s a way of being, living a life of commitment. You’re one of the real shining lights on our planet. Thank you for all of your commitment, action, and hard work, and most of all, your presence. Appreciate it a lot.

[00:32:04] Lynne: Thank you, Marc, and yours. So wonderful to talk to you. I love the field that you are for conversations that matter. You are a presence that has the best of who you interview show up. I’m grateful to be one of those people, so thank you.

[00:32:23] Marc: Thank you, Lynne.

[music]

Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

[00:32:54] [END OF AUDIO]

The post The Power of Commitment with Lynne Twist appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Thriving in Change and Uncertainty

Today’s episode is called Thriving in Change and Uncertainty. It begins with a short guided meditation, and then a talk about three practices for navigating and shifting our relationship with change and uncertainty. Then, today’s Zen puzzler comes from the words of Dongshan, a 9th century Chinese Zen teacher, that includes the phrase, everyone wants to leave the endless changes. It address the practice of becoming more comfortable with change and uncertainty.

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones, ancient wisdom for modern times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

Marc Lesser: Today’s episode is called Thriving in Change and Uncertainty. We begin with a short guided meditation, and then I talk about three practices for navigating and shifting our relationship with change and uncertainty. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from the words of Dongshan a ninth-century Chinese Zen teacher that includes the phrase, “Everyone wants to leave the endless changes.” I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[pause 00:00:57]

Marc Lesser: Now, let’s begin with some sitting practice, some meditation practice together.

[pause 00:01:14]

[bell ringing]

Marc Lesser: Dropping in, arriving, pausing. In this ordinary, ordinary practice of bringing awareness to the body, to the breath, feelings, thoughts ordinary and not so ordinary.

[pause 00:02:08]

Marc Lesser: Bringing an approach, attitude of curiosity. Think of it as a warmhearted curiosity. What is it like to be here now? What is it like to be breathing using the breath as a anchor, some stability. Letting thinking mind do its thing, but gently bringing awareness, bringing attention back to the breath, to the body.

[silence]

Marc Lesser: Opening our minds and hearts.

[pause 00:03:43]

Marc Lesser: What does it feel like? What is it like in the body if there were nothing lacking? Right now, there’s nothing to strive for. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki uses the expression no gaining idea. No gaining idea [chuckles] and yet he also says, “If we’re going to bake bread, we should make tasty bread.” We do that by watching with care, noticing how water and flower transform in this practice just watching, just without any sense of anything missing, allowing our full functioning to arise. Just putting ourselves into the oven of our awareness and attention, and keeping it simple. Breathing in, breathing out.

[pause 00:06:26]

Marc Lesser: I’m going to ring the bell. You can stay with me or please feel free to continue sitting if that’s what calls to you.

[bell ringing]

Marc Lesser: Thriving, navigating uncertainty. We certainly are living in a time of tremendous change and uncertainty. In some way, I think this heightened lack of clarity makes it difficult to see and understand our tendency to avoid or deny just how uncertain our lives really are on any given day. More clarity might be our most essential need and path as individuals in relationships and throughout our communities and our world. I think clarity is often obscured by our habit energy and how we respond to change and uncertainty.

Finding clarity and equanimity and freedom in the midst of uncertainty is core important Zen practice, human practice, I think, that can benefit everyone regardless of our age or gender or race or faith or profession. I often come back to one of my favorite Zen teachers of all time Dongshan who lived during a ninth-century China, which was the golden age of Zen. He talked about these three ways of navigating change or finding more clarity. These three ways are what he called the bird path, the mysterious way, and the open hand.

I suspect that even, and maybe especially in ninth-century China, there who was a great deal of uncertainty about day-to-day life. Let’s look at these three teachings and how they might be applied as practices as ways of living ways, things that we can learn from and integrate into our challenging and uncertain world. The first is what he called the bird path, which is leaving no trace in the midst of activity. This in a way is the opposite of a worker, or leader, or manager who has a way of leaving stress or a wake of difficult emotions.

For example, when we feel impatient, it’s a really common sense to leave a wake of impatience, and blame, and communicate dissatisfaction or even to put others down. The bird path, the aim is to notice this feeling, any feeling of impatience or a sense of urgency, and to be able to find a sense of openness, curiosity, warmhearted curiosity right in the midst of whatever we’re feeling. This is challenging. The bird path is challenging and is aspirational. Much of these practices, I think, are aspirational in nature. Like I was describing during our meditation, on the one hand, let go of any gaining idea, but of course, we want to be able to do things well. We want to even be more sage-like.

This is something as I’ve been rereading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I’m struck by this apparent paradox of no gaining idea, and at the same time, this aspiration to be awake, to be more sage-like. The bird path feels like that. This is the practice of being, I think, so comfortable in our own skin that we’re able to not be fooled, not be drawn into denying or overreacting. Finding just the right way. An appropriate response. The bird path is like soaring more effortlessly and effectively dropping into more effortlessness and effectiveness and leaving no Trace, the bird path.

The second practice that Dongshan talks about is what he calls the mysterious way. Recognizing and appreciating how much we don’t actually know. Finding comfort in this not knowing. At the heart of this practice is greater comfort and effectiveness while responding to change and uncertainty, a skill that most of us can use right now. Practicing with and embracing this mystery allows us to find our way with more ease and confidence, even when there are the usual patterns, when we lack the usual road signs that give us a sense of navigating our way. We make lots of decisions in our business lives, our personal lives without knowing the outcome.

We weave together stories that make our decisions and our lives. We try to make our lives as explainable as possible, but underneath, we know that there is tremendous sense of uncertainty. That the world seems to mysteriously function without a specific intervention. Fish swim in the sea, the sun rises and sets, businesses start and go through their ups and downs, we work collaboratively with people from many cultures around the world.

This is the practice of the mysterious way. It’s much like in my book, Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, the practice, don’t be an expert. None of us are experts in the realm of relationships, or mindfulness, or human emotions, or consciousness. When we appreciate the mystery in these realms, we can learn to live more with a sense of openness, curiosity, and even in sense of adventure as we learn and grow. This is the second practice, the mysterious way.

The third practice he calls the open hand. This is simple and powerful. It’s the opposite of working and living with a closed fist. I’ve noticed that many people, especially leaders or people trying to accomplish things, tend to live and lead with fists closed often with a closed mind and a heart. This often comes from a sense of scarcity. It’s a way of avoiding stress and trying to deny or avoid uncertainty. This practice of the open hand involves noticing when we are making a fist, when we’re living with any sense of rigidity.

Instead to open, open our hands, open ourselves, opening our hearts and mind. This practice of the open hand means seeing our work and our life as an offering, responding generously to needs and problems. It’s about cultivating an attitude of care and service. I want to share a poem by the wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye that expresses some of the spirit of Dongshan’s teachings for working with that change and uncertainty. This poem is called Burning the Old Year.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Please experiment with Dongshan’s three ways, the bird path, the mysterious way, and the open hand. Welcome to the Zen Bones Puzzler, where I will regularly be presenting a story, or a Zen koan, or a poem, something to contemplate, to think about. A story that has purpose. It’s about developing greater insight and reflection. Not so much for a solution, but as a way to support your practice. A kind of meditation in daily life. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from the same teacher who I’ve been been talking about, Dongshan. Actually, the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism in 9th century, China.

Soto Zen is one of the living traditions. It’s a tradition that I trained in the School of Shunryu Suzuki, the school of the San Francisco Zen Center, and continues to flourish. Dongshan continues to be a much-studied and revered teacher. I love these, what I’m calling Zen Puzzlers, or Zen koan, Zen stories. This one comes just from something that it’s an interpretation of something that Dongshan said in one of his talks. It goes like this, “Without saying it is or it isn’t, do you have the courage to be at peace with this? Everyone wants to leave the endless changes, but when you stop bending and fitting your life, you come and sit by the fire without saying it is or it isn’t.”

He is introducing this sense of non-duality. Can you let go of the usual sense of duality without saying it is or it isn’t? Do you have the courage to be at peace with this or at peace with it? It takes courage to not be caught by calling ourselves successes or failures, or to get caught by any of the usual dualities of what we should be doing or shouldn’t be doing. Is it this or that? This is a encouragement to not be caught by the relative world of duality and instead to open up to some greater possibility.

Then the next line, he says, “Everyone wants to leave the endless changes.” That it’s recognizing change and uncertainty and to be okay with noticing our own resistance to change and uncertainty here. This great Zen teacher, even though change and impermanence is one of the core assumptions, one of the core underlying tenets of Zen practice and also of human practice. That change is part of what– is recognizing change. Living and swimming in change and uncertainty is part of being human. He says, “Everyone wants to leave the endless changes.”

Then he goes on to say, “When you stop bending and fitting your life, you come and sit by the fire.” When we stop, I think, resisting change. When we stop living in the world of duality, we can relax. We can come and sit by the fire. This puzzler, this koan, this phrase has many possible pieces that you can work with without saying it is or it isn’t, or do you have the courage to be at peace? Everyone wants to leave the endless changes, stop bending and fitting your life and come sit by the fire. I think that’s the one I’m going to suggest and recommend that phrase when you stop bending and fitting your life, come and sit by the fire.

What does it mean when? It means noticing the ways in which we are bending and fitting and instead shift toward a radical sense of appreciating and opening and just swimming effortlessly, and when there is effort to appreciate the effort, appreciating the resistance and letting it go again and again. You might experiment without saying it is or it isn’t. Do you have the courage to be at peace with this? Everyone wants to leave the endless changes, but when you stop bending and fitting your life, come and sit by the fire. Let’s all together come and sit together by the fire. Thank you.

[music]

Marc Lesser: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

[00:24:45] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Thriving in Change and Uncertainty appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Creating Room for What Matters: Exploring the Practice of Emptiness With Thomas Moore

Marc sits down with New York Times bestselling author Thomas Moore for an exploration of the practice of emptiness and its impact on well-being and effectiveness. Tune in to discover how spaciousness can help reduce stress and anxiety while supporting your work, ambitions, and aspirations, and receive guidance on embracing emptiness as a tool for achieving daily goals as well as long-term dreams.

 

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Podbean App Spotify Amazom Music iHeartRadio Podchaser

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Thomas Moore is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul. He has written twenty-four other books about bringing soul to personal life and culture, deepening spirituality, humanizing medicine, finding meaningful work, imagining sexuality with soul and doing religion in a fresh way. In his youth he was a Catholic monk and studied music composition. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University and was a university professor for a number of years. He is also a psychotherapist influenced mainly by C. G. Jung and James Hillman. In his work he brings together spirituality, mythology, depth psychology and the arts, emphasizing the importance of images and imagination. He often travels and lectures, hoping to help create a more soulful society. His family members are also deeply involved in spiritual approaches to the arts: His wife, Hari Kirin, is an accomplished painter and teaches a course she has created on Yoga and Art; his daughter Ajeet is a musician and recording artist and spiritual teacher; his stepson Abraham is an architect focusing on design related to the social aspects of building. Thomas also writes fiction, arranges music and plays golf in New Hampshire, where he has lived for twenty years.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Mark: Welcome to Zen Bones. Ancient wisdom for modern times. This is Mark Lesser.

Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting. Now, more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

Thomas Moore is the author of Care of the Soul, a New York Times bestseller for almost a year. He then has written 30 books on soul, spirituality, and death psychology.

He’s traveled the world teaching and speaking. He’s also a psychotherapist and an avid musician.

In today’s episode, we talk about the practice of emptiness and how this concept can support our well-being as well as our effectiveness in the world.

We talk about the practice of spaciousness as an antidote to stress and anxiety, and the ways that emptiness can support our work and ambition to achieve every day and important goals and aspirations.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Well, I’m very pleased to be here with Thomas Moore. Thomas, good morning. It’s great to see you.

[00:01:26] Thomas: Well, hello. Really nice to see you too, Mark.

[00:01:29] Mark: It’s funny that we were just saying that though we’ve never– I don’t think that we’ve met in person. If we have, it was very briefly.

I feel so connected with you through your bestselling book from many years ago, Care of the Soul, which was a wonderful book, and I know life-changing book for you and for many others.

[00:01:50] Thomas: Yes. It completely changed my life. It opened up so many doors, places to go and teach and speak. I don’t know. So much.

Also, a way to start making a living. When I published Care of the Soul just before that, I think I remember once having $4 in my pocket, and that was it.

I never really was interested in making any money. I had a daughter at the same year that Care of the Soul came out. I needed to be able to support a family. In so many ways, that book was a miracle of a gift to me.

[00:02:33] Mark: Yes. Amazing. It’s a little bit like winning the lottery too.

[00:02:40] Thomas: Yes.

[00:02:41] Mark: Then and now as well. There’s so many books, but there is something, I think about the title of that book.

It was a beautifully designed book. Michael Katz and I, who I know is a mutual friend, and was the agent, we used to send book covers back and forth.

Somehow I used to get involved in helping people design book covers. Michael, I thought, was with the best of the best at that and that book had a beautiful cover to it.

[00:03:10] Thomas: We have tried. I say “we.” My wife, who is an artist, she and I have tried over the years with all the books.

It’s about 32 books now. We’ve tried very hard to have covers. Good Covers. I remember one time I wrote a book called The Soul of Sex.

To try to do something with that cover, we got someone to do some hand-drawn calligraphy for the title. Just to have that on the cover.

I’ve not succeeded every time because some publishers just insist on their computer-driven in-house artists. It’s just unfortunate, from my point of view.

[00:03:52] Mark: I’ve been really appreciating reading your newest book, The Eloquence of Silence.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve sent you my newest book, which is called Finding Clarity. Actually, I have a whole section on the heart sutra and emptiness, kind of unpacking it.

I think where I want to start is talking about, I was just telling you a little bit of this story where I was teaching, and I was describing kind of defining what I mean by emptiness.

The question that I got asked with such great sincerity was, what does emptiness have to do with our daily lives?

I would love for you to say something about what you mean by emptiness in whatever way you want to. In what way is it pertinent? I would say essential, but how do you think about this?

[00:04:56] Thomas: This book that we’re talking about of mine now about emptiness has 30 stories.

I just comment on the stories. I feel when I read it over, that there are 30 different ideas about emptiness, 30 different kinds of emptiness.

It’s not as though emptiness is one thing. I think it appears in everything, everything we do. Everything that goes on, emptiness can be a part, so it’s different each time.

For example, it could be something very concrete like having a room in your house that’s not too full of things. That would be a kind of emptiness.

It’s very physical, but I think it’s still within the range of idea of emptiness or whatever you want to call that. I think that another common way for me, one of the most common things, comes from Christianity.

They have an idea of emptiness too called Kenosis. The idea there, the theology of that is that Jesus says all the time in his teachings that not– he says, “not my will, but my Father’s will.”

It’s that emptying of one’s will that I find happens almost every day. Where there’s one thing I want and then something else the world or somebody wants something else and I feel that I have to say that. I have to get into kenosis.

I have to say, “Okay, not my will now, but I don’t need to do what I need to do. I can let that go and do what someone else wants.” I think that’s a very ordinary, everyday kind of emptiness that we all experience.

[00:06:43] Mark: How I answered that question when I was asked was, when we’re truly listening to another person, we have to let go of whatever.

Letting go of our own ideas. We have to empty out of whatever our biases and thoughts are. Now, we may then need to bring them back in to think how does what this person is saying, how does it, how am I screening it or evaluating it?

Can I truly be really open to listening to what this other person is saying? Harder than it sounds this– And maybe we can get into this emptiness as a practice, as something that we, again– Even what you were just saying, it’s easy.

Someone comes up with their own idea or something happens. It’s easy to get frustrated or demand that no, I have.

How do we practice with this? How important and essential it is, this practice of emptiness.

[00:07:55] Thomas: I think if you have this daily practice of emptiness and the ordinary things of daily life, then the really big challenges are a little bit easier.

For example, if you find out that you’ve got an illness, a disease or something that you hadn’t suspected, that really requires some emptiness to accept it in some way.

I don’t know if that’s the best word, “accept,” but to be able to be with that illness in a way that you are not destroyed by it, you have to give over it. You have to give over to it somehow.

[00:08:31] Mark: In Buddhism, there’s many ways in to talk about emptiness. I think of a classic definition is the combination of a selflessness.

Not any sense of a stable, solid self and impermanence. That the way that we think of time is, again, the past, present, and future are practical, but are made up. Don’t really exist.

When you put those two– basically, it’s like time and space or time and self together– you get one definition, one way to think about this practice of emptiness.

[00:09:15] Thomas: Yes. It reminds me of a story. I don’t remember if I put it in the book or not, but when I was teaching at a university about 25 years ago now, one of my fellow professors in the religion department I was in was Fred String. Have you ever heard of him?

[00:09:35] Mark: I’m not familiar with him.

[00:09:36] Thomas: Fred was a professor. He was an intellectual educator at the University of Chicago.

He wrote his dissertation there on emptiness. He wrote a book called Emptiness based on his dissertation.

Fred was a very big guy, very strong. Strong in his voice and everything he did. He was just a strong character.

He and I used to play racquetball once a week. We’d be playing and we’d really get tired and we’d get a short rest.

I’d always ask him, “Fred, tell me what emptiness means.” He was considered the world’s expert on an intellectual approach to it.

He would say, “Dependent core origination.” I said, “Fine, Fred. Would you please tell me what that means?” He would try to explain it to me.

This happened numerous times as we were playing racquetball. I noticed that when we played that he couldn’t lose.

If he lost a game, he would just be in a terrible mood. I thought, “That doesn’t look like emptiness to me. He’s not dependently co-originating there. [laughs]

[00:10:47] Mark: Well, now we’re getting into some practical. I’m fond of saying things like when people hear about emptiness or even mindfulness or sacred, whether it’s Buddhism or Christianity, somehow people associate that, I think.

A concern that people can have is maybe a lack of ambition or a lack of energy, or a lack of effectiveness. Now I want to talk a little bit about how– in fact, again, I would make a strong argument– how emptiness or selflessness, timelessness actually support our effectiveness.

Or even going back to your example. Your friend, ambitious, competitive. The desire to win. I’m very ambitious. I love to win. I love to play sports.

I think that the role of emptiness is that we can completely want to win. We can completely, without any resistance, but if we win, great. If we don’t win, great.

Also, I think of when it comes to, I often use the example of, to me, Martin Luther King is a beautiful example of someone who ambitiously, with tremendous energy, skillfully was wanting to end racism.

When he was at his best, there wasn’t a shred of anger or blame. To me, I sometimes think of him as an example of someone who was practicing a kind of selflessness or emptiness with great ambition.

[00:12:44] Thomas: Yes, I did a great completely. He is an excellent example and model.

Where he came from, I don’t know, to be able to have those personal qualities of being able to face impossible odds and keep at it too.

Not seem to be undone by failure or what looked like failure, but be able to keep his equanimity through it all.

Patience and be able to model, for other people, nonviolence. Probably nonviolence could be another facet of an empty thing in his work.

Maybe probably a lot of us would be tempted to just act out of our anger and rage and frustration rather than keep that calm that he had.

[00:13:40] Mark: Yes. This is something that I notice in when I see business leaders, CEOs, C-level people who often are under great strain to perform.

In high school, I was captain of my high school wrestling team. I was very competitive. I wanted to win. I didn’t want to lose. I distinctly remember two very quick memories.

One was a match where I was winning. I happened to look at the clock and saw that there wasn’t much time left.

I clamped down, so run out the clock. I won. I got up and I felt terrible. I thought, “It’s not just about winning. It’s about how I’m performing.”

That other thing that brought me, I think, to practice was, I noticed in some way, even though I don’t think I was very aware. When I was in high school, I was pretty asleep.

I did notice there was something unique about the best wrestlers. The good wrestlers seemed really caught by winning and losing.

The best wrestlers, there was something about them. It was like some sense of emptiness, some sense of– Not that they didn’t care, but they were beyond.

Their Self wasn’t so invested in winning and losing, which seemed to give them a superpower. That was partly what brought me to Zen practice was I want that superpower. I’m completely caught by winning and losing. I wonder what that’s about.

[00:15:21] Thomas: This reminds me of that little book, Zen in the art of Archery, where there’s such a model for being able to do something, like any sport.

Maybe you might say that, from that point of view, sports could be a really good place to practice emptiness. It’s all a model for life in any sport.

To be able to handle that, to be able to bring some emptiness into it, can make you a better player, whatever it is you’re doing.

I used to give that book to football players at the university where I taught. I would tell them, I’d say, “I’ll pass you in this course if you read this book and write me a note assuring me that you had read it. Let me know,”

I thought that’s something that would be a doorway for the ordinary athlete who is caught up in literal competition and not really understanding how it could be done in a more empty way.

[00:16:24] Mark: Beautiful. Do you have a favorite story about emptiness from your book or any place? I like the story that you told about your competitive emptiness expert.

[00:16:37] Thomas: Yes. Well, it’s hard. When I think of that now, I think of all those stories.

There are so many. I’ll tell you one I like. It’s the story of one of those Nasruddin stories where he must be in London.

He gets on a double-decker bus and goes up to the upper level. Then he comes down and the conductor says, “Is there something wrong?” He says, “There’s no driver up there.”

I thought that’s really a pretty good story. I think of emptiness, for many reasons. One is, of course, in my commentary, I talk about how people dream so often of being in cars and buses and trains and things.

Vehicles are a very common dream image. In my therapy practice, I work with dreams always every time, so I’m very familiar with all these different themes that come up.

I feel that it’s a deep thing about who’s driving in a car. Someone tells me they’re in a car in a dream. I say, “Well, where are you in the car?”

That’s really significant. Well, they’re driving, or I’m in the back seat, or I’m in the front seat. All of that makes quite a difference when you think about the image of it and you explore it deeply.

Well, in this story, up there, in the upper level, which is usually where people think of control coming, they pray to God up there.

When you look up and say, “What does he want now?” It’s similar that can we stand being in a place where there’s no driver?

[00:18:09] Mark: This is amazing. You just reminded me about a dream I had this morning.

[00:18:15] Thomas: Oh, my gosh.

[00:18:16] Mark: I’m going to get some free therapy here from you.

[laughter]

No, it’s funny that I have been, I think, preparing for this conversation. It’s been meaningful for me to have this conversation with you.

The dream that I woke up with this morning, literally, I was, I think in a therapist’s office or some teacher or mentor.

I was climbing a rope. I was at the very top of the rope at the ceiling and couldn’t go any further. I was searching for answers. I was searching for clarity for something.

The thought I had right before I woke up from this dream was, no one has it. I have to figure this out by myself.

Or at least not that there is this answer I’m searching for is, doesn’t exist outside of me in some way. I’m feeling the similarities of that dream and what the story you just told about being at the top of the bus.

In a way, I felt like my dream was, I was at the top of the bus and there was no driver.

[00:19:25] Thomas: Yes. There’s nobody there.

[00:19:28] Mark: Nobody there. There’s no answer. There’s no answer there.

[00:19:32] Thomas: That’s right. You don’t have the most substantial means of getting up there either.

A rope is not, it’s pretty basic and slender, so that might be a problem too. You might need a little more support then. Try a ladder. See what that’s like.

[00:19:51] Mark: No, it’s funny. In my youth, I was pretty adept at rope. Rope climbing was something I really enjoyed.

[00:19:58] Thomas: Really?

[00:19:58] Mark: I can remember being scared. That was probably middle school, where we had to do our rope climbing to the top of the gym ceiling. It’s like, “Oh, I could do this.”

[00:20:11] Thomas: Well, you see what you’ve just introduced then is your childhood. There, off we go. We find a lot more richness to that image certainly by discussing that.

[00:20:23] Mark: There’s my childhood, and the therapist, and rope. Maybe a ladder would’ve been better or a bus.

[00:20:34] Thomas: A bus might do it. Yes. Try that. Wonderful dream. I’m tempted to spend the next hour just talking about it but–

[00:20:44] Mark: That would be taking advantage, which will-

[00:20:46] Thomas: It would, yes. On my part anyway.

[00:20:52] Mark: I wonder about other ways how this shows up in your life, Thomas, this practice. Again, I think of it–

It’s interesting too, the relationship of silence. That you’ve titled your book about silence, and yet it is about silence, but it’s about emptiness as maybe the container of silence.

I think emptiness can sometimes be silent, but maybe not too. Emptiness can be loud.

[00:21:22] Thomas: Yes, definitely. I’m a musician. I think I understand that.

The mere practical fact is that trying to look for titles, if you use the word empty, it’s so easily misunderstood.

People would think that’s a terrible thing, to have an empty life. You can’t put a footnote on your title. It’s a problem.

The other way to get a title is to see maybe, in a collection of stories, one or two stories that have a theme that stands out and you make that your title. That’s one.

Another way to look at it, though, the way I look at it is that silence doesn’t have to be about sound. I lived as a Catholic monk for a number of years.

I felt, when I look back on that experience, that the silence we had was more visual than sound. We had spaces that were not cluttered and a place for everything.

The architecture tend to be to support silence so that, in itself, the architecture and furnishings seem to be silent.

That’s another way I look at it, is that there’s a silence that’s not quite so literal about sound, but it’s the environment in which you live.

[00:22:35] Mark: One of the first things that you said when I asked you about emptiness was you pointed to the space in the room.

It’s actually one of the practices that I find I work with leaders who are feeling tight, or crowded, or tense. To experiment by noticing the space. Notice the emptiness, literally.

Often we are so trained to just seeing objects. I think this is what you were saying, that we miss that. I’m in a room that’s primarily empty. Literally.

I’m sitting in the middle of a room. There’s a few objects here and there, but primarily there’s space.

Again, one of the practical ways, I think, to take what seems like this difficult intellectual idea of emptiness and make it how we can live it and practice it, is through a spaciousness. Through experimenting with even just noticing the space.

This is one of the things I think that meditation offers. Is to be aware of the maybe far and few between spaces in between one’s thoughts.

To focus on the spaces instead of the thoughts or the spaces in between in breath and out breath. Like wow, how so simple, but pretty powerful if we can bring our attention to these empty spaces.

[00:24:05] Thomas: One of the ways I do that, it’s quite different from what you’re saying, although I understand that very well myself and having done a lot of that very close practice.

What I think of these days is if I’m going to a hospital or a doctor’s office. I just recently went to have some blood tested.

There’s this television set-up at the ceiling with a tape on it or something wouldn’t be taped today. Probably some feed that’s coming through constantly.

I’m sitting there waiting to be treated or to give the blood. I may have 10 minutes that I’m waiting. I think it has a challenge to be there in an empty room.

Even though the television is there, I really don’t even know how to turn it off. I don’t think it’s probably what I would do. It’s not my way to just go up there and turn it off.

I do see it as a challenge to be empty. I sit there and I ignore the sounds of the television and create my own space.

I find those moments like that are really good for practice because they’re a bit of a challenge. You’ve got time on your hands.

How often in your life do you have time you do something like that? That’s what I do. I look for those moments in ordinary life that allow me time to practice.

[00:25:31] Mark: I ran a greeting card company for years. I’m a professional quote collector. One of my favorites in this realm is, “If you learn to enjoy waiting, you don’t have to wait to enjoy.”

In a way, it’s exactly, I think what you were just saying is, whether you’re waiting in the doctor’s office or in traffic, or–

I like to encourage people to show up early for meetings and appointments and enjoy the space. Literally. Enjoy.

As opposed to the usual rushing to get there on time and the stress of that practice. In a way it’s, again, practical ways to integrate this concept and practice of emptiness in our daily lives.

[00:26:20] Thomas: That’s right.

[00:26:21] Mark: Thomas, anything you’d like to offer or say and about anything as a way of wrapping up?

[00:26:28] Thomas: Well, could I tell one more story that-

[00:26:31] Mark: Please, yes.

[00:26:32] Thomas: – and go from there. I think it’s one of the first stories, if not the first one.

I’m confused because I haven’t even seen the book in print yet. I just have it on my computer.

Anyway, there’s a story, another Nasruddin story where he’s just there in a village. He’s a spiritual teacher in a village in many of his stories.

This student of his comes to him and says, “I’m going to have to go away. I have to leave the town. I won’t be back for a long time, if I ever get back. You have been so important to me as a teacher.”

He says, “I’ve noticed that you have this ring on your finger that I keep looking at when I come to see you. I thought that if you would give me that ring, then when I was away, every time I looked at my hand, I would see your ring and I’d be reminded of you. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

Well, this fellow in this character, in all these stories– Nasruddin or Nasruddin, don’t know how to say it– He’s somebody who likes his own possessions. He doesn’t like to get things away.

He says, “I have a better idea.” He said, “Why don’t I keep my ring? Then when you’re away, every time you look at your finger and you see that there’s no ring there, you’ll think of me.”

I thought, what a great story. That’s one of the best stories of emptiness I know. It is so typical for us to need something all the time.

This story tells us that nothingness can give us what we need. Nothing that is there can be more important than anything else, even emotionally.

When a person is not there, if you haven’t seen your friend in a long time. So many things.

Instead of demanding that you get something, that you take the very emptiness, the very thing that’s not present, you take that as your gift, as your way of connecting and of still being and getting what you’re asking of life.

I think that’s a great mystery, and a wonderful one. I like to keep that story in my mind all the time.

[00:28:49] Mark: Yes, no, thank you. I love that story. I’ll share with you the image that came up in my mind as I took in that story was–

I don’t know how this is as related as I’m thinking it is. Every time you look in the mirror, it’s an opportunity to see your entire life.

That you can see yourself being born, all of the selves that you were, and you could also see all of yourself getting older.

That story, to me, is playing with time and space. I think, essentially, that’s the great practical and mysterious teaching of emptiness, is to be able to play. Literally, to play in the realm of time and space is a kind of freedom.

[00:29:41] Thomas: Yes, absolutely. We don’t give ourselves that freedom too much. We demand that it be the way it always is, or that the way the world thinks, the way everybody thinks.

Instead of maybe there’s also a bit of a twist there. The twisting it so that you’re not just thinking the usual way. If only I had something here, I’d remember you.

You could say that was, well, if I have nothing here, I’ll still remember you. [chuckles]

[00:30:09] Mark: Yes. I’ve been enjoying reading the stories in your book from Alan Watts to Suzuki Rishi to, James Hillman, to Nagarjuna is the great first-second-century Indian philosopher, beautiful writings emptiness.

[00:30:28] Thomas: Can I tell you another one before you–?

[00:30:31] Mark: Yes, please.

[00:30:32] Thomas: I can’t stop. See, I just love these. There’s another great story of Nagarjuna where he goes out hunting lions.

He comes back from the hunt, and people say, “Well, how many lions did you shoot”? He says none. “Well, how many did you try to get”? He says none.

“Well, how many did you see”? He says none. “Well, that was not a very good day.” He says, “No, it was a great day because when you’re hunting lions, none is plenty.”

There’s something too about that, that I think about failure as emptiness too. I always say this about the life of the soul, that failure and loss give your life soul as much as anything.

[00:31:19] Mark: Yes.

[00:31:21] Thomas: Yes. He understands that. When you’re hunting lions, none as plenty. I think of that line many times in my daily life.

If you go to a doctor and you come back, and they say, “Well, what did he say”? They didn’t say anything. They’d say, “Well, that’s too bad.” I’d say, “No. Nothing is plenty.”

[00:31:42] Mark: Exactly. We could do a whole nother episode on failure and disappointment, and how it feels, at first blush, like something empty.

Yet there’s so much richness in our failures, even though we don’t want them. There they are, and they enrichen us.

[00:32:05] Thomas: Absolutely. Yes. Mark, I don’t mean to keep us going forever here, but I’ve really enjoyed the conversation so much.

[00:32:13] Mark: Me too. I want to just wish you much success and gratefulness right within the emptiness of your life and our lives. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

[00:32:24] Thomas: I wish you a great success. A resounding success with one of your books.

[00:32:31] Mark: [laughs] Thank you.

[00:32:32] Thomas: Thank you.

[music]

[00:32:39] Mark: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations.

You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:33:04] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Creating Room for What Matters: Exploring the Practice of Emptiness With Thomas Moore appeared first on Marc Lesser.