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Stop Giving Away Your Power

In this Practice episode, Marc begins with a short guided meditation on ways to cultivate a sense of awe, wonder, and warmheartedness as the path of finding your authentic power. He then gives a short talk on power as an expression of the heart, of compassion, and as a way of being clear and effective, while also identifying ways that we give our personal power away. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from a famous Zen question: “What is the teaching of a lifetime?”

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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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. Now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. Today’s practice episode is Stop Giving Away Your Power. One of my favorite topics. We begin with a short guided meditation that includes feeling a sense of awe, wonder and warmheartedness as the path to finding your true and authentic power. I then give a short talk about power. Power as an expression of your heart, your compassion as a way of being more clear and more effective as a leader, as a human being.

I describe how to notice the ways that we give it away, that we give our power away as a path to finding your true power. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from a famous Zen story, a question and answer, what is the teaching of a lifetime and appropriate response? Let’s do some sitting practice together and I think I’ll begin by ringing a bell. [bell ringing] This is a different bell. This bell, the sound continues. Can you hear it? [silence] The sound of the bell, that’s simple. It’s a way of reminding us, priming us to stop and be here. No place else but here. So often, we’re so scattered these days.

I think it makes a lot of sense to practice, train ourselves to be present, bringing attention to our bodies. Noticing what it’s like to be in this body that we so easily take for granted. Amazing, amazing. I think we can be filled with awe when we bring attention to our bodies and how much is going on completely outside of our awareness and our control, awe of the…

It’s even hard to find words for the blood coursing through our bodies, the oxygen, all of the amazing billions of synapses in our brain, which fortunately we don’t have to do anything. We do need to, I think, train ourselves to heal, to process all of the challenges and difficulties of what it’s like to be human. The losses, the unknowns, the pain. I think of this practice as keeping our hearts open right in the midst of all of the challenges.

Also related to that, I think finding our real power, finding ways of not giving away our power. Power in the positive sense, positive sense of compassion, presence, effectiveness. Power. Can you feel it right now in your body with your breath? Letting go of the thoughts and stories about scarcity or anything lacking, the to-do lists, and being here. [silence] I can use the breath as a focal point, as an anchor to staying present. Using our thinking minds, our cognitive minds to be curious about what it’s like to be here, to be a sense of wonder. Letting go of the skepticism and, instead, to be curious, bringing a childlike quality to what is this body and what is this breath?

Letting thoughts come and let them go and just being here. Curious, kind, warmhearted. I think there’s tremendous power in warmheartedness, a warmhearted approach to starting with ourselves. Imagine having a warmhearted approach to yourself, to know a gentle firm acceptance. Openness and nothing to fear, nothing to hide, and keeping it simple by just practicing with sitting here with an open heart and an open mind as much as possible, whether you’re feeling calm, or not so calm, or joy, or grieving. It’s all okay. No need to change anything. Appreciating everything. I think this is part of the path of not giving away power, but instead to find our true power. [silence] Please feel free to continue sitting or come and transition with me.

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This topic of power is one that has been important to me, essential to me for a long time. It actually started with when I was in my early 20s living at Green Gulch Farm, part of the San Francisco Zen Center. A woman teacher of mine looked me in the eyes and said, “Marc, you have a way of pissing away your power.” I was aware enough to know that this was not a compliment. At the same time, over my lifetime I come back to this statement by this woman Zen teacher as a great gift and makes me think about what power did she see in me that I didn’t see in myself, as well as what is power and how was I giving it away. Here, I’m talking about power in a positive sense. I think about power as our ability to be clear, our ability to be present, our ability to make effective decisions, our ability to influence in a positive way to help for the greater good. I think that developing our sense of agency and our personal power may be one of the most important practices that we can engage in as a way of living, as a way of leading, as a way of helping do things more skillfully to maintain a healthy work-life balance, to foster more effective communication, and as a way of nurturing our most important key relationships. I think underneath that and holding this is our own sense of real power, authentic power.

Recognizing the importance of agency in this context is easy, but have you ever thought about some of the ways that you might be giving away, whittling away your innate power? I think considering the ways in which we give away our power can actually be strangely empowering, right? Another interesting paradox, and can also bring out and expose some useful insights, some useful lessons. A question that I’ve asked many individuals in a variety of contexts and settings is, how do you give away your power? How do you give away your power? Some of the answers that I hear most commonly are things like, “I say yes when I mean no.” “I rush from one thing to another, totally caught up in the busyness.”

I hear people say, “I overthink decisions and then I overthink my overthinking.” Another common answer is, “I underestimate my abilities. I underestimate my abilities, I doubt myself, I let fear and anxiety get in the way of my true power.” Another common answer is, “I don’t make clear requests and I don’t ask for help often enough.” I think that asking ourselves this question and naming our own tendencies about how we give away our personal power can heighten our awareness. It’s a way of shining the light on and noticing our patterns, our actions, and how we can step into or not step into our own sense of personal agency and responsibility.

I think this is a powerful mindfulness practice, and in a way, a core practice and perhaps starting point of mindful leadership as leaders, and I think we’re all leaders. We can practice having more power and more agency by not avoiding conflict, by being more real, more vulnerable, courageous, being willing to take a stance especially when it feels risky or challenging. We can bring more awareness to our tendency to be overly busy as a way of, we can see that busyness can often be a way of avoiding conflict, avoiding stress and anxiety. If we notice this pattern, we can find a way of practicing more spaciousness, we can notice our process of decision making.

Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission, right? That we can make decisions more easily, less overthinking, less caution when appropriate. We can be more realistic about our own competence, exploring how we can transform our doubts into more possibility. Bringing an attitude of greater curiosity to everything that we do and everything that we’re engaging in, and we can depend more on others by making clear requests. Again, these are all ways I think of that we can stop giving away our power and where we can find our own, again, genuine positive power.

I think in some ways, we’re all searching for ways to find our true power. I think this is a way to describe mindfulness practice, human practice, in our families, our relationships, our work, our identities, all parts of our lives. Our true power lies in how we step into our full authentic selves and how we can have a positive influence on all of those that we touch. To just read a couple of short poems about power by Emily Dickinson, where she says, “To be alive is Power, existence in itself without a further function, Omnipotence Enough.” “I took my Power in my Hand and went against the World. ‘Twas not so much as David had but I was twice as bold.” “To be alive is Power, existence in itself without a further function, Omnipotence Enough.”

I think this not giving away your power is a great, important practice, noticing. In this question, I think, how do I give away my power, is very empowering, is very empowering, so please do step into and have the awareness, courage, curiosity, boldness to find your true power.

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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, I love these Zen– taking these Zen koans, Zen teachings and looking at how we can make them practical and mysterious, usable ways to just to deepen and broaden our questions and answers, our lives, our relationships. Today’s Zen puzzler comes from a famous Zen koan from a collection. I think from the sixth century China, and it is a question and answer many of these traditional koans, these traditional Zen teachings are questions and answers. This one begins with a question, and the question is, what is the teaching of a lifetime? What is the teaching of a lifetime?

The answer here is rather simple and yet deep and surprising. The answer in this Zen koan collection is an appropriate response, an appropriate response. Sometimes the question is translated as what is the teaching of a thousand lifetimes, right? It’s made a little bit more dramatic. What is the teaching of a thousand lifetimes? An appropriate response. I think these teachings are meant to be thought about, reflected about, brought into your daily meditation and into your daily life. What is an appropriate response? In every moment of our lives, we are responding. We are responding to other people, we’re responding to whatever is being asked of us in every situation.

To me, again, I don’t have the answer here. I think the answer lies within you. My suggestion is for you to turn this. What does this mean? What does this mean for you? To think of this, let this come up in your meditation. Maybe write it down, make a note on your desk that says an appropriate response and come back to it. Write in your journal about it. What does it mean for you to respond appropriately? Are you responding appropriately in your life right now? How might you respond even more appropriately?

For me, I think this word that’s translated as appropriate, I think means with power, with your true authentic power, with compassion, with kindness, with effectiveness, with clarity. Zen practice and all of these Zen koans, Zen puzzlers are extremely aspirational. I think aspirational and impossible. I think we humans in our human lives are aspirational, right? We’re reaching for something. We’re reaching for being our best selves. We’re reaching for solving real problems of the world. We’re reaching to make real connections.

Yes, that’s what this means for me, that it’s mysterious, unknown, and the desire to be of benefit. To be of benefit, to be of use, to transform myself and to transform the world. I hope you’ll practice today. Maybe this week with what is the teaching of a lifetime? What is the teaching of a thousand lifetimes? An appropriate response. Thank you.

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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.

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Awake at Work with Norman Fischer

Norman and Marc talk about work as a spiritual practice, and as a Zen practice. They discuss how to shift from fear, anxiety, and burnout to approaching work as a means to make an offering, and to help and benefit others. They address the practice of confidence and humility, and the lack of distinction between benefitting others and our own wellbeing. And they touch on meditation as a way of not fooling yourself, at work and in all parts of your life.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Norman Fischer is a poet, writer, and one of the world’s most prominent Zen teachers. He is the former Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and founder/teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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[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. Now, more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

My guest today is Norman Fischer, poet, writer, and one of the world’s most prominent zen teachers. Norman is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and currently is the founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation. In today’s episode, we talk about work as a spiritual practice and as a zen practice. How to shift from fear and anxiety and burnout to work as making an offering, as helping, and as benefiting others.

We talk about the practice of confidence in humility and how thinking of others instead of ourselves just might be the key to our own happiness. We touch on meditation as a way of not fooling ourselves at work and at all parts of our lives. I am really pleased to welcome Norman Fischer.

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[00:01:28] Marc: This is Marc Lesser, and welcome to Zen Bones, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. I am really thrilled to have this time with my dear friend and teacher and buddy, Norman Fischer. Welcome, Norman.

[00:01:42] Norman Fischer: Hey, Marc. Great to be here. It’s a wonderful rainy morning out here at Muir Beach in California.

[00:01:50] Marc: Norman, I was wondering this morning that many years ago, you and I started a nonprofit called the Wright Livelihood Institute and I don’t know what happened to that. Somehow it led into Company Time workshops that you and I have done, I think, starting more than 25 years ago that we did several times a year. This question of what does zen have to do with work, what does work have to do with zen? I know this is a topic that is dear to your heart and practice. What are you doing these days with zen and work?

[00:02:35] Norman: [chuckles] Well, it’s funny because I don’t really do much work. I’m not at work out there. When we lived at the Zen Center together, I was always very admiring of all the people who did all the work. The people who worked in the kitchen like you and you had expertise in kitchen work, but I especially admired the carpenters. We had a whole building crew at the Zen Center. Those were many decades ago when we were literally building the Zen Center and building all of its various ancillary institutions.

There was construction going on all the time and I was so impressed and amazed by all the people who did that work.

Then of course, one of the insights of zen, which is very obvious, like all great insights, completely obvious, there’s no living without work. You can’t go through a day without some kind of work because the world is material. Whatever consciousness you have depends on that you have a body, and if you have a body, then you have to clean it, you have to feed it, you have to take care of the poop and the urine that comes out of the body. All of these things require daily work.

Actually, I work every single day. I clean the kitchen, I put food on the table, I clean up the house, I pick up, I put away, I do laundry. Work is actually unavoidable, and like everything else in life, zen’s insight is that living is spiritual practice. Everything about being alive is to be seen and understood as a spiritual practice. Work in zen practice is very explicitly considered to be a spiritual practice.

As you know, Marc, in contemporary zen monasteries, and not only contemporary but throughout the history of zen, there was always more work going on than there was meditation. I think that nowadays, as for many centuries, the monks at a hagi spend more time cleaning than they do meditating. Polishing the wood in the hallways, on the floors, and on the beams of the building, taking care of things, and keeping everything beautiful. They spend more time doing that than they do sitting in meditation, probably much more time.

[00:05:22] Marc: It was just curious to me, Norman, the way you described your work, which of course the work of taking care of the necessities. Then I was smiling, you reminded me a little bit of our mutual good friend Kaztana Hashi, who describes himself as lazy because he’s never– If you walk into his office, he’s got literally five computer screens.

A little bit like you, I know that you are always writing talks, writing poetry, counseling people, preparing for retreats, leading retreats, leading multiple zen groups, and there’s a way that you do that so seamlessly that it’s somehow so aligned with your being that it doesn’t even feel like work to you. Which I often think is the real. If there’s an aspiration for zen and work, it’s to be so aligned with what you’re doing that it doesn’t even feel like work.

[00:06:31] Norman: Yes. That’s an interesting point, what in the end is work? From early on, I had this thought about work. In my first poetry book from 40 years ago, I think there’s a little poem in there about work. It’s something that says something like, work is moving something from one place to another, or making something that didn’t previously exist out of materials, and everything else is play. [chuckles]

I think of work as physical activity. I don’t think of– Most of the work that is done nowadays, so many people are working in abstract terms when they’re working with communication or they’re working with ideas or they’re working with non-material forces. I want to just hold that there because of course I’m aware of that and I want to think about that. Here’s the thing, in zen, work is exclusively a practice. There’s famous zen sayings like a day of no work is a day of no eating, that every day I work and therefore I eat, and if I don’t work I don’t eat.

There’s also the famous zen phrase chopping wood and carrying water. The whole phrase is something like, “What is my miraculous zen activity? It’s chopping wood and carrying water. These are the kinds of miracles that I engage in every day.” I would say that it’s really important because everybody, no matter how abstract their work is, in a way, like you just pointed out, my work is very abstract. It’s giving talks, it’s studying texts, it’s talking to people about their practice, it’s meditation. In a way, you could say that the main work that I do is not physical work, not work as I defined it a moment ago. Yet at the same time, I also work every day.

Now, the temptation would be to say that the retreats and the talks and the books and all this, this is really important stuff. This is high-level stuff, people really pay attention to this and they value it. The fact that I’m cleaning the toilet is just something I barely pay any attention to because that’s not anything. Who cares about that? My point here is that actually it’s very important for everybody to realize that they are doing work in the very literal sense of physical.

Moving something from one place to another or creating something or cleaning something in the physical world. I think it’s actually very important for everybody to pay attention to those things and actually make those things real and value those things. I think to me, I actually do consider it to be just as important, actually to be honest, more important. The cleaning up the sewage mess in my house that happened last week in the storms, to be more important and more significant than my Dharma talk. I really do.

I think that if we all thought about that and made that commitment to ourselves, it would make a big difference in our world. Because I think what we’re doing is we’re spending a lot of, we’re throwing away our opportunity to really appreciate our lives by jobing everything out. There are people who never clean anything because they hire people to clean everything. There are people who never cook any food because it’s all takeout. I think it’s very important to pay attention to that stuff.

[00:10:19] Marc: Yes, I agree totally. I’m remembering that when we would start our workshops for business people, we’d often use the quote, this expression of leaving your soul in the parking lot before you went into the office. There is, you’re describing I think, a non-dual approach or a radically different approach to work. That there is this tendency to bifurcate.

Or that people, when they walk into their office or– I was just with a group, teaching a workshop to these elite wildland firefighters. This young man who I thought was a wonderful person, he really suffered a lot from, he said, I become a different person when I’m a leader in wildland firefighting. In fact, he said, “I’m kind of an asshole.” It’s interesting, it’s a little bit like, I think he was expressing a version that, “I leave my soul. I have to give up.”

I suggested that he maybe play with the idea of can he be a bit more kind and compassionate with himself and still be just as effective in the work. Even with this work of firefighting and jumping out of helicopters, why does it need to be this whole different way of being? I think what you are suggesting is just such potent, a very practical practice of less bifurcation and more seeing it all as practice.

[00:12:13] Norman: Yes. I think that, let’s say that there are two aspects to doing that. One aspect is what I was talking about there, mindful, simple physical work that everybody does or ought to be doing. Focusing on that is just as important as everything else. That changes the way you behave in the everything else part, when you focus equally on the right physical work.

There are the practices, mindfulness, being careful, paying attention to what you’re doing, recognizing that there’s nothing more important in the world than cleaning the toilet when you’re cleaning the toilet and giving it your best shot. That’s one aspect of the work. That aspect really, that’s classical zen work. That’s literally carrying water and chopping wood, physical work on a very simple basis.

Then there’s all this other kind of work, like the one this example you decided is a question of leadership. I think that this young man probably feels like, “Well, I’m a leader now, I’m responsible now, therefore this is serious. Therefore I better not be soft and humane. I better be a tough ass because this is really serious. I’ve got to command respect and I’ve got to get it done, so I got to, so on and so on.” There’s a whole ideology behind the way he behaves.

In zen we would say that one aspect of work is as I said, careful, mindful activity, and physical work, but then the other aspect of work is the body serves a dedication to the benefit of others. That the only reason to do work and all work, including the physical work, is actually an offering to sentient beings. The world is, everybody suffers, it’s hard to be human. Goodness knows at this moment we’re aware of a tremendous amount of suffering all over the world among people for various reasons that are quite severe and serious.

The idea is all my activity, all my work is really dedicated to being a benefit to others. I clean the toilet, not for the toilet only, but to clean up the drek and crap of all sentient beings. I clean, I prepare food not only to feed myself and my family, but to feed all sentient beings. That’s my spirit in doing it. Therefore, if I’m leading a fire crew, if I’m giving a dharma talk, if I’m leading a retreat, this is not work that I’m accomplishing for pay and reputation and kudos, this is actually a selfless offering to sentient beings.

I try to train my mind to really and truly look at it that way. When I do, of course, I’m going to behave differently. Because, for example, if I’m the fire crew guy, the sentient beings I’m serving are the trees, the people whose homes might be threatened, and mostly, the people that I work with every day. To care about them and be kind to them is just as important as the goal of the task.

As you pointed out to him, to be kind to the people you work with is probably going to be very beneficial in the end for the goal that he’s trying to realize. In that way, you go to work and whatever your work is, chances are really good that you’re working in some way with other people. Thinking of them and their benefit and their happiness is part of your brief of your work. Then doing everything that you do as well as you can possibly do it, knowing that everything you do is influencing the world, and you want it to influence the world in a good way. I want to do a good job, I want to be as conscientious as I possibly can.

[00:16:27] Marc: I think you are unpacking a key insight of zen and work. That you mentioned the bodhisattva ideal, this insight of zen that everything we do is for the benefit of others, we’re here for the benefit of others. That reminds me of, there’s that– I think of that Dalai Lama quote where he says, if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. Then interesting life is, is if you want to be happy, practice compassion.

I think there’s interesting insight there about because so many people feel a sense of stress and anxiety in their work life. There’s a doctor who I’ve become friends with and who sits with me, who brought me in to do some work with brain cancer patients. He ended up in the hospital with anxiety attacks because it’s hard right now being in healthcare with Covid and with a shortage of nurses. It’s easy to lose sight of that practice of helping others and somehow remembering our own well-being and getting caught by that stress and anxiety. There’s an interesting practice edge there.

[00:17:5] Norman: Yes. Once you think that there’s some kind of difference between your own well-being and the well-being of others, you’re already in trouble. [chuckles] Once you say, “Well, I guess I have to sacrifice my own well-being for others,” you’re already in trouble. Because there really is no difference. The bodhisattva path is not about a kind of extreme altruism at the expense of oneself.

The bodhisattva path starts from the deep recognition that there is nobody here in myself other than my endless engagements with what is outside myself. That is what I am. To take care of myself is to take care of others. To take care of others is to take care of myself. Of course, I’m aware, oh my God– I think that as you and I know, Marc, from our many decades of experience with practicing zazen, that when you have an ongoing meditation practice, it makes it very difficult for you to fool yourselves.

When you are beginning to go down the drain because you’re overexcited or overextended, you can’t help but notice. You can’t help but notice that letting that go on for too long is going to just make a mess out of everything. You’re not going to be very helpful to anybody else once you’re in the hospital for anxiety disorder. You start taking care of yourself as the most effective way to ultimately take care of others.

There’s no contradiction, there’s no– To me, the whole discourse about self-compassion and whatever, not overdoing empathy, to me, I really don’t– I understand why people say those things because they’re operating in a framework of ordinary self-other framework. In Buddha Dharma, as you and I both know, there is no contradiction there whatsoever. The actual quote that Dalai Lama I think is referring to there, I think it’s a verse in Shanti Devi that says something like, “If you want to be miserable, think only of yourself. If you want to be happy, think only of others.”

That, most people say, “What? That’s crazy,” but actually, it’s true. If you think of others, you’re going to take care of yourself. It won’t be like, “Oh, my God, I feel so guilty. I’m taking a vacation I shouldn’t be taking.” You’ll feel absolutely happy and completely seamless about taking care of yourself. You won’t be worried about how you’re not doing anything for others. Because what others are we talking about? What others are there? There’s only here in this moment. The whole world is here.

There’s no contradiction there. The point of view of practice, I don’t think it’s just zen practice. I think it’s all the Buddhist practice. I don’t think it’s just Buddhist practice, I think it’s all authentic forms of spirituality. In the end, the view that you have and the way you live your life is like the opposite almost of the way people think of things. The way the world is constructed in people’s minds, the way we understand the world is guaranteed to produce anxiety and confusion and all the things that we see all around us because it all flows quite naturally from the way we understand the world and the way we understand ourselves.

Our practice proposes that we train our hearts to understand things in a radically different way, and that’s where that verse comes from. To be miserable is to think only of yourself. To be happy is to think only of others. That’s really true within a spiritual worldview.

[00:22:34] Marc: You probably have seen some of the science, the studies, they call that the default mode network. Which is the part of the brain that is thinking about yourself, which apparently, a study you’ve probably seen says that the average American does more than 50% of the time, and it is correlated with unhappiness.

[00:23:00] Norman: Yes.

[00:23:02] Marc: You were quoting the Dalai Lama and Shanti Devi gave us some of the older texts.

[00:23:08] Norman: That [unintelligible 00:23:09] surprising.

[00:23:10] Marc: Science is discovering all of the obvious things that the contemplatives have discovered. I loved too how you were just talking about meditation practice as the way, the practice of making it harder to fool ourselves, and maybe easier to see the reality, the truth of the lack of distinction about self and others.

[00:23:39] Norman: Yes. Somehow, over time, the practice of meditation, along with some reflection really changes things quite a bit.

[00:23:51] Marc: I was trying to remember some of the other insights, lessons from all of those years of teaching workshops for business people. I think really what you’ve just talked about is maybe at the base insight of this, doing work. That work is essentially an offering, that benefit. That quite naturally it will take care of our own well-being. That it’s practice to see work as a spiritual practice. Radically crazy idea.

[00:24:34] Norman: Yes. Part of that reminds me of what we were talking about, just before we started the podcast, this idea of how much are we concerned about the results of our work and our own place in it. This one, this is I think, a key point and a difficult one. Because I think you need to have a certain amount of faith. Here, again faith comes not just from a hopeful belief but from the experience of your meditation practice and your reflection over time.

You have to have a certain amount of faith that if you really and truly do your best, work hard, slough off, but work hard, do your best, and you’re a decent person to the people you work with and everybody you come in contact with, that somehow things will work out okay. Therefore, if you get promoted, that’s great. Everybody likes to be promoted. If you get fired, that’s too bad. Nobody likes to be fired.

You really don’t have to worry about it that much. Just do what you do, take care of yourself, take care of everybody else, and don’t worry about it. You’ll be okay. I think a lot of the anxiety is that now that we have this wonderfully efficient hypercapitalism, what that means is that the minute a worker is not sufficiently productive, they’re gone. We’ve been working very hard for the last decade to make sure that no worker in any sphere of life [unintelligible 00:26:29] .

That everybody has to be maximally productive every single moment, otherwise they’re gone. Everybody is worried about their job. Now, it used to be that if you were a college professor, you had tenure, and you didn’t have to worry about your job. That’s out. Now, college professors, all can lose their jobs at any moment with a wrong word or a bad look or whatever or not enough publication at the right time. I think that is a great source of anxiety, worried about whether or not we’re going to keep our job, whether or not our production is good enough. How is our reputation doing. Is our stock rising or falling, and all of this?

I think that in order to do work as a spiritual practice, you absolutely cannot let that get the best of you. You really have to have some kind of confidence that if you do work, if you’re a decent person, it’ll work out. Will there be ups and downs? Of course. Things happen. You’ll have setbacks but then you’ll get another job or whatever it is that will happen. So many people I know– I know some people who are professors who were casualties of this new technological university.

Though they had tenure, they were basically forced out of their jobs. They fought it mightily and they were so upset, and so on and so on, and then a year later they say, “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I am retired, I’m doing other things that I really enjoy,” and that was a great thing. Or you lose your job and you get a different job. Or you don’t work and you find a way to survive.

Things go the way they’re supposed to go. Who can figure it out? Who can manipulate it? Who can ensure that if I do this, that will happen? There’s no straight-line causality, and you’re happy. You always figure out how to survive one way or the other. You have to have confidence in that and not worry so much. However, if this, then that. I do this, and then that happens, and God knows how that happened.

You have some trust that things will work. It’s really important not to worry so much about, “Does the project succeed? Do I succeed?” You can’t really worry about that. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Pay attention to how you’re communicating, pay attention to everybody around you, and then trust.

[00:28:59] Marc: Yes. I think that you use the word faith and trust but you also– I think there’s something about, in the work world, confidence. Kind of a deep confidence. Maybe it’s a confidence that contains humility.

[00:29:18] Norman: Yes.

[00:29:18] Marc: It’s interesting. The shortcomings of our language, the integration in a way of completely confident and completely humble at the same time.

[00:29:30] Norman: Yes. If you’re not worried about your performance every minute, then you have that confidence, and you’re not afraid. You’re not afraid. I think that so many people, it goes together, right? Anxiety, upset, and fear all go together. If you can overcome your fear, then you are going to be a confident person.

Just like you say, a really confident person does not need to deny his or her mistakes, does not need to pretend that he knows everything. Real confidence is, “Oh, let’s learn something new here. Let’s be wrong and let’s be happy about that because I found out something I didn’t know before.”

[00:30:14] Marc: Well, Norman, I feel like we’re just getting started. Maybe with some confidence and humility, I can say that I hope this is part one maybe of some– We’ll do this again. [chuckles]

[00:30:30] Norman: [inaudible 00:30:30] Good to see you, Marc.

[00:30:34] Marc: Anything you would like to say or read or do as a way of ending our time here on this podcast?

[00:30:44] Norman: Yes. This is never done on podcast because you’re not supposed to do this. I think it’s bad radio, it’s bad audio. I think we should end with three silent breaths. You can take three breaths and if the listeners are– We can challenge whatever listeners there may be. We can challenge them not to turn off the podcast now because we’re going to end with silence before saying goodbye. See if you can actually stop what you’re doing and just breathe three silent breaths with us before we say goodbye. Let’s try to do that, okay? You and I will just breathe.

[00:31:27] Marc: Okay. Let’s do that.

[pause 00:31:30]

[music]

[00:32:01] Marc: Norman, thank you, and may your good health continue.

[00:32:05] Norman: You too. Be well.

[music]

[00:32:12] 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 to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:32:37] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Awake at Work with Norman Fischer appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Appreciate Your Life

In this practice episode, Marc begins with a short guided meditation with the theme of impermanence and appreciation, followed by a short talk on the practice of cultivating appreciation. The Zen puzzler is based on a short dialogue from Dogen, the 13th century founder of Zen in Japan, in which Dogen refers to his years of study in China as a lesson in how to appreciate everything life has to offer.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]  

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. In this practice episode, we begin with a short guided meditation with the theme of embracing impermanence, as well as appreciation, appreciating your life and everything, followed by a short talk on this important topic of cultivating gratitude as well as appreciation.

Today’s Zen puzzler is a short dialogue from Dōgen, the 13th-century founder of Zen in Japan, where someone asks about what he learned from his years of study in China. His cryptic and also applicable response was, “I learned that eyes are horizontal, and nose is vertical.” A way of saying pay attention to what is most obvious, and appreciate everything. I hope you enjoy today’s episode

[music]

Let’s do a few minutes of sitting practice together.

[pause 00:01:24]

It’s the practice of pausing and stopping, just taking a few minutes, a few moments, to appreciate your life. [silence] Whether you’re feeling calm or not so calm, settled, not settled, happy or grieving, stopping and noticing, [silence] not just noticing, appreciating [silence] whatever’s happening. Not holding on too tightly, not pushing things away, [silence] being here right now, and bringing attention to the body. Opening our chest, shoulders, softening the belly, relaxing the muscles in the face and the jaw, and allowing breathing to be full and fluid.

No need to try and change anything, just noticing. [silence] Bringing attention to the breath, [silence] with a sense of curiosity and a childlike quality, as though we’re noticing the breath for the first time. This breath really is– We don’t have to pretend that this breath is unique, new, fresh, now. [silence] Simply breathing in and breathing out. Checking in, checking in with the body, checking in with the breath, letting the thinking mind do its thing. Thoughts will come and go, they’re coming back to the body, coming back to the breath.

Returning, coming back to your full experience, opening our minds, opening our hearts, to whatever is showing up now. What is it like to be here, breathing, feeling, alive? [silence] Think of that. Aligned from one of Rilke’s poems about– I don’t want to be hidden, I don’t want to be folded. This practice is a bit like unfolding ourselves, revealing ourselves to ourselves right now.

[pause 00:06:36]

Nothing to gain, nothing to lose. With each exhale, letting go of our usual comparisons and judgments, and just allowing your full experience right now. Appreciating everything, body, breath, feelings, thoughts. Experiencing your experience with as much presence, kindness, curiosity. [silence] What a relief, with nothing lacking, nothing to accomplish. [silence] I would invite you to continue sitting in this place for as long as it feels right, or you can join me for a short talk on this topic.

[music]

This is one of my favorite topics, appreciating our lives. I once published a greeting card that said, “The way you live your days is the way you live your life.” When my children were young, we used to have a weekly day of doing less. This was an important part of our family ritual. We borrowed some ideas from the Jewish Sabbath, as well as practices from the Buddhist day of mindfulness. At the heart of our day, we had three simple rules that we applied, starting at sundown on Friday evening until sundown on Saturday evening.

The first rule for this time was no spending money. The second was no watching television. These days, this would be no screens, no having any screens on. The third rule was, we did something together as a family during this time. These three guidelines actually produced really significant results in the quality of these 24 hours. What a relief, not to buy anything, not to have screens on, and to have time to enjoy each other’s presence. I noticed that both of us would talk more with our children.

We read books, we told stories, we played games. We’d go for walks and share preparing food, and having meals together. In a way, the largest benefit of this somewhat intentional and structured break was that, for a day, the pace of our lives slowed down. Somehow, our family connections increased, sometimes in small ways, sometimes more dramatically. One of my favorite parts of this ritual was a formal ending, and we chose to observe.

There’s a Jewish tradition of looking for the first three stars to become visible at the end of the day on Saturday. This was the signal that the day of mindfulness, or the Sabbath, was over. There was something fun and exciting for the four of us. My wife and two children would stand on our deck together, seeing who could find the three stars as the sun faded and nighttime slowly emerged. Of course, sometimes, since we live in the Bay area of San Francisco, the dense fog forced us to use our imaginations about these three stars.

Having a way to have more rest and simplicity in our lives is not some magic wand for perfection. Of course, there were, on these days, the usual disagreements, grumpiness, and sometimes boredom. Our imperfections often emerge was, sometimes, the most endearing parts of these Sabbath days, these days of mindfulness that stand out as many important sweet memories of our growing family. These days, in the midst of the intensity of our lives, these guidelines, they might seem quaint, as though they’re from another age.

I think it’s important to return to some simple rituals, whatever those are for you, that somehow revolve around returning, that revolve around taking the feeling, the benefits of meditation practice, of mindfulness practice, and integrating them into your daily life, whether it’s with your family, or by yourself. Having quality time, quality time by yourself, quality time with others, a way of returning, a way of connecting with the rhythms of the natural world.

A simple way to translate these guidelines is to experiment with, once a week, whether that’s Friday night, or whatever works for you, maybe it’s Sunday, to take some time where you are not purchasing anything. Let go of material concerns and activities. Let go of exploring, researching, or buying anything. Just experiment with that. The other is to have a radical media-free day. What might a day be like with no screens, no social media, no podcasts, perhaps a day that can include more time in nature, more being with others.

Simple, and for many of us, rather radical. The other guideline is to be intentional about doing something nourishing with friends or with family. Explore having real conversations, asking people to talk about their stories, their concerns, what’s bothering them, and what they’re appreciating. This is, I think, some simple practical ways to appreciate your life. I want to read a short piece about the power of appreciating our lives. This is by zen poet Ryōkan.

Returning to my native village after many years of absence, I put up at a country inn and listen to the rain. One robe, one bowl is all I have. I light incense and strain to sit in meditation. All night, a steady drizzle outside the dark window. Inside, poignant memories of these long ears of pilgrimage. Ryōkan, he was a zen monk in Japan some time ago, who decided to just leave the usual world and wandered around doing calligraphy, writing poetry, and experimenting with a number of ways of appreciating his life.

Returning to my native village after many years of absence, I put up at a country inn and listen to the rain. One robe, one bowl is all I have. I light incense and strain to sit in meditation. All night, a steady drizzle outside the dark window. Inside, poignant memories of these long ears of pilgrimage. Right now, in this moment, just noticing what it’s like to be here, noticing what it’s like to be alive, appreciating this moment, appreciating your life.

[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 a 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. Today’s Zen puzzler– This is actually a story. It’s not a traditional koan, as far as I’m aware. It’s just a story that I’ve read. I actually have to look up where this comes from.

A story about Dōgen, right? Dōgen was the founder of Zen Buddhism in Japan, in the 13th century, a prolific writer, thinker, and hugely influential of the teachings of Shunryu Suzuki, who was the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. Many, many of today’s Zen teaching, Zen philosophy writing lean on, integrate, the teachings of Dōgen. From a very early age Dōgen had a very curious and deep mind. One of the stories is that he was at the funeral of his mother, I think he was nine or 10 years old.

He was, of course, deeply moved, and grieving. He was watching the smoke from the incense that had been lit at this ceremony appear and disappear. He wondered. He couldn’t help but wondering about birth, life, and death. He wanted to understand what it meant to be a full human being. He wanted to find his own sense of real freedom, equanimity, responsiveness. He spent years searching, in Japan, for teachers, and he was disappointed.

He came to the conclusion that if he really wanted to answer his most deep and compelling questions, he needed to go to China, which was a big deal. Again, in the 13th century, it meant taking a couple month trip, risking one’s life to go to China. He did find a variety of teachers that he thought were amazing. He also kept bumping into the head cooks of monasteries. There’s many stories about Dōgen and his dialogues with head cooks, how much he learned from people who were doing that work inside communities and monastic settings.

Today’s puzzler is– When he returned to Japan from China and went on to build a practice center, a monastery, that was thriving, and to this day, is actually the main practice training center in Japan, called Eihei-ji. Someone asked him, on his return trip, “What did you learn? What did you bring back from China after years of study and training there, and working with teachers?” One of his answers was, “Eyes are horizontal, and nose is vertical.” This is today’s Zen Puzzler.

What the hell did Dōgen mean by that? How might one work with that? I think the beauty of the Zen tradition is that it takes very simple, obvious ideas, experiences, and says, “Go deeper. Look more closely.” When we look in the mirror, or when we see another human being, how obvious, seeing someone’s eyes, and seeing someone’s nose, right? This is, I think, a radical appreciating what is, and appreciating your life. We get so lost in our stories and our thoughts, what’s going well, what’s not going well, our hopes and dreams.

All that is wonderful, but this, Dōgen comes back to eyes are horizontal and nose is vertical. What did you learn? In some way what he learned? One of the things he learned was to not be fooled by all of the things that are pulling at us, and to come back again and again to seeing, feeling, and living a life with appreciation, appreciating the most obvious parts of our lives. Eyes are horizontal and nose is vertical. You might experiment with this. I think the way these puzzlers are intended to be is to actually practice with them.

I sometimes like coming back. You can write down eyes are horizontal and nose is vertical. Then reflect on it. Write in a journal about it. Talk to someone about how does that work, influence your life. What did you learn? What is there to learn? Eyes are horizontal, nose is vertical. He might have said, “What I’ve learned is to appreciate everything. What I’ve learned is to devote my life to seeing more clearly, seeing what is, to be fooled less, and to appreciate everything.” Thank you.

[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.

[00:25:48] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Appreciate Your Life appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Transforming Pain to Possibility with Joan Halifax

Joan Halifax is known as one of today’s most important Zen teachers, especially through her activism or what she refers to as “engaged Buddhism” and from her work in prisons, to grief, death and dying, and much more. Roshi Joan and Marc talk about serving others as an unconventional source for radical joy. They explore the way of the modern Bodhisattva as someone who maintains presence with compassion in the face of extraordinary challenges. Joan addresses how her compassion for all beings is her secret for avoiding burnout. They talk about the importance of going from helping or fixing to truly serving.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Joan Halifax is an American Zen teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She currently serves as abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] 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. My guest today is Joan Halifax, who’s known as one of today’s most important Zen teachers, especially through her activism and engaged Buddhism.

From her work in prisons to working with death and dying and so much more. She recently returned from facilitating a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and a group of scientists. Joan is the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality and she currently serves as the abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In our conversation, she speaks about the unconventional source for radical joy as service to others, and she addresses the way of the modern bodhisattva, a person committed to serving others as well as someone who maintains presence with compassion in the face of extraordinary challenges and suffering.

She addresses the importance of shifting from helping or fixing to truly serving, and she addresses the importance of holding and cultivating an attitude of possibility, curiosity, and openness in the face of today’s challenges. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. This is Marc Lesser, Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times and I am just feeling a lot of joy here with my friend Joan Halifax. Good morning, Joan.

[00:02:08] Joan Halifax: Good morning. It’s great to see you, and I like that enso behind your head. Who did that?

[00:02:17] Marc: That’s a Kaz Tanahashi.

[00:02:19] Joan: Of course.

[00:02:22] Marc: Yes, who I might have– I don’t know if I ever shared with you the story of Kaz, out of the blue called and asked if I would be his coach. I was like, “Kaz, I’d pay to just come hang out with you.” Kaz and I had lunches together for, I don’t know, every other week for many, many years and it’s delightful too. I love this enso.

[00:02:51] Joan: He actually sat with Rohatsu Sesshin this year at Upaya. He’s 89. He sat every period doing Fusatsu, he did every [unintelligible 00:03:02] I just have to say– and he gave these wonderful very scholarly talks on the Avatamsaka Sutra from the perspective of Green Dharma, or the environmental perspective. It was a really extraordinary Rohatsu. It was the first time we allowed some guests who actually quarantined in order to be here. The outer rim of the Zendō was all full, which made me happy, it was beautiful, and everybody quarantined, which I think was very gracious of people. [chuckles]

[00:03:43] Marc: Just for people who don’t know, Kaz Tanahashi is one of the world’s leading translators of Buddhist texts, especially Dōgen, and also a calligrapher, and just an incredible human being. Joan leads a Zen Center, Upaya in New Mexico, and Rohatsu Sesshin is a traditional seven-day Zen meditation retreat that typically happens 1st to 7th all over the world, and then Buddha’s Enlightenment Day is then celebrated the following day on the 8th. It’s great.

It’s interesting, you and I, we were saying that the topic here, many, many possible topics, but the practice of joy and radical joy, and there’s something about these traditions. Also, I know that you have a lot of things going and wonder how you practice and find joy and antidotes to burnout because you are doing so many things. How do you practice with avoiding burnout and radical Joy?

[00:05:01] Joan: Well, I think that’s a wonderful question. I think first is to understand joy or happiness or that sense of fulfillment. It’s not the kind of, let’s say, conventional happiness that comes from getting a new car and you’re happy briefly, or eating a pistachio ice cream and you have this moment of happiness. It’s more this sense of fundamental well-being, even in the midst of the complexities of our world today.

How do I maintain it? I don’t always maintain it, I will honestly say, but having had big tastes of it in the course of my life, it is in a certain way a kind of reference point or a resource that I know is there even on very cloudy days, if you will. I know that above the clouds there’s clear sky, and the clouds in a certain way give me an opportunity to examine the edge that I’m on, how I’m not practicing good self stewardship.

I think it’s not to feel bad about the moments where the weather moves in, but it’s to actually use the weather as a way to say, “Ah, this is a kind of mindfulness bill,” and so on, but I want to say something more, and that is, I recently returned from Dharamshala, where I was moderating the first day of a science meeting in the living room of his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, for the Mind & Life Institute and Mind & Life Europe.

His Holiness [unintelligible 00:07:03] emphasizing a couple of things. One is that common humanity. We are all human beings and the difference is that we experience the polarization, the conflicts, and thinking about the war in Ukraine and the many conflicts in countries across the world and also the interpersonal conflicts that are in his Holiness’ awareness, and of course, certainly in mine.

Then that meeting was very powerful because it looked at some of the psychosocial causes of unhappiness, of burnout and so forth. Then in a second meeting of young compassionate leaders, and these were young people from around the world who are social activists including the former head of Extinction Rebellion from Ireland and other just extraordinary young people.

I would just say, the common theme that these young people shared in the preparatory meetings was this sense of burnout, of futility. They’re all doing good work and yet they’re anticipating a not healthy future, and also, they just see the magnitude or the scale of the problems in the world ramping up on their watch. His Holiness heard what they were saying in his way, and his Holiness emphasized again and again, and I know this to be the case, he said, “You know, the cure for futility, the cure for burnout, in fact, is altruism. An altruistic heart.”

I think this is the case, that what we know from the research in compassion is there are three balances that receive benefit. One of those is, of course, the person who receives compassion. Another is those who witness compassion, but most interestingly, those who are compassionate, and I speak about compassion in a very particular way, receive enormous benefit.

Whether your compassion is just on the micro level, taking care of your little friend next to you, your little child, your little plot of earth that you walk upon, or whether it’s like the compassion of my good friend, Christiana Figueres, who I was meeting with yesterday, who is the architect of the Paris Climate Accord, her compassion is just boundless, and her energy is just boundless. It is because her values are very much aligned with this experience of caring deeply for the world. I don’t do it to feel better. I don’t do what I do to feel better.

I just do what I do because that’s what’s before me. It’s not like a pill that one takes and gets the benefit. After so many decades of doing a good thing here and there, I think that I’ve reached my ninth decade, in a way, like Joanna Macy, with a sense of joy that is underneath all of the weather.

[00:10:55] Mark: I think of it as a somewhat well-known quote. Someone asked, “Suzuki, why do we practice Zen?” He’s given many answers to that, but one is so we can be happy in our old age. There’s something about what you’re saying that I think it can easily escape the importance of it or the profoundness of something about altruism, making our offering as an approach to our lives. Very different than somehow trying to find safety or be someone. It completely turns the tables on an approach to how we live our lives.

How do you get that across to young people who are seeing all of the warning signs around not only climate change, but all of the other challenges and divisiveness and difficulties that we’re seeing? How do you teach that, how do you make that shift in way of being?

[00:12:13] Joan: I think this is a great question. It’s something that’s very much in my foreground all the time because we have so many young people at Upaya. I don’t think you can teach it. I think you have to be it. Being it is just in the ordinary acts of your daily life.

I love Norman’s vision of the Bodhisattva attitude. The Bodhisattva attitude is not something you acquire, so to speak. It’s something I believe, and I think Norman also, it arises out of living to whatever degree that you can, an authentic life, and others who happen to be in the field of an authentic life, which includes moments, naturally, of inauthenticity, of scrappling around, and so on.

Those who are in the field of it feel this benefit of having, for example, a generous mind, the first Pāramitā, or a mind that’s cool and peaceful and stable, and wholeheartedness. Manifesting the Bodhisattva attitude in the way that Roshi Norman Fischer has written about it and lives is something that I think comes out of first having a practice that is scrupulous, having a sangha that allows for the kind of trust for feedback, course correction, for all of us in the community of practice, and also doing a good thing in the world. It’s not bad, I have to tell you. [laughs]

[00:14:10] Mark: I want to again, just unpack. The word Bodhisattva is a person who lives for the benefit of others. I think of the prime vows or promises, approaches, beings are numberless. I vow to be of benefit. I vow to awaken them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. There’s something about the Bodhisattva approach to life of the practice of our own awakening and helping, benefiting, benefiting others. Again, the core.

It’s interesting. I also think of that, you were talking about His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who again somewhat famously said, “If you want to benefit others, practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

[00:15:12] Joan: That’s his message.

[00:15:13] Mark: It’s something about the unintended consequences of the Bodhisattva life or altruism is this kind of radical approach to our own well-being, our own sense of joy.

[00:15:30] Joan: I don’t think you and I can emphasize enough how– Well, I can’t speak for you, Mark, but I fall over the edge all the time. This is why I say a community of practice where there’s support for feedback is really important because correcting course is part of the work that we do in the experience of practice.

I wrote this book, Standing at the Edge, where I was looking at altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement and burnout. These five areas, the antidote to going over the edge in terms of experiencing pathological altruism and empathic distress and moral suffering and disrespect and burnout is compassion. I would not know all this had I not been over all of those edges myself. [laughs]

[00:16:36] Mark: Yes. I’ve been lately calling that edge or going over the edge, getting in touch with my inner Homer Simpson, especially the, “Why does everything have to be so hard?” Yes, whether in my inner grump, but there is something about then returning to, “How can I help? What is it?” There’s no shortage of need for help, whether it’s in my own household or out in the world.

[00:17:15] Joan: Actually, I try not to use the word help. I’m sure you remember these words from Rachel Naomi Remen, the physician philosopher. 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 always keep that feeling. Her words really have meant a lot to me over the years because I definitely was a helper and fixer. Every time I hear help, I think, “Oh, no, no, no, no, we’re talking about how do we serve a situation.”

[00:18:03] Mark: Yes. No, thank you for pointing that out. I love also, “What can I offer? What’s my offer? What’s my offering? How can I–” Even in leadership, in leadership service, being of service as a leader. You are an amazing– I don’t know if you think of yourself as a leader. Again, it’s one of those– can be as many, many– It’s funny, I tend to think– People ask me about what’s the distinction between emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and leadership? I tend to say, “I think they’re all kind of the same thing. They’re just different flavors of–” and in some way, it’s different flavors of Bodhisattva practice or the practice of radical joy or the practice of radical service, using the word you just used.

[00:19:13] Joan: I think I’ve failed continually as a leader. It’s a constant learning process. It’s also an incredible opportunity for growth, for development, because how do you actualize support for others growing into the best of who they are, on one hand, and also recognizing issues related to accountability? In an organization, and ours is a very complex and dynamic organization, with all the problems that any institutional organization has, how do you actually have these two valences in a healthy relationship?

That’s been a big learning, I think, for all of us and an important one as we work together, is to see each other’s gifts as clearly as possible and to create the circumstances that avoid failure, but to also know the value of challenge and failure [chuckles] in an organizational structure where we are all just human beings. How do we work it relationally and in the field of practice, and aspirationally, knowing that we are here for one reason, which is, how can we serve others? Leadership is a great area for growth, so to speak. [laughs]

[00:21:02] Mark: Yes. I think, keep coming back in a way to, how can we create, and live, and embody in this field of practice? How do we create a field of practice? Because the field of practice, the field of service, there’s something that– joy seems to arise there. Joy or meaning, satisfaction, something that is filled with possibility as opposed to– there’s something opening about it.

[00:21:42] Joan: Kaz talks about joy density, which I think is a really beautiful concept. I will also say, Mark, seeking Joy, I think is not going to produce joy, number one. Number two, there’s a lot of grief in the world today. Of course, I work with people every day, who are very discouraged, or who have grave physical illnesses, where joy is not present, and where conventional joy would be an assault in a certain way.

I want to just also say that, when you’re working in weather zones, if you will, where suffering is really acute, pasted on joy is a toxin. Toxic positivity, so to speak. [chuckles] I really respect people suffering, knowing that there are profound opportunities for realization, for learning in the journey of suffering. People like you and I, we had to go through it. This is, in part, about the development of our own character. For me, it’s not just being happy, happy. [chuckles]

[00:23:12] Mark: Yes. If we’re going to talk about radical joy and radical well-being, we can’t leave out suffering. It’s all part of the package.

[00:23:26] Joan: It is. The four noble truths or the four important learnings is connect with the truth of suffering. This is charnel ground practice, whether it’s our personal charnel ground or the world charnel ground, and look deeply to see why is this suffering in our world today? Because we really can’t transform suffering if we don’t understand deeply the roots of it. Having that taste that allows us to know who we really are, which is at the base, at our very foundation, our basic goodness, the very core of our character is, we’re free. We’re out of the box, if you will, of suffering. Then of course, I love the path. That’s our practice.

[00:24:24] Mark: Again, just a note for anyone that might not be aware of this, this word that gets thrown around a lot, mindfulness. One of the first teachings of the historical Buddha. The four foundations of mindfulness, and the first is mindfulness of the body. In that teaching, there’s a large– in fact, it might be the largest teaching in there, is the charnel ground meditations, is to actually visualize or actually go. This was originally in India, to go to the places where dead bodies were being burned. Cremation ceremony, so mindfulness. Mindfulness of impermanence as a starting point.

[00:25:15] Joan: This is such an interesting question. This charnel ground practice, I hadn’t really identified myself in that area until I began to work closely with Glassman Roshi. Kaz and I went to Auschwitz, doing the bearing witness retreats. We went several times, and I really understood what [unintelligible 00:25:43] [chuckles] The importance of Bernie’s work and how to maintain a good heart in the midst of extraordinary suffering, whether it was the charnel ground of Auschwitz, or whether it’s the work that I did in the prison system for six years as a volunteer working on death row and maximum security, or whether it’s working with people who have catastrophic illness, or people working in the medical system, who are so discouraged and burned-out.

All charnel grounds in our external world, but we have our own inner charnel grounds. [chuckles] Being able to sit in the midst of our own confusion, anger, anguish, blame, self righteousness, and to wake up in those charnel grounds. Those charnel grounds are essential for us to actually connect with and learn from.

[00:26:45] Mark: Yes. I miss Bernie. Joan was referring to one of her teachers, Bernie Glassman, amazing person, social activist, and the work that he did taking people to Auschwitz to bear witness. This bearing witness practice, very powerful. Well, you have things you have to do. Anything that you’d like to offer as a way of closing here around this bearing witness, making one’s offering, radical joy, anything at all that you’d like to say?

[00:27:32] Joan: I’m curious about your perspective on the charnel ground of Silicon Valley and the business world and the Bitcoin world. [chuckles] I mean, just watching what’s happening on Twitter, where I’m very active, on that social platform, network platform and so on. I’m just curious of your take.

[00:28:03] Mark: My take, Joan, is that greed, hate, and delusion have been very popular for thousands of years, and that there are– it’s easy, I think, to fall into. I’m saddened that Effective Altruism has now gotten such a bad name. A crazy idea, I think, especially one interpretation about amassing a lot of wealth in order to do good things, as opposed to doing– there’s something– It’s fine to amass wealth through doing good things, I think would be much more sane than somehow that separation.

[00:28:50] Joan: Well, it’s not just the Effective Altruism issue. Actually I think amassing wealth is not a good thing. Sorry. [laughs]

[00:28:58] Mark: Yes.

[00:28:59] Joan: I think as you amass wealth and get rid of it. I think also billionaires should have the heck taxed out of them. I think our economic structure is way off. I don’t think the Buddha criticized wealth per se, but the suffering that arises as it relates to the 1%. I’m glad Warren Buffett and Gates do their work, but also they deploy a huge amount of– versus toward their own real estate endeavors and so on. [laughs]

[00:29:39] Mark: I thought it was brilliant, Anand, in the book Winners Take All, who describes the policies, financial policies of the last 40 years as a crime scene and how it’s contributed. I think it contributes to a divisiveness. It’s the opposite of altruism. It’s supporting divisiveness and greed, which are in so many ways, I think, the opposite of living a life of the Bodhisattva path or the life of service and life of offering, and clearly don’t lead to well-being.

[00:30:25] Joan: Well, and it’s contributed to the climate catastrophe and the cascade of effects from what we’re facing now in terms of the climate. We’re in overshoot right now, and we’re not going to be out of it without a huge modification of the deployment of our so-called fiscal resources and the ending of the extraction of our natural resources. Anyway, don’t get me going, but I think you get my point. Greed, hatred, and delusion. [chuckles]

[00:31:00] Mark: Like something you said earlier, we’re all human beings. I’m often amazed when I find myself in Silicon Valley, in the hallways of Google or Facebook or Apple. It’s human beings who are, in many ways, many good people, the policies are in need of real fixing. Again, I don’t know. [laughs] It’s hard to be optimistic. Yet in the long run, I think people doing good will more and more have a positive effect.

[00:31:51] Joan: Good. Wonderful. I’m curious, I’m open, and also I’m concerned. I’m really concerned. I’m in my ninth decade, so I’m not going to be around much longer, relatively speaking. Who knows? Today might be the end or 20 years, but interacting with so many young people, which has been grace in my life in the past few decades. I feel a commitment to do whatever I can to a sense of love and responsibility for people, so we can meet a world where flexibility and adaptivity are important, because we are going to have to adapt even further to circumstances which we did not ever know would be unfolding, at least I didn’t, in our lifetimes. Very interesting time. I’m not hopeful. I’m curious, actually.

[laughs]

[00:33:07] Joan: Or I’m not optimistic, I’m hopeful, so I make a distinction between optimism and hope. This is, again, going back to Roshi Norman Fischer’s Bodhisattva attitude, holding that attitude of possibility is, I think, our work. Curiosity, openness.

[00:33:33] Mark: I come back to one of my favorite quotes by Wendell Berry who says, “Be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts.”

[00:33:42] Joan: Yes. That’s it. Beautiful, Mark. It’s just been a pleasure meeting with you this morning, and-

[00:33:49] Mark: Yes, thank you.

[00:33:51] Joan: -may you enjoy the rest of your day. [laughs]

[00:33:54] Mark: Thank you so much for all of your great service and offerings and your being a model. A model of radical well-being in the world, so thank you.

[00:34:07] Joan: Of continuous failure.

[00:34:10] Mark: Continuous failure, one failure after another. Yes. Thank you.

[00:34:13] Joan: Exactly. Thank you so much.

[music]

[00:34:20] 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.

[00:34:45] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Transforming Pain to Possibility with Joan Halifax appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Frustration is Optional

There is no shortage of frustration in our daily lives. In this episode, we begin with a short meditation, followed by a short talk about effective ways to shift from frustration to acceptance and appreciation. Marc shares one of his favorite poems by Tony Hoagland.

Today’s Zen puzzler comes from the teachings of Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki. Marc helps the listener unpack various ways to consider and answer the question: What is the most important point for you right now?

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]  

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. Today’s practice episode is around the theme of frustration is optional. There is no shortage of frustration in our daily lives. To help with this we begin with a short meditation and then talk about effective ways to shift from frustration to greater acceptance and appreciation.

I share one of my favorite poems by Tony Hoagland and then move into today’s Zen puzzler that comes from the teachings of Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, who often talked about the most important point. What is the most important point to you right now? I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

[music]

Let’s do a few minutes of sitting practice. Stopping, pausing, arriving, nothing special and also pretty extraordinary this ability that we humans have to pause. Wherever you are, whatever you might be doing, seeing if it’s possible too. Open, sometimes this is opening, sometimes this is focusing, but right now, why don’t we bring attention to the fact that breathing is happening without us having to do anything, just bringing attention to the breath? With a child-like curiosity, what is this breath?

With that question of course comes, what is this life? What is this experience of being here now breathing, letting thoughts come and let them go, like clouds in the sky or like the waves on top of the ocean, and coming back? Coming back to the ground, to the ocean, coming back to our true nature. Whatever is most present, relevant, important, letting go of our to-do lists, letting go of any sense of frustration or anything lacking right now. Right now, there’s nothing needed, nothing lacking. What does it feel like? What does it feel like in the body to be fully here, fully present, and fully satisfied?

I’ve been reading this book to my three-year-old grandson, the book is called Filling Your Cup. I think meditation practice is like the practice of filling up or emptying out whatever metaphor works for you, but filling your cup with satisfaction, with safety, with being connected and emptying of frustration, emptying of any sense of lack. Cultivating the mind of appreciation and the mind of acceptance, warmhearted acceptance right now right here. What is it like to be alive? What is it like to be here right now? Nothing special and yet and yet, and you feel the sacredness of this moment, this life, this breath. Please feel free to pause and continue sitting or come on back and join me here.

[music]

I want to talk about the practice of letting go of frustration. Frustration, I think, is this sense of entitlement or discomfort that things are not how we want them to be. Lately, I’ve become a student of frustration, and I’ve noticed there’s no shortage of events and situations to become frustrated about on many levels. There’s gun violence or climate change or COVID, politics. Then on a closer to home, there’s our work lives, our relationship where everything rarely or never goes as we might want it to go.

People are complicated, really complicated. Why can’t they be simple like you and like me, real simple? I was just speaking recently with a doctor friend who conveyed intense frustration, and the lack of resources, and staffing that several key nurses on his staff had just resigned, and some doctors were away with COVID and the need for services was greater than ever and he was really struggling. How can we find ground? How do we find our sense of well-being without getting caught or drowned by frustration, and stress, and burnout?

I’ve also become, some of you may know, a student of Homer Simpson, a terrific mindfulness and leadership expert, who gives this advice to his daughter, Lisa, when she’s frustrated when things are not going as she wants in her work. Homer says, “Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t go on strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed, that’s the American way.” Yes, great advice from Homer about how to deal with frustration. Just do it half-assed.

Sometimes it seems like our choice is, especially at work, to either take Homer’s advice which is a kind of giving up to deal with our frustration by letting go of caring, or to be constantly stressed, anxious, frustrated with the challenges and difficulties of communication, collaboration, the goal of engaging in effective and meaningful work. There must be another way, there must be another path. I’ve also been a long-term student of Shunryu Suzuki who is the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and collection of his talks, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is wonderful, wonderful reading.

He suggests that the most effective way to work with frustration with people and events is to appreciate things and people and that then our minds can become calm and clear. This practice of appreciation, appreciating what is instead of dwelling and getting all worked up about things being not how we want them to be. Of course, this is not easy, this is not easy and I think it’s doing both simultaneously in the gaps. It’s not that we don’t notice the gaps, but it’s a radical sense of acceptance.

I was just on the phone with a friend of mine who’s quite ill, and I was saying, I remember when Shunryu Suzuki was dying and quite ill. He said, “Sometimes I’m a healthy Buddha, sometimes I’m a sick Buddha.” This is that radical sense of acceptance and appreciating whatever is. Zen practice and mindfulness practice start with the inspiration and aspiration that we can use our imaginations and set an intention for how we work and how we live with a more calm and a more clear mind, right in the middle of our challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes seemingly impossible situations.

Our relationship with frustration is something that we can shift and change and reduce and we can aspire to work with a more clear and calm mind, and not get caught by the gaps and the frustrations. This, I think, is an important way to work with more effectiveness and more productivity as well as more joy and happiness. We can’t control other people. We can’t control the events, but we can’t influence and be influenced by other people and events. We can’t even control our minds, but we can work with and develop our minds and our bodies.

This aspiration to have a clear and calm mind, even when our minds are not clear and not so calm. I’m regularly reminding myself that there are events and there’s how we relate to or how we interpret these events. There, of course, will always be problems and challenges and breakdowns and pain and broken hearts, but we don’t need to add extra frustration. My suggestion and this is for myself and as well, is to experiment with exploring and noticing, what if frustration was extra? What if there was some space between the events and how we interpret and live these events? How can we find more radical acceptance and more joy?

I want to share one of my favorite poems. This is a poem by Tony Hoagland called The Word. 

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli”, you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he has sent you from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen are alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to anyone among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.

I love the line, “Do you remember that time and light are kinds of love? Do you remember that time and light are kinds of love and love is no less practical than a coffee grinder or a safe spare tire?” Feeling our true nature, the innate sense of a calm mind, even in the midst of difficulties and challenges. 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 a 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, Zen poem, Zen question is a short statement. This is some words that a Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki often used. He often started sentences by saying the most important thing or the most important point. Today’s Zen puzzler is, what is the most important point? What is the most important thing? Maybe just contemplating that, thinking about that, journaling about that. What is the most important thing? Of course, I was collecting the number of times that Shunryu Suzuki used this phrase, and I think it’s more than 200 times that he named the most important thing.

Then, of course, one of the best is that that summarizes them all. The most important thing is to know what the most important thing is but some of my favorites that he talked about were the most important thing is to express your true nature in the simplest, most adequate way and appreciate it in the smallest existence. The most important thing is to express your true nature in the simplest, most adequate way, and appreciate it in the smallest existence.

I think this is quite beautiful and works really well as the most important thing to aspire to. In some way, acknowledge that we’re always, no matter what we’re doing, we are expressing our true nature but to do it in a way that is simple and with appreciation, and even in the smallest, the smallest tasks, it’s not about doing any grand gestures. Another statement that he makes is the teaching of love is the most important thing. The teaching of love, right? To feel love, to express love, to love, be loved. I think really all of Buddhism, all of mindfulness practice essentially is about the teaching of love, and in my last book, Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, the first practice is love. Love the work.

This isn’t just to love the work you’re doing but to love the work of expressing your true nature. To love the work of being human, of opening our hearts, of finding our calm minds. Another one of Suzuki Roshi’s statements is, the most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas. How beautiful, simple, and profound.

Again, imagine what our lives would be like if we could. It’s not that we don’t have visions and that we, of course, were always looking to create things, do things, we set goals as we should, but at the same time, to have a mind that can be at rest and not be caught by setting these goals, not be caught by needing anything or doing anything extra. Maybe one more. The most important thing, our effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to non-achievement.

Again, this is particularly challenging for us, especially bringing this into the world of work, but I think of my time working as the Tassajara baker or running the kitchens where there was this sense of the importance of producing great meals or great bread. You start with that aspiration, but at the same time, there’s the sense of service, there’s a sense of love, there’s a sense of just enjoying my hands on the dough or enjoying the knife cutting vegetables, enjoying working with each other and letting go of any sense of achievement or fear of not doing it right. This is an expression of service and love. I think that’s what he means here. The most important thing is to have the right or perfect effort.

Our effort should be directed from achievement to non-achievement, and again, coming back, the most important thing is to know what the most important thing is. This changes, it’s worth coming back to again and again. What is the most important thing?

[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.

[00:22:02] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Frustration is Optional appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Growing a Sustainable Business and a Sustainable Life with Joel Makower

Joel Makower is a world leader in the field of sustainable business and its relation to climate change. Marc and Joel share a heartening conversation about how sustainability gives him hope, and how to shift from overwhelm and despair to committed and engaged activism. Joel invites young leaders and entrepreneurs to not settle for vague answers and to truly believe and work toward a better future. He highlights the power of community during these times and affirms how there are more of us who care about the health of this planet than those who do not.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Joel Makower is chairman and co-founder of GreenBiz Group, a media and events company focusing at the intersection of business, technology and sustainability. For more than 30 years, through his writing, speaking and leadership, he has helped companies alig pressing environmental and social issues with business success.

Makower has written more than a dozen books, including Strategies for the Green Economy, The Green Consumer, The E-Factor: The Bottom Line Approach to Environmentally Responsible Business and Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World. In 2010, Makower was awarded the Hutchens Medal by the American Society for Quality, and in 2014, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] 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. My guest today is Joel Makower. He’s the chairman and co-founder of GreenBiz Group. GreenBiz Group is a media and events company that focuses on the intersection of business, technology, and sustainability. For more than 30 years, Joel, through his writing, speaking, and leadership, has helped companies and individuals align pressing environmental and social issues with business success.

In this episode, we had a most heartening conversation about how sustainability gives him and gives us hope, how to shift from overwhelm and despair to more committed and engaged activism. Joel invites young leaders and entrepreneurs to not settle for vague answers, instead to truly believe and work toward a better future. He highlights the power of community during these times and affirms how there are so many more of us who care about the health and wellness of this planet than those who do not.

I hope you enjoy and appreciate this episode as much as I did. This is Marc Lesser. This is Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times. I’m here today with Joel Makower, and I’m just so happy to be here with Joel, who’s been an entrepreneur, a real leader in the realm of green business and sustainability. Welcome, Joel.

[00:02:06] Joel: Marc, it’s so great to be here. Thanks so much.

[00:02:10] Marc: Being in this space, a question I think I want to start with is what gives you hope these days?

[00:02:19] Joel: Wow. Well, hope is an interesting commodity these days. Let me start by saying that being in sustainability is an inherently hopeful profession. We wake up everyday thinking of solutions, big ideas, moonshots, if you will, or earth shots, some people call them. In that context I live a hopeful life, professionally speaking, but it’s hard because every day is this rollercoaster. Those of us in sustainability and in the world, it’s not just limited to sustainability, but every day is this rollercoaster of optimism and discouragement, hope and despair, exciting promising things and then some soul-sucking reality check and up and down and up and down and before long it’s time for lunch and rinse and repeat.

That’s the challenge, is how do we stay in that zone? I guess what keeps me hopeful is a lot of things. A lot of the businesses that are at the core of the work that I do are really leaning into solutions, not necessarily at the scale, scope, and speed we need, but it’s just a huge change from just even three, five years ago. Mostly what gives me hope is the new generation of youth activists that they’re really stepping into be leaders even before the point in life when they could be what we would necessarily call leadership in communities, in business, in society, in politics, or anything else.

Around the world, there’s just this amazing wave of not just activism, but really pro-activism, I guess, where the young generation, and I’m talking about the late teens, mid 20s, are really stepping up and trying to move things along. It reminds me a little of when you and I were much younger men, Marc, and the Vietnam War was raging, and I don’t know about you, but I did not know anybody who served in Vietnam, at least until later in life.

I was personally a conscientious objector, so I was exempt from selective service from the draft. Even without having that visceral connection, we were in the streets, I was at least, and protesting and marching and writing letters and sometimes doing little bit more civil disobedience kinds of things. I think that made a difference. Now we’re talking about something, changing climate and so many other things that are not 6,000 miles away. They’re visceral, they’re personal, they’re local as well as global. They’re immediate, but also long term. I think it’s really refreshing to see them really stepping into the role that I long hope that we’d see.

[00:05:47] Marc: I think maybe a little context for anyone who’s listening to this might be useful. I was just learning about your business and that you have a company that’s growing quickly, has 60 plus employees, and that you do conferences including one that you just mentioned called Verge, that had 4,000 attendees in Silicon Valley. I think on some sense it’s maybe, as you’re saying, not at the scale to change climate change, but it’s at a fairly large scale, the work you’re doing. I’m curious to hear both more about your business and also what you might say. You talked about how impressed you are with leaders, especially the young generation of leaders and how we might support those leaders and what you think are the qualities of leadership that you’re noticing that are most prominent.

[00:06:51] Joel: Great question. One of the things as we, if we’re talking specifically about the youth leaders and the young activism in general, one of the things that I think has naturally happened that is not that we need to change is that we invite them in. It’s not a token thing, there’s a lot of tokenism. Let’s bring in some young people, hear what they have to say, applaud them, thank them and then let’s get back to whatever the heck we were doing before that. I think really listening and engaging and being in for the long haul and inviting them in and over time, that’s really I think something companies have not done well, probably not just companies, but in society overall.

We still tend to treat them a little bit as a novelty act, and, of course, this is deadly serious stuff to them and should be to us as well. Part of it is we need to support them by, first of all, encouraging them, and second of all, by bringing them into conversations in a way that is substantive. It’s not just a matter of inviting a young person to a meeting or a conference or into some board or anything else. There’s a lot of power dynamics that are naturally in there, even if we don’t necessarily think about it, in terms of who’s paying the bill and who really can make the decisions. This is a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges, and I don’t know how well this has been done, is how do you, again, bring in young people, not in a tokenist way, but also with those power dynamics minimized and maybe it’s meeting on their turf, for example. There’s ways of mitigating if not leveling those power differentials, but those are important. I don’t think we’ve thought much about that yet. I haven’t seen a lot of good examples where we’ve done it. That’s a huge way in how we can be supporting them. That holds true for any marginalized community.

It holds true for people of color that have not been as much a part of the mainstream sustainability conversation, at least at the levels that’s taking place at say the big climate conferences or elsewhere. Certainly at the community environmental justice level, there’s people of color, the ones who are most affected typically are certainly people, the more marginalized economically or racially, we tend to bring them in a token way as well. The i word inclusive has become very big in business now. How do we make a transition to a just and inclusive economy? It’s a good word, but I don’t yet know that we really understand what that means, let alone how to do it.

[00:10:20] Marc: What might you say to these young entrepreneurs? What are the core qualities that you see in them, and that you would want to help grow and support in them?

[00:10:36] Joel: Well, vision is part of it. Enthusiasm and passion, as you may recall is a particular value of the young, but also just holding everyone accountable, and holding our feet to the fire, and not accepting vague or elusive answers to really important and sometimes difficult questions. I see a lot of that whether you’re an entrepreneur or an activist truly believing in a better future, truly believing in solutions, and understanding that the solutions that we need are not simply incremental.

We’re drowning in what I call radical incrementalism, or maybe random acts of greenness, where you’ve got a lot of different initiatives, not just environmental, but social as well, but they’re still a series of disconnected dots. You’re not really thinking systemically when we need to be thinking at the system’s level here. There’s just a lot more that we can be doing in terms of thinking in those ways, but really supporting the work of those who are. At the Verge conference you mentioned, actually at multiple conferences, we have some fast pitch competitions from entrepreneurs, primarily on what is now called Climate Tech, used to be called Clean Tech back in the day.

It’s not just renewable energy and electric vehicles or mobility, it’s a whole range of things, from food systems to circular business models, monitoring and verification systems that we desperately need to track our progress or lack of progress in fighting the climate crisis. It’s just a breathtaking breadth of solution sets, and it’s very exciting. Of course, like all entrepreneurs, they need support, they need mentoring, they need customers, they need to cross through what was often called the valley of death between basically proof of concept and getting to scale. We have so many solutions out there, and many of them are coming from the next generation of entrepreneurs. It’s very exciting to see and we need to make sure that as many of those as possible do not wither on the vine.

[00:13:14] Marc: It’s interesting you’re mentioning the excitement and passion that I can feel from you about all of the different solutions that are emerging, but I also heard you say some concern, deep concern about the lack of a more sustained effort or integrated effort. Do you have any sense how do we get there? How do we move more toward sustainable and integrated actions?

[00:13:46] Joel: Yes, that’s a really good question, Marc. I don’t have a pat answer for that at all. We need to be moving much further, much faster, and not just here in the United States or North America, but globally. Just in Egypt at the COP27, they’re fighting over important things, but not necessarily the right things. In the meantime, the problems keep getting worse and worse every year. We’re reaching tipping point, we’re reaching tipping points across a whole range of environmental systems, ecological systems, and we’re just not addressing those.

To some extent, and it’s really sad to say this, how bad do things need to get before people rise up, and step up, and stand up, and speak up, and show up in all the ways that we need. Of course, by that time, it’s kind of late, it’s already kind of late. The question now is not whether we’re going to face the impacts of climate change. That’s already happening. We’re seeing that all over the world, including here in the United States. The question is, how bad is it going to get, and what cost in every respect from financial to lives will that exact from–?

Everything of what we’ve just gone through in the pandemic, we’ve seen the ability to come together quickly, but the pandemic is a very different thing because it was here and now and daily and affected us personally in our homes and climate is a slower moving pandemic. It’s taking place over years and decades, and it’s not always possible to see the impact on our lives. Of course, our lives are filled with lots of other things we need to be worrying about. Kids and education and finance and health care and putting food on the table and meaningful work and clean air and water and respect and justice and everything else that really should be a human right.

It’s really hard for people to pay attention to something that may be existential, but it’s relatively far off. That’s the dilemma we face. As I said, I don’t have a solution about how we do this. I do think we’re seeing lots of signs of progress around the world from government, from the business community, from civil society, from homeowners, from all over the place, at the community level, at the national level, but it’s just not enough. The indicators are telling us that, I think it was someone from the UN called it a red light for humanity, or flashing red light or something, I don’t remember the phrase, but you get the point, and yet, it’s on the list of the top five things I need to worry about today. That may be number eight.

[00:16:54] Marc: The work you’re doing is so on the ground, bringing people together. You mentioned, not only do you get to work with lots of young, vital entrepreneurs, you also work with big companies, you do a lot of work, and I imagine with government as well, to some degree, but I know you work with companies like Google and Facebook, and Microsoft. It’s interesting. It seems like you also bring those factions together. That must be very heartening and exciting.

[00:17:35] Joel: Our tagline is we convene communities to confront the climate crisis. Convening is something that we do very well, whether it’s in small groups of 50 or 100 people, or 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 people, and I think some of these events will soon be 10,000 people in the next few years because they’re growing rapidly, and bringing them together. What we’ve learned about that, again, whatever scale is 50 or 5,000, is that the success is partly on having good content, or partly on giving people a good experience, whether it’s just a nice meal at a resort, or whatever the experiences or some extracurricular kinds of things, but it’s mostly run creating community.

People want to be part of a community and particularly with climate and sustainability in general. There’s a general understanding that we can’t do this alone, this is very much a team sport, and none of us can do this, and none of us knows everything. Companies need to collaborate, even competitors, and they need to engage their value chains. These are communities and sometimes there’s communities in waiting. I’ll just give you an example.

About four or five years ago, we launched a conference called Circularity for and about the circular economy, which is around how do we basically keep molecules in play through closing the loop or extending the life and making things repairable, or sharing things so that we get more utilization or bringing in more bio-based materials. It’s a fairly complex and fascinating and systems-oriented field. It’s been around for a long time. There’s been a big conference in the UK, a group called the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. We hadn’t done anything in North America. Nobody had. We convened for this event. It was in Minneapolis and we hoped for about 500 people.

We had to cut registration off at 850 because that’s all the fire marshals would give us, but I remember it was just an amazing moment in this hotel ballroom, packed hotel ballroom in Minneapolis on the opening morning of the first day. People were looking around saying, “Holy crap, look at us. I had no idea how many of us there are.” It was a community in waiting and we catalyzed that and nurtured it and we put a lot of work into nurturing communities.

It’s a little bit of a fake it till you make it aspect, and we call it a community, and then eventually it so becomes that. Now a few years later, there are people who want to come back sure to learn about circular economy and see the latest and greatest but really to be together and share and learn and commiserate and all of that. That’s really a lot of what we need is we need more community, whether it’s at the human scale or the corporate scale, or I suppose at the government scale, although that feels a lot harder these days.

[00:20:55] Marc: It’s interesting. I think there’s something so important about that “Holy crap, I had no idea”. I find it in the work that I do, it’s often the holy crap I had no idea that everyone else is dealing with the same problems, the same busy minds, the same doubts, the same imposter syndromes but there’s also that I think that recognition of how many people there are who care about similar things. I think we’d probably be blown away by the level of care that there actually is about these issues. Who doesn’t want well-being, sustainability, a healthy planet, but how to move that higher on the– Also, as you were saying, we need to put food on the table. We need to pay the bills and how to create enough, I think, community is probably the answer. I hear you saying the power of community.

[00:22:02] Joel: But all those things you mentioned about the people that you work with, Marc, the uncertainty, the imposter syndrome, the insecurity, all of that, that’s part and parcel of being human, number one, but certainly in sustainability. All these people, they’re passionate, they’re excited, they have increased influence in their companies and these are sometimes very, very large companies, McDonald’s and Walmart and Amazon and Google and General Motors and so on. At the same time, they constantly I think burdened with, “Am I doing enough? Is this really making a difference? Am I fooling myself? Are we tinkering at the margins? Are we fiddling wall roam?”

There’s this constant radio station 24/7, 50,000 watts playing in insider that brings that uncertainty. That’s one of the challenges at our GreenBiz conference, which we do every February in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it’s for and about the profession of sustainability. How do you become better at your job? I opened it with a little video, a skit basically, but it was two versions of me, one in color, one in black and white, one was optimistic one, and each one was a different camera. This is the most exciting time in my entire sustainability career. Boom. This is the most terrifying time in my sustainability career. Boom.

Finally, everybody, my company understands what I do and appreciates and knows who I am. Boom. All of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of me. I don’t even have time to think and anyway, on and on and on. That’s the world which hit people inhabit. It’s this rollercoaster I was talking about earlier, the ups and downs of just in the course of a single day, let alone a week and a month and a year. That’s what people go through. We need one another. That’s true as humans but I’m, specifically talking about these communities that we’ve helped catalyze and nurtured and convened.

People need one another. They want to understand exactly what you were saying, Mark, “Oh my God, it’s not just me. I’m not the only one who’s thinking this way. How do you deal with it?” There’s just this huge hunger and we’ve been very cognizant of that and have designed a lot of significant part of each of our events around community and around bringing people together and giving them the opportunities to share and as a result, people keep coming back and bringing their friends.

[00:24:54] Marc: You mentioned you were surprised by how many people came to that Circularity conference. How many people are coming these days?

[00:25:03] Joel: We had a bit of an interregnum called COVID but the last one we did, which was in Atlanta, we had just north of 1,000 people but it was still a time when there were a lot of travel restrictions and people couldn’t come. We’ll be in Seattle next June for the third in-person one, about the sixth year but the third in-person one. I don’t know. I’m guessing we’ll be 1,200, 1,500 people.

[00:25:36] Marc: Somehow it hadn’t dawned on me what a tough time it is to be in the conference business during COVID.

[00:25:45] Joel: Considering that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of our revenue come from bringing people together, we came through the pandemic in actually pretty good shape, pivoted hard and fast. The amazing team that we have that I don’t run of, as you said, about 60 people, didn’t say, “We can’t do that.” They said, “Okay, now we’re headed in this direction.” We pivoted to virtual. We continued to nurture the community. We innovated, added some new ways of bringing people together, new ways of making money.

In 2020, I think, our revenue dipped 4%. We came through it I think stronger than ever because we don’t really have that many competitors but some of them aren’t around anymore, let’s just say, or aren’t doing it as well as maybe they could have or certainly as well as we are. We came through it in really good shape and it’s, to be honest, a minor miracle.

[00:26:51] Marc: That’s great. I love the way you were describing how you opened that conference. I think of it in a way as it’s I think an important reality, important paradox to actually pay attention to the sense that on the one hand, everything is terrible. We’re going to hell in a handbasket. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be hopeful for. I think of it as not avoiding the pain and not avoiding the possibility, both. It looks like you described it as a rollercoaster, and I think it has that element to it and it’s also learning constantly, I think, acknowledging the pain, learning and moving toward the possibility. Then we end up in some way back in the pain but to keep raising the bar of the possibility, how can we do that?

[00:28:09] Joel: A lot of it is just learning how to live with duality. The duality of all these possibilities and solutions that just seem incredible and promising and exciting and impactful and may be exactly what we need to solve our biggest social and environmental challenges, at the same time just seeing the headlines and hearing the news and watching the world go by and knowing that things are messed up, politics and climate and the economy and everything. How do you hold those two things? This is not unique to sustainability, although I would posit that it’s those into sustainability live this more intensely.

It’s just part of being human now is how do we get through the day knowing that it’s a beautiful day and my family is doing well, I had a great day at work, I have enough money to pay the bills, I’m looking forward to a great meal tonight, and oh my God, the news, Trump, Ukraine, the economy, Elon, you name it, it’s just a mess. How do we reconcile those two things and how do we just move through them on a day-by-day basis? That’s just a challenge we all face every day.

[00:29:38] Marc: Yes. The human dilemma. Then there’s also our own on a very personal level, our individual level, our minds are a mess, our emotions are a mess and yet there’s something extraordinary about these minds and bodies and [crosstalk]

[00:29:58] Joel: The human experience.

[00:29:59] Marc: The human experience. The gift of our emotions, the gift of our imaginations. There is something about, I think the power, how potent the power of community that you touched on, that’s one of the real striking things from what you were saying today.

[00:30:16] Joel: Community doesn’t have to be 1,000 people or 50 people. It can be five people, it can be two. There’s a huge need for mentoring, not just elder to youth, actually youth to elder in a lot of times, or just peer to peer. Every one of us in sustainability gets calls, emails, social media, pings or friends of friends saying, “Hey, how do I get into the field? I want to be in sustainability. I want to be climate.” It’s now the most important issue in my future. I want to work in that and everybody wants, needs to be part of this. It seems not everybody, I live in a bubble, so I’m probably exaggerating.

I know I’m exaggerating, but, but there’s a lot more people that stepping into this than I ever saw and thought possible. If you just go on LinkedIn and search for sustainability or circular economy or climate tech, and if you had the benefit of what those returns and how many jobs there were three years ago versus now, it’s gone way, way, way up. What’s the opportunity to mentor? I get to do that a lot. Mentoring young people, both in my company and outside. We as a company try to do that. We have a program called Emerging Leaders where for each of our four annual events, we gift not just registration, but actually airfare and hotel to 10 young people of color to come to our event.

Our events are expensive. They were in the four figures at some point or another. It’s really interesting to see that. First of all, we don’t just bring them and we plop them into a conference of largely older white people. It’s not older, but older than them. We have a number of programs and nurture them internally. It’s just phenomenal. Not just the reaction of these young emerging leaders, but the reaction of the elders. Again, some of these elders are in their thirties and forties, but in terms of the opportunity that they see and the joy and satisfaction they get in helping bring others along.

We just need more of that. We need more of that in the world, but in sustainability where it’s really hard to learn because it’s really about everything. One of the remarkable things about sustainability, Mark, is that on the one hand, it’s about this incredible scientific complexity, geekiness nerdiness, that even the experts don’t fully understand just this technical complexity. On the other hand, it’s about our bodies and our families and our communities and our kids and our future and our world and what we eat and drink and all of that.

You probably know, and I’m sure most people know, that if you go too far in either direction, it’s either, it’s like, I don’t know, that’s just way too complicated for me to understand, or, wow, that’s just so California woo-woo. Integrating head and heart is through storytelling, whether we do that on stage or one-on-one. I think that’s a really powerful tool that we’re all learning how to use better in terms of how do we tell those stories. How do we integrate head and heart and increase transparency and share the sets and share ideas.

[00:33:49] Marc: Well, I was going to ask you as a way of closing the question that I started with, which is what gives you hope? I have to say, in a way, you just answered that. Hearing you and the work that you’re doing gives me hope. Is there anything else that you just want to add as a way of closing this today?

[00:34:12] Joel: Well, if I gave you hope, Mark, then my work is done.

[00:34:16] Marc: [laughs] Your work is never done, unfortunately.

[00:34:20] Joel: I know. I wish it was, but you get the point.

[00:34:24] Marc: Thank you. It makes me, I really want to come to your conferences. I get the sense that you’re really good at creating community and providing hope and paths for people. Thank you so much for your work.

[00:34:39] Joel: Thank you for all that you do too, Mark. Really appreciate it.

[music]

[00:34:47] 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 to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

[00:35:11] [END OF AUDIO]

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Why Must It Be This Way: Guided Meditation, Talk, and Zen Puzzler

In this episode we begin with a short guided meditation. Then, Marc gives a short talk based on a famous Zen dialogue in which a student asks, “Why must it be this way?” when he sees a crow eating a dead frog. The Zen teacher responds “It’s for your benefit. And you caused it.” Marc address and unpacks this mysterious and practical dialogue that is meant to open our hearts and minds. For this episode’s Zen Puzzler, Marc plays with the question, “What is Zen?” and goes deeper into the question of why things must be a particular way.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]  

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.

In today’s episode, we begin with a short guided meditation, just a few minutes of stopping, pausing, and going deeper. Then I talk about a famous Zen dialogue in which the student asks, why must it be this way? Referring to a crow eating a dead frog, and the Zen teacher responds, “It’s for your benefit and you caused it.” Together we address and unpack this mysterious and practical dialogue meant to open our hearts and minds, broaden our worlds.

Then today’s Zen puzzler, we address this question of why must it be this way and also unpack a bit the question that is parallel which is what is Zen or what does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be alive and live in this world of earth and life and death. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. [music] Let’s begin with a short meditation and I’m going to ring my trustee bell.

[bell ringing]

Marc: We hit the bell. The bell I think helps with the transition, reminding us that there’s a difference between our ordinary lives and stopping, pausing. Can you feel it? Can you feel right now the transition, [silence] from ordinary space to the space of entering the space of a different kind of curiosity, awareness, bringing awareness to whatever’s happening with the body, bringing awareness to whatever’s happening with your breathing right now, and noticing our thoughts, our thinking minds, how curious that we can do that, that we can bring attention to the body, that we can bring attention to the breath, that we can be curious.

Is our thinking mind busy, judgmental, or is it calm and curious, and noticing any feelings? How are you showing up right now? How are you showing up right now? What are you bringing to this moment? As much as possible shedding the activities and to-do lists, putting those aside and just being here. Here in this both ordinary but also extraordinary space here alive, seeing if it’s possible to bring a warmhearted quality, warmhearted even in the midst of the challenges, the difficulties, the grieving, the joy, while all enveloped in this sense of appreciating whatever is happening right now.

[silence] Keeping it simple while breathing in and breathing out without doing anything extra. What is it like? Take some attention and some courage to enter this space of not doing anything extra, not distracting ourselves, really noticing, sometimes this is called our big mind, the mind that can hold everything, not pushing anything away, not grasping onto anything, while ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

[pause 00:07:03]

Marc: I’m going to ring the bell to finish here, but please feel free to pause and keep sitting or we’ll move on to whatever happens next.

[bell ringing]

[music]

Marc: Why must it be this way? I think this is such a great question. Why must it be this way? Question for leaders, for mindful leadership, and for anyone here alive right now. It leads me to think about how might things be different? How might I benefit from everything around us? What is it like to be alive? What are the wonderful things that can happen in our lives as well as the challenges, painful things? Why is it this way? This question actually comes from a very old dialogue, a Zen dialogue from sixth century China, in which a student, a Zen student comes upon a crow that is eating a dead frog and he asks a great Zen teacher Dongshan.

Why must it be this way? Dongshan responds I think with just a surprising and powerful answer. Dongshan says, “It’s for your benefit and you caused it. It’s for your benefit and you caused it.” That, of course, is not the answer that we might expect. What is it? What is it about Dongshan’s words? Of course, this image of a crow eating a frog is a powerful image and can conjure up pain and frustration and any difficulties that we’re experiencing in our lives and we might say, “Why?” Why is everything so difficult? Why is everything is so challenging? Why do things look painful and unfair? Why are we so divided on key issues? Why aren’t we caring for our planet? How can we live with so much uncertainty?

Dongshan words it’s for your benefit might seem like a cruel joke, and yet it’s really about perspective, stepping back. Yes. while our world is filled with pain and challenges, it’s also filled with unbelievable beauty, loving hearts, and goodness all mixed together in a most amazing and mysterious way. The frustrating and the painful blended with all that is beautiful and moving, and clearly, it is all for our benefit.

In this case, if all the good and bad around us is really for our benefit, consider how might we work on this. How might we look at the way that we are thinking about embodying, and feeling our approach to ourselves, to our work, to our relationships, and to the world? It’s easy to feel that somehow the world is operating against us. It’s this phrase, it’s for your benefit is a whole sense of empowerment, a whole sense of radical, radical empowerment, radical agency. The second part of this is you caused it. Clearly, this is a way of radical responsibility for how we are seeing and approaching and living in the world. I love to say that there are events and then there’s how we interpret and relate to these events.

We are responsible for how we see the world for our actions and our relationship with our family, our work, our community, and our planet.

Saying you cost it doesn’t mean it’s not your fault. I love the distinction between it’s not your fault, it’s not our fault, but it’s our responsibility. How can we take responsibility for living the best life that we can? How can we take responsibility for how we see and swim in the world? How can we shift from the habit energy to the deeper vow of living with awareness and the vow of helping in every way that we can? Here’s a poem that I think is a way of highlighting this sense of why must it be this way and it’s for our benefit. This is a poem called Sometimes by Sheenagh Pugh.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all from bad to worse.

Some years, muscadel faces down frost;

green thrives, and the crops don’t fail.

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,

elect an honest man, and decide they care enough,

that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss,

sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen. May it happen for you? Why must it be this way? Why and how can we open our hearts and minds to living our best full selves? People sometimes will step back from war, elect an honest man, decide they care enough that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

[music]

Marc: 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 meditation in daily life. Today’s Zen puzzler. I love bringing forward these interesting mysterious Zen question Zen poems. Again, I think just the word Zen is a puzzler. To me, the word Zen itself, I think, literally, it means to sit. It’s about the practice of sitting, sitting practice.

Deeper than that, I think the word Zen is a placeholder for what does it mean to be human? I was once at an event at Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center Monastery in the Los Padres Forest wilderness and Central California. It was an event where there were families there in the summertime. There was a 10-year-old boy who turned to his father, who was visiting Tassajara I think for the first time. The 10-year-old said, “Dad, what is Zen?” The father turned to me and I said, “What? Why don’t you have your son ask all of the Zen students here this question?” He did. He went around for the next couple of days and asked people what is Zen and wrote down their answers.

Then the following evening after dinner, a bell was rung. The father said he had an announcement to make, and his 10-year-old son stood up and read the I think it was 20 or 30 answers that he had gotten. Of course, they were all very distinct answers to this question. What is Zen? Essentially they were all about Zen, Zen is being fully here. Zen is developing your radical self-awareness. Zen is the practice of warm heartedness. Zen is a non-dual practice of cutting through right and wrong.

Now, onto our puzzler for today, which is really the question, this dialogue that I talked about earlier in this episode of a Zen student coming, coming across a crow, eating a dead frog, and asking and wondering why must it be this way? In some way, this question, why must it be this way? Is it a lot like the question of what is Zen? What is up with reality? What is up with my experience? Why this harshness of life and death? Zen is really about an exploration about our birth, our lives, and our death. Why do we practice and how do we practice within this, the mystery of that we’re born, we live and we die.

Again, I think this is the student coming across birth and life and death in seeing a dead frog encountering it. I think Dongshan who is the founder of Soto Zen in China in the sixth century response, “it’s for your benefit and you caused it”, this response is worth staying with. I would suggest during meditation or during the day in meetings, in conversations anytime we find that we are wavering or feeling our inner grump or our inner victim or the gaps between what we want, what we aspire and what we see, this phrase, this it’s for your benefit and you caused it. It’s for your benefit and you caused it.

I think the underlying sentiment here is that everything is for our benefit, from the air that we breathe, the sunlight shining on the trees, the clouds, it’s all gift, it’s all completely gift. If we can embody that and feel how spectacular, amazing that is when we are able to feel that and the you caused it or it’s really your– again, not that it’s our fault, but that we have the ability to completely enter the courage it takes to not grasp on or push away, but to see what is to see. I love the statement by Shunryu Suzuki I think it’s in the opening talk of his book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, where he says, if you think that when you die, this is the end of your life, this is not right understanding.

Then he says, if you think when you die this isn’t the end of your life, this also is not the right understanding, that he’s saying birth and life and death are for our benefit and we caused it in some way or we make it what it is and that we have the deep responsibility to cultivate our own depth, our own understanding of our lives, of birth and life and death, so why must it be this way? I hope you can bring this question and this sentiment into every aspect of your lives, it’s for your benefit. 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 to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:24:37] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Why Must It Be This Way: Guided Meditation, Talk, and Zen Puzzler appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Finding Wholeness in a Challenging World with Parker Palmer

Parker J. Palmer is a writer, speaker, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. In this episode of the Zen Bones Podcast, Marc and Parker explore the creative tension between what is and what is possible, the art of perspective taking, and how to find wholeness in a challenging world.

Parker shares how his hard experience with depression gave birth to several books, what he aspires to now, how his experiences in a Quaker intentional community showed him a way to transform economic inequality, and how creating safe spaces and tapping into your inner wisdom is a key component in enabling social change.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Parker J. Palmer is an American author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He has published ten books and numerous essays and poems, and is founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal. His work has been recognized with major foundation grants, several national awards, and thirteen honorary doctorates.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[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.

In today’s episode, I’m here with Parker Palmer, author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues that include education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change. He’s published many bestselling books, which I’ve enjoyed immensely. He’s the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and he’s been recognized with major foundation grants, several national awards, and 13 honorary doctorates. So pleased to welcome Parker.

In this episode, we talk about the question of what gives you hope, and we talked about the gaps and the creative tension between what is and what is possible, and the art of perspective-taking, looking at the world through others’ points of view. Parker talked about his experiences in a Quaker intentional community, and how that helped him learn ways to transform economic inequality.

We talked about how he rekindles hope with his walks in nature, as well as his profound experiences with depression, and how that helped him give birth to some of his more hopeful books. We talked about the art of creating safe spaces and finding your inner light as a core part of enabling social change. I hope you enjoy and learn from this conversation with Parker as much as I learned and enjoyed it. Thank you.

This is Marc Lesser, and this is Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. I am just really thrilled and honored to be here today with Parker Palmer, who’s been a hero of mine in his books and writing. Parker, welcome.

[00:02:32] Parker Palmer: Thank you, Marc. It’s a great pleasure and honor to be with you.

[00:02:37] Marc: I’ve reread Let Your Life Speak, which I really enjoyed just as much reading the second time from 10 years ago. I think where I want to start is this question of the world seems to be in a pretty messed up challenging place in many, many ways. I wonder, how are you feeling about things these days, and especially what gives you hope, and how do you practice and bring your sense of hope and possibility into this world of ours?

[00:03:21] Parker: I’m sure there are days when had you asked me that question, I’d be Mr. Doom and Gloom, because those days come, don’t they? Like bad weather. For the most part, hope is a notion that I work with and work on. I’ve always seen hope as an action rather than an attitude. I’ve thought a lot and talked a lot, and I guess tried to live the notion that we stand and act in a tragic gap between what is and what should be, and what could be.

Our job is to keep putting one foot in front of the other in that tragic gap with whatever role we’re playing in the world. I hear people saying, “Well, it’s hopeless,” and my thought is, if I were to embrace that, what’s left to do except sit in the corner and suck my thumb? That seems to me not a fit way for a grownup to live. I think what gives me hope is all the good people I know, all the good work they’re doing, a lot of it stimulated by the apocalyptic feel of the last decade or so. Apocalypse after all means revelation. A lot of people have walked into that revelation and seen possibilities that they either hadn’t seen or hadn’t really activated in their own lives before. Young people, especially, I think there’s a whole cadre of the rising generation, and for me, that would, I suppose, be anybody under  45 or so, that’s how it looks at age 83 as I sit here today.

They live into what I just said about folks engaging the tragic gap and keeping on. I read, the other day, a wonderful quote from a woman who represents the Black Liberation Movement in this country, which is one of the historical streams of American history that has inspired me for a very long time, ever since I became a community organizer at age 30 in Washington DC.

She was asked about hope, and she said, “I know of no narrative in the Black experience in this country or elsewhere around the world that ends with the words, “And then we gave up.” I take inspiration from people who’ve really had a much harder row to hoe than I have literally and figuratively.

Finally, I take inspiration from the natural world. I live in Wisconsin in Madison. We’re blessed around here with lots of lakes and woods and rivers. I get out and walk and sit and meditate and absorb, even in the coldest months, as much as possible, because there’s a resurgence in nature that’s also in us. I’ve seen areas that were burnt to the ground by forest fires or blown to the ground by derechos, inland tornadoes. 5, 10 years later, they’re back with new forms of growth but green fecund and growing. When I have the presence of mind to recollect and be present to all of that, I find hope.

[00:07:04] Marc: One of the words you used a couple of times and you started with is the word gap. Maybe there’s the tragic gap. What you’re describing, I think, is the gap of possibility. I, more and more, see how we live in and work in those gaps as a practice, as a core. This is where I think, as business people, everything about the life of work is the gaps between what is and what you are envisioning.

I think this is also true of our personal lives or our spiritual lives or the lives of Black people or our democracy. That approach, I find, so just practical and useful, and yet it’s uncomfortable. It’s basically acknowledging discomfort of being able to stay with and work in those gaps.

[00:08:12] Parker: Yes, it is. I guess the reason for that discomfort is that there’s something in us that always wants resolution. We always want to solve the problem rather than holding the tension. Of course, that’s a disease that’s eating away at our democracy right now because the founding genius of this democracy for all of its flaws and all of the founders’ flaws, the founding genius was a system that was really designed to get creative use out of tensions, out of the great debate between left and right, this and that, and to slowly, as time went on, to not close that gap but to negotiate it was something that somehow begins to approximate the moral arc of history, as Martin Luther King talked about it. I like your description of the gap, it is what it is and it’s where we are. It draws us forward, doesn’t it, that gap? If you’re on to its possibilities, if you don’t turn away, if you feel the opening for you to move forward with life-giving creative work and activity or in the case of a business person to innovate a new product to be of greater service to the consuming public, then that gap functions to in a teleological way. There’s an end in there that draws you into a more creative future. I like to think of this and a lot of other things as a matter of choices that we have to make.

My notion of the tragic gap is that we’re always in this gap between, on the one hand, the harsh realities around us. On the other hand, the life-giving possibilities that are not wish dreams but are real. These are possibilities we’ve seen with our own eyes. I look, for example, back at my 11 years in a Quaker intentional community where everybody made the same amount of money, no matter what your role was. There was no distinction by rank or status or education or age.

It was an absolutely flat economic system of radical equality. I spent 11 of the most creative years of my life there really coming to understand how much nonsense there was in the notion of privilege, which I grew up with as a White straight male from a well-off family. How, by getting rid of the economic distinctions, it suddenly became possible to look at everyone as equally valuable, equally worthy, and to pay more attention to what they had to say and to how they lived their lives than to how much money they made or how much status their role in the organization carried with it.

I look around my neighborhood right now in Madison, that’s not how we live, but I spent 11 years living with real people in real space and time living that way. I know that there are possibilities in a less predatory and consumptive model of economic life than the one we live at this moment in my town where there are clearly the haves and the have-nots and the have-nots are really suffering. For me, the choice is, do I flip out on the side of harsh reality, which I call corrosive cynicism?

That means, okay, I see how the economic system works. I’m just going to game it to max it out for myself, let the devil take the hindmost, or do I flip out on the side of an unrealistic idealism, irrelevant idealism? Wouldn’t it be nice if some floaty notion of how all of this can change tomorrow? If it doesn’t change tomorrow, then I get off the train.

I did my graduate work at Berkeley in the ’60s, and I saw a lot of people who thought all of this will change by the end of the decade. At the end of the decade, it hadn’t changed. It had actually gotten worse with Vietnam raging. They got off the social change train and devoted themselves to the acquisition of wealth. We have choices to make, and I think a lot of people these days are reflecting deeply and well on the choices they want to make at this critical time in American history.

[00:13:36] Marc: There’s a book that I find myself surprisingly how often I refer to the work of Peter Senge in a book called The Fifth Discipline. In there, he uses the expression creative tension, and he makes a statement that I highlighted that says, “The ability to stay in the discomfort of these gaps may be the most important quality of a leader.” He goes on to talk about various strategies that we have for avoiding the gaps. He describes the three most popular strategies.

One is to be so busy that we forget that the gap exists, that’s very popular today. The second, to get embroiled in the emotional aspects, to get so worked up about our anger and frustration. The third is to lower the bar. That’s a bit of the cynical, I think, approach. This is impossible. I think it’s interesting and important to look at what the challenges to being able to stay in these gaps and then to be able. What I was hearing you say, one of your practices is nature and keep coming back to nature, but you also seem to– I was hearing you as a perspective taking. The practice of perspective taking, which I think is a really undervalued practice, like seeing things from a multitude of perspectives.

[00:15:22] Parker: Thank you for underscoring that. I do the best I can at that. I think it’s really hard for any of us to escape our own perspective but we can at least be aware of the limitations of our perspective. We can read enough, we can talk to enough people who are unlike us in their life story, and to understand their perspective on things more fully. With that information, we can begin to ask ourselves, what more do I need to know about how the world looks from another person’s point of view in order to check and correct the blinders that come with my perspective?

As I said earlier, I’m an older, reasonably well off, straight, White male in America, and it took me quite a while in life to figure out that the way I looked at the world was not the way a lot of people looked at the world, because this world was made for me, not for you and me, but just for me. I was the person for whom this society was designed to work very, very well.

I think one of the great struggles these days is there are a lot of White people, men and women, who, like me, are reasonably well off and not marginalized in any significant way, who are just having a very hard time realizing that their perspective is not the only perspective. The life that comes, the three-dimensionality that comes, the color and texture from adopting other people’s lenses, as the old cliché goes, look at it from the other person’s point of view. Do that multiple times from multiple perspectives and life just gets more exciting. It gets less boring, it gets more engaging.

I think, above all, I was reading a wonderful piece that Joanna Macy wrote, one of my heroes, about the Buddhist concept of the bardo, which I’m sure you know far better than I do. The bardo is that gap between the times when things could either get better or they could get worse, and it looks like the odds are they’re going to get worse. She says, one of the big pieces of Buddhist advice is very simply, do not look away, do not blink it, do not turn aside, take it in engage it, try to understand it, and then keep moving into it, or at least sitting with it without evasion.

I think your comment about how hard it is for us to hold tension is well taken, and it takes us back to the old fight and flight syndrome. I wrote a book called Healing the Heart of Democracy, which drew heavily on the importance of creative tension-holding.

One of the things I learned in researching that book was something I hadn’t known before, I should have known probably, but for psychology, we talk a lot about stress and distress, but psychologists also have a word eustress for stress that draws out the best in us. When you think about the power of the fight and flight instinct and how it actually created so many cultural institutions that are designed to help us hold tension well, language is one. Once we have language, we don’t have to respond to something startling behind us by reaching out and clubbing them with whatever we got in our hand. We can inquire. We can say, “What’s going on here?” Turn around and look and conduct inquiry into it. Art itself is always driven by dynamic tension. The cultural inventions of art in every form are, I think, in many ways,an effort to help us transcend the impact of fight or flight, and on it goes. A very fundamental human problem, but let’s not waste all those years of evolution by failing to take advantage of the openings we have into holding tension creatively.

[00:20:24] Marc: Yes. It’s interesting. Evolution and the bardo and tension. One of my favorite moments that I ever had in writing was– this was a book I wrote many years ago about paradox. As I was writing about paradox, at some point, I found myself writing, “I don’t like paradox, it’s uncomfortable. I want clarity.” Then what really surprised me, and this is one of the things that I love about writing, is being surprised when I wrote, “Well, perhaps Paradox is actually more clear than clear.”

What we usually think of as clarity is usually very one-sided, right? Whether it’s too much looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or too much cynicism, or as gradual, do things change gradually or do they change suddenly? I think, yes, we’re experiencing, as you were saying, the brilliance of how our government was initially designed as a way of being able to create tension and hold tension.

[00:21:39] Parker: It’s what the tripartite division of government is all about in this or any other democracy. It’s so interesting, Marc, that you mentioned the word paradox, because, this morning, as I was preparing for our conversation, by reconnecting with you in my mind and heart, I was remembering that my very first book, which is one I don’t think about a whole lot anymore, 10 books ago, was called The Promise of Paradox.

It was an exploration that began, for me, with Thomas Merton, who was a big fan of paradox. The people who know his marvelous journal, The Sign of Jonas, will probably remember Thomas Merton writing as an epigraph to that beautiful book, “I am traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.” [chuckles] When I read that, I thought, “This is the guy for me because that’s how life feels.”

Had I not been onto that notion with Merton’s help in my 30s, there’s just so much of the rest of my life that I never could have made sense of, but paradox, as you say, is really clarifying. I think the alternative to paradox is the kind of simplification that actually obscures and distorts things. I don’t remember who it was, maybe one of the Supreme Court justices or some great literary figure, who said this very interesting thing, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” That’s where paradox, I think, takes us.

[00:23:31] Marc: In my own mind, I have to keep coming back and reminding myself of at least a definition of paradox, which is something that appears impossible, but may, in fact, be true.

[00:23:45] Parker: Yes. Exactly. I love Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist. What he said about paradox, he said, “The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one great truth may be another great truth.” It calls for discernment. He didn’t say it always is another great truth, but it may be another great truth, like, are we made for the community? Absolutely. Are we made for solitude? Absolutely.

It’s like breathing in and breathing out. If I were to say to you right now, “You know what? I think I’m basically a breathing out kind of guy, so that’s all I’m going to do for the rest of this interview,” this interview wouldn’t go on very long. Neither would I.

[00:24:33] Marc: Yes. Well, thank you for bringing us back to the breath

[laughter] and the paradox, right? The paradox of breathing in and breathing out. This is one of my images of how we exist and how we practice, is what we breathe in and the world appears in a certain way, and as we somehow think it is, and then we breathe out and let it all go. It’s with each breath we make, we create the world again fresh and even the tension, the gaps that exist in our breath, in our bodies. I want to come back to what gives you hope, Parker.

[00:25:28] Parker: All of the above. Conversations like this give me hope. I know, from experience, what human beings are capable of. I’m not talking about merely about what happens among educated people who sometimes really don’t take very good advantage of their education in terms of where the conversation goes or how the life gets lived. In my own family, I come from a line of skilled craftsmen with whom wonderful, very different kinds of conversations were possible.

Sometimes just watching them do their work and marveling at the intelligence in their hands, the kind of genius of crafting a beautiful object. In one case, it was a carpenter, and in the other case, a metal worker, in my own family. I learned so much from those grandparents, about the different modes of human intelligence and what’s possible between human beings of many, many sorts.

Again, we talked earlier about perspective. I think the more forms of intelligence you can connect with conversationally in the broadest sense of that word, the more you’re going to learn. Just observing my grandfather build a cabinet was a learning experience for me. How often he taught me, not with words, but just by saying, watch what I do. Then making space for me to try it for myself without judgment or mockery or anything because obviously, I wasn’t going to do his quality of work.

I’m a big fan of what human beings are capable of. The human possibility, I guess, is how I name it. Are we flawed? Are we greedy? Are we narrow-minded? Do we fall into the pits? Yes, absolutely. That’s part of the deal. I think one of my operating notions is that wholeness, human wholeness, which is I think what a lot of us are striving for. Human wholeness, not just for me, but for everyone. A sense of wholeness, a sense of being worthy, a sense of being seen and heard, which is what we have to offer up to as many people as possible.

I think wholeness has nothing to do with perfection. Wholeness has to do with embracing the imperfections in your life along with the stuff you get right. Being able to say, at the end, and it’s been very therapeutic or helpful for me to be able to say this as a person who’s taken some very deep dives into clinical depression and the profound darkness of that experience for months at a time, it’s been very helpful for me to be able to, eventually, to show up in the world saying, “Yes, I’m all of the above. I’m not only the hopeful books I write, but I’m also the hard experiences that gave rise to those books, and the potholes I stepped into along the path that somehow triggered or landed me in those hard experiences.”

I think there’s so much for us to talk about. So many things to talk about, so little time. [laughs]

[00:29:24] Marc: When you use the word wholeness, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite books of yours is called, A Hidden Wholeness. I thought both philosophical, but also very practical instructions for how to design and create wisdom circles, circles of wholeness and finding wholeness not through seeking solutions or advice-giving or problem-solving, but a paradoxical view of allowing and perspective taking, but just with tremendous sense of creating safety.

How can we create safe spaces? I think this is a skill. When it comes to racial issues, when it comes to democracy, when it comes to how we can skillfully find our way in managing and working toward solutions to some of these gaps.

[00:30:39] Parker: No, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. In raising a teenager or traveling through life with a partner, these are skills, I think, are understandings that are just valuable at so many levels. You’re absolutely right. What I’ve come to refer to as a circle of trust, which is what I write about in A Hidden Wholeness, is manifested in the work of an organization called The Center for Courage and Renewal, a nonprofit that I founded 25 years ago, which is just now celebrating its 25th anniversary. A very joyful event for all of us involved.

In the work of the Center for Courage and Renewal, we do retreats for people in many walks of life, but especially for people in the helping professions; teachers, and clergy, and nonprofit leaders, and so forth and so on, and healthcare folk, especially physicians. We talk about our circles as a way of being alone together. Talk about a paradox. We talk about our circles as places where the primary conversation is not around the perimeter of the circle, but each person in the circle is supported in having a deepening conversation with him or herself.

As you rightly said, there’s a lot of paradox in these practices. They are practices. They’re very concrete practices. Principles and practices are what we talk about when we begin our retreats. Trying to create a culture that will sustain us in this goal of allowing each person to have a deepening conversation with him or herself. The circles of trust that I’ve been in over the years, 25 years and more, are another source of hope for me because, in those settings, I see people who are just like me with all the flaws and foibles, along with the potentials, start to discover that they have an inner voice.

That there is a truth that lives inside them. Some people call it soul, seeds, call it the spark of the divine in every being. It can be called big self or true self. Merton called it true self. I think some Buddhist talk about big self, which is also a non-self or a no-self, which is another great paradoxical notion. I’ve seen people in these very trusting spaces begin to come in touch with the fact that they have what we– I’m a Quaker. We Quakers call the inner light.

Once you start getting access to it, it illumines your path in many, many ways. It’s a source of hope for me just knowing that we are not captive to our roles or our images or the prejudices that the society lays upon us the way it wants to define us, either as terribly important or you hardly exist. We’re not captive to any of that. I’m very, very struck with how most movements for social change have their originating spark in the lives of people who begin to understand this fundamental principle that “I am worthy, I am not unworthy in the way that this racism or this sexism or misogyny wants to define me.” They resolve to live divided no more. They resolve to begin living from the inside out. People who poo-poo in their work as somehow touchy-feely or whatever the latest phrase of dismissal is, really need to study the history of social movements because, so far, I’ve not been able to find one across the globe and across time that did not begin with people recovering that inner voice of truth.

Finding ways to share it with each other, to build community around it, and to deploy it in the world as a force of social change. That’s the story of the Civil Rights Movement in this country, The Black Liberation Movement, which was going on years before we even had a country. That’s the story of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. It’s the story of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It’s the story of the women’s movement around the globe. On and on it goes.

[00:36:05] Marc: Parker, you are beautifully articulating my hope for this conversation and any of these conversations that I’m hosting because, whether it’s one person or a million people, but who’s ever listening, I believe is having a conversation right now with themselves about this conversation. My hope is that leads people to find their own inner wholeness and their own inner light, which will support and enable people to take social action and to help create anything that we can all do to put our weight over on making this a more whole, whole world.

[00:36:59] Parker: Beautifully said, Marc. That’s a mission. That’s a mission worth pursuing.

[00:37:04] Marc: It is. Maybe this can be part one because I feel like we are just touching on things. Anything you would like to say just as a way of completing our circle here this morning?

[00:37:21] Parker: I just want to say, again, thank you, my gratitude to you for making me your conversation partner for this time together. As always happens for me, a good conversation, this conversation with you, not only your questions for me, but your comments along the line have awakened me to certain parts of my past that I want to reclaim, certain ideas that I don’t want to forget, practices that I want to continue with, and to possibilities, the human possibility in me that I want to try to live into. Thank you for all of that, Marc.

[00:38:06] Marc: Thank you. My heart is full and I really appreciate this time together. Appreciate it a lot.

[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.

[00:38:42] [END OF AUDIO]

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Design Your Life: Guided Meditation, Talk, and Zen Puzzler

How are you designing, and living your life? In this episode Marc begins with a short guided meditation. Then he unpacks the teachings of Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki who says “The more you practice meditation, the more you will be interested in your everyday life.” and “You will discover what is necessary and what is not; what part to correct and what part to emphasize more.” Marc reads and comments on a poem by William Stafford called Just thinking. This episode’s Zen puzzler is Ordinary Mind Is the Way. How to design your life – with your ordinary, extraordinary mind.

 

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 evershifting, and now, more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. In this episode, the topic is designing your life. How are you designing your life? How do you think about it? In this episode, I lean on and rely on the teachings of Zen teacher, Shunryū Suzuki, who says, “The more you practice meditation, the more you’ll be interested in your everyday life.

You will discover what is necessary and what is not, what part to correct and what part to emphasize more.” He goes on to say, “So by practice, you will know how to organize your life.” This episode is about the inner work of designing your life. I go on to read a poem called Just Thinking by William Stafford about this topic. Then today’s Zen puzzler is ordinary mind is the way. How can we work with our ordinary extraordinary minds to design our lives, to live our lives with great wonder, awe, and purpose, and meaning? I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you. Let’s do some sitting practice together.

Right now, whatever you happen to be doing, and just seeing what it’s like to pause, to stop. Both ordinary and sacred pause of bringing attention to your experience, experiencing your experience. I think of the 90-day practice period I did a few years ago at Tassajara, where the theme was experience the experience you are experiencing. It’s about noticing. Right now, noticing whatever you are feeling, sensing what is happening with your sensations right now. What are you seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, touching, thinking?

Just noticing, no need to change anything, it’s completely normalized, ordinary, and yet, when we let go of some of the busyness, the noise, there is opening. Opening our senses, opening the mind, opening the heart, and bringing a sense of a curiosity, and as well as some sense of wonder and awe. It’s amazing. This body and mind and heart that we have been given, all gift and all completely impermanent. Our thoughts and our bodies and minds coming like a flash. A flash here now and gone, here now and then gone.

Appreciating these gifts right now. Not getting too complicated, just noticing. This is, I think the fundamental practice of being aware of the breath, using the breath as a focus point, as an anchor. This breath that has been with us from the moment we were born, from the moment we arrived, and will be with us till our last breath. This paradox of how ordinary, how simple, and yet extraordinary and sacred at the same time as ordinary. The theme for this time together is designing your life. I think this is the most effective, profound starting point for designing our lives, making important decisions, allowing our lives to emerge.

Letting go of the idle concerns, the busyness, and bringing a sense of wonder and awe, and keeping it simple, breath, body, feelings, whatever is in your heart right now. Please, you can, and I can encourage you to maybe pause and continue sitting on your own, appreciating the silence, appreciating whatever you are experiencing. Of course, to bring this approach into your daily life, into your work, into your relationships, bringing this approach of curiosity, awe, wonder, and simplicity. Creating that spaciousness, that awareness, bringing your full experience into designing your life, living your life. Please do, thank you.

[music]

In today’s episode, I want to talk about this, one of my favorite topics, designing your life. Usually, when I think of this topic, my mind goes to thinking about work, our families, and our friends, our travel plans. How do we want to spend our time? This topic has become, I think, particularly relevant, interesting, maybe puzzling. As we’ve been transitioning out, I think of a few years of pandemic where there was a near lockdown.

These questions of how we use our time and our schedules, how we’re living. For many of us there was suddenly a lot more space, a lot more options about what mattered. Many people were shifting work, doing things long distance virtually that were thought to be impossible. I know that was true for me, how all of the work that I do from one-on-one coaching to doing especially, trainings, people thought it was impossible to do them virtually, and yet, here I am.

My life has been taking on a very different look and feel. At the same time, here we are witnessing shifting of civilization from the war in Ukraine, how we’re dealing with climate change, but seeing neighborhoods turn to rubble with the war. Some neighborhoods turn to rubble with the results of climate change and wondering how do we respond? What does this have to do with us? What do I do with my own life? Feeling this immense privilege of even being able to see from this perspective and ask these questions.

For me, these questions of designing our life start with how do we design our internal lives? How do we design our own practice? This practice that we call [unintelligible 00:11:02] practice or contemplative practice, or mindfulness practice. This, I think, is the ground, the basis of which this question of designing our lives sits on and emanates from, not to be overlooked. It’s not just moving external pieces around.

It’s the dance, the noticing where, from what ground, from what basis do we make these decisions from? I’ve been studying the writing and teachings of a Zen teacher, Shunryū Suzuki. In one of his talks in the book Not Always So, he says, “The more you practice meditation, the more you will be interested in your everyday life.” This may sound like a throwaway quote, but really it’s like the more we stop, the more we practice paying attention to our experience. It opens doorways to looking at our everyday lives from a very different perspective.

This particular sentence, the more you practice meditation, the more you will be interested in your everyday life makes me think of a drawing that I have framed and that sits on the wall right here. I’m actually looking at it right now. It’s a drawing and some calligraphy by Shunryū Suzuki’s Son Hoitsu Suzuki. It’s a simple image of a Zen monk and a frog looking at each other. The calligraphy says, “Everywhere you go is your temple.” I think this is in a way, what is meant by you will be interested in your everyday life, that all of your activities become more focused, more alive.

Everyday activities are contextualized, are experienced more as an expression of what really matters, of our practice of the ordinary and the sacred at the same time. This is the practice of not turning away from pain and difficulty, as well as not turning away from the joy and wonder and awe and the possibilities. Keeping our hearts open as much as possible. There’s another line where he says, “You will discover what is necessary and what is not, what parts to correct and what parts to emphasize more.” Again, this is from Shunryū Suzuki not always so, talking about why we meditate, why we practice. You will discover what is necessary and what is not necessary.

You will discover what parts to change and what parts to emphasize more. I’m finding it especially right now, in this time in my own life, during the Pandemic and during the war, really looking at what is necessary, what is needed. I think this is a valuable, ongoing question. Letting go of what isn’t necessary. Asking this question can be a way of clarifying what changes do we want to make? What shifts do we want to make? What needs more and less emphasis in our lives? By practice, we can find out how to design our lives.

For me, organizing my life literally means to make time for meditation, for study, for deepening my relationships, as well as wrestling with the questions, how can I help? What can I offer? What can I do in this crazy, mixed-up world that we find ourselves living in? It also makes me keep coming back to the practice of appreciation and to wonder. This simple kind of organizing our lives, adding more and more sense, value. This is to observe your situation accurately, to clear your mind, and begin from your original starting point.

This is another line from this talk. This is to observe your situation accurately, starting by clearing your mind and beginning from your original starting point. This is like seeing meditation as hitting the reset button with each breath, with each period of meditation, and starting fresh. What is your situation? What is the situation of our world? What’s working well and what needs more attention? How can we see our lives more accurately and more clearly? Shunryū Suzuki’s response to this question is clear your mind and begin from your original starting point.

This, I think, is a fundamental value assumption practice of Zen practice, which really, to me, Zen practice is human practice. The idea and practice of returning, loosening our grasping, our aversion, letting go of mistaken beliefs, and coming back to the beginning, coming back to zero again and again, as much as possible. Here is a very short poem called Just Thinking by William Stafford. A poem that calls to me about reflecting on returning to what matters most as we design our lives.

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot—peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes.
No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

This poem, I think, is, again, designing our internal lives so that we can more effectively, skillfully design our lives. Thank you.

[music]

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.

[music]

Today’s Zen puzzler comes from one of the more famous Zen stories from a collection. It’s called The [unintelligible 00:20:31] was a collection by Zen teacher [unintelligible 00:20:37] from China, I think in the maybe seventh or eighth century, in which a teacher asked, or a student asked the a famous teacher, [unintelligible 00:20:52] “What is the Dao or what is the way, or what does it mean to be fully human?”

This is the question. In this case, the teacher responded [sound cut] mind, or everyday mind is the way. In some way, the puzzler here isn’t so much the question. The puzzler here is the answer. What did this Zen teacher mean and what does it mean ordinary mind is the way? Be careful. Here, ordinary doesn’t mean what we usually think of as ordinary. He might have said, sacred mind is the way, or extraordinary mind is the way. [chuckles] There’s a few other clues here. After responding, ordinary mind is the way, the student who asked this question asked another question, and he said, “Should I direct myself toward it?”

The teacher said, “If you do, you’ll be lost. You will betray yourself and your practice.” The student goes on and says, “Then how will I know it?” The teacher here responds, “Knowing is arrogance and not knowing is stupidity. The genuine way is vast and boundless. It can’t be experienced. It can’t be discussed at the level of knowing or not knowing, at affirmation or negation.” [chuckles] This so-called ordinary mind we see is not so ordinary after all. I think, partly, it’s beautifully paradoxical in that it’s both the way our human life– designing our lives is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

A paradox by definition is something that appears impossible, but may in fact be so, may in fact be true like this, ordinary and extraordinary. What is the way ordinary mind? Ordinary mind is the way. How should we practice? How should we live our lives? How should we design our lives with ordinary mind? In these traditional Zen teachings, the person who collects it often writes some commentary, some short poem. In this case, [unintelligible 00:24:26] who’s the collector of this particular puzzle, says, “Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, summer with breeze, winter with snow. When idle concerns don’t hang in your mind, this is your best season.”

Here in this verse, he’s beautifully just describing nature, spring and flowers, autumn, moon, the summer breeze, the snow of winter, just how ordinary, what could be more ordinary? Then he says, “When idle concerns don’t hang in your mind, this is your best season.” I think he’s saying, “Don’t be fooled by what looks ordinary. It is extraordinary. It is filled with awe and wonder, ordinary mind.” So simple. A little bit again, like this [unintelligible 00:25:38] quote that I often come back to, where he says, “The real miracle is not to walk on water. The real miracle is to walk right here on earth.”

Here, the real miracle is to let go of idle concerns and experience the flowers of spring, the moon of autumn, the summer breeze, the smile of a child, your own hand, your experience as [sound cut] and extraordinary. What is the best season when idle concerns do not take up space in our mind? The suggested practice here is to stay with this line. Ordinary mind is the way, everyday mind is the way. You can experiment with during meditation practice or any time. While you’re driving or in a meeting, in a conversation. Merry mind is the way, and see what happens. See how this can support you in living on this edge of the ordinary and the sacred, the ordinary, and the extraordinary.

See how this contributes and supports designing your life, living your life that is completely ordinary and completely extraordinary.

[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.

[00:27:54] [END OF AUDIO]

The post Design Your Life: Guided Meditation, Talk, and Zen Puzzler appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Say Yes to Everything

Jane Hirshfield is one of the world’s most celebrated poets. The New York Times describes her as “among the modern masters.” Jane and Marc have been friends since their days as young Zen students living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. During this intimate and enlightening conversation, Jane describes what brought her to Zen practice and her life-long journey to poetry. They discuss and Jane reads her poetry about optimism, surprise, and embracing the fullness of the world.

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Jane Hirshfield, writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to the New York Times, and described as “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post, is one of American poetry’s central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Lay-ordained in Soto Zen in 1979 during her eight years spent in full-time residential practice, including three years of monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness, she explores transience and interconnection, shared fate and interiority, with equal allegiance. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder in 2017 of the online and traveling installation Poets For Science, Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020).

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:01] 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.

My guest today is Jane Hirshfield. David Baker from the New York Times described her as one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I’ve known Jane for many, many years. We were students together at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and I thought our conversation was quite wonderful, enlightening, and intimate. She reads a variety of poems about optimism, surprise, and embracing the fullness of the world. I’m excited to share my conversation with Jane Hirshfield.

[music]

This is Marc Lesser and Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times and I am very happy to welcome my dear friend and poet and human, Jane Hirshfield. Hello, Jane.

[00:01:31] Jane Hirshfield: Hello, Marc. Lovely to be here with you.

[00:01:34] Marc Lesser: Jane and I were hanging out many, many years ago at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. One of the stories that– I don’t know if this actually happened or not, but someone purportedly said that they asked you what you were going to be when you left Tassajara, and you said, “I’m going to be a poet,” and here you are.

[00:01:57] Jane Hirshfield: Here I am more to my surprise now than perhaps my hopes then. Now when people remind me of such things, I think, “What hubris, how on earth could I have hoped for such a life?” Now I look back and I think, “How amazing, I am a person who actually the fates have allowed to do what it is I most wanted to do from childhood.” That’s luck as much as whatever it was that I did that brought me here. It’s also luck and I never want to forget that.

[00:02:35] Marc Lesser: I don’t think I ever asked you what brought you to Zen and Zen Center.

[00:02:40] Jane Hirshfield: Ah, poetry did, of course, and life. My exposure to Buddhist ideas, thoughts, and imagery began when I was eight years old and on the lower East side of New York City, Manhattan, walked into a stationary store with my allowance money in my pocket and chose a book off those spiral bound display cases that they had up near the front. For some reason, the book that I brought home with me was a book of Japanese haiku.

I’m sure I understood nothing of what is truly meant by haiku in those days but something drew me. In retrospect, when I look back on my life, no matter what I was reading, and this includes the Western tradition as much as the Eastern tradition, every time I nodded and said to myself, “Ah, that’s a worldview that feels right to me, that’s a way of being that feels right to me and a set of awarenesses that I recognize as true,” every time, it turned out to be things that are in accord with the teaching of Zen and of Buddhism.

Sometimes that could be the epicurean and stoic poets of ancient Rome, and sometimes it could be Herocritus, and sometimes it could be ancient Chinese poets. When I was graduating from college, a friend of mine had a copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. In the early days, the inside back cover of the Bread Book had the monastic schedule on it, which was how I knew there was a Zen monastery.

When my life was opened up, I did a year of farm labor after graduating from college and then set out across country in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains looking for my future which I thought was going to be a waitress somewhere beautiful and writing poems in a cabin someplace. I knew Tassajara existed, and I was curious. I went to see what it was and ended up staying within the three Zen Center communities for eight years of full-time training and practice.

Then practice returned me to poetry just as poems had brought me to practice. Now they both go forward in left foot right foot ways in my life.

[00:05:25] Marc Lesser: Interesting that Tassajara Bread book, which was actually my first, I was living in San Francisco, and there it was on the shelf, and next thing I knew I was walking in the door of 300 Page Street.

[00:05:37] Jane Hirshfield: Oh, we share that. Everybody else seemed to come because of Alan Watts’ radio programs. I’d never heard of Alan Watts’ radio program, but I had read a lot of ancient Japanese poetry, and I had come across the Bread Book.

[00:05:53] Marc Lesser: You mentioned you’re going to be spending some time in Ireland on a fellowship.

[00:06:00] Jane Hirshfield: I am the third Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow for this year. They had invited me for last year, but the pandemic was still too unpredictable then, so we put it off for a year. I will be based at Queen’s College, which has a Seamus Heaney Center.

This rather means the world to me because Seamus and I were friends, and so to be going to Northern Ireland for the first time– I’ve been to the Republic, but I’ve never been to Northern Ireland. With his arm around my shoulders, that means a great deal to me.

[00:06:39] Marc Lesser: That sounds wonderful. This practice, the practice of poetry, the practice of Zen, and this crazy mixed-up world– I woke up this morning, like, “What a world?” Looking at the newspapers like, “Is this really happening? Is this– How could this be?”

Actually, I was rereading, last night, your writing in your book, Ten Windows, the chapter on surprise, which I really love. I love that, and so much of, I think, in some way, waking up and looking up the newspaper was all about surprise as was in the world of Zen and the world of poetry. I think it’s wonderful that you’re unpacking that and talking about as– and I almost see it as a healing property or waking-up property. I wonder what’s surprising to you these days?

[00:07:47] Jane Hirshfield: Oh, everything is surprising to me. Surprise, really, is the great unrecognized emotion of our life or neurochemistry of our life, perhaps. In that surprise is what throws open the brain’s portals to recognize something new and changed. I have become more and more interested in this moment of permeability and vulnerability that surprise offers us.

One of the things which interests me, there was– A long time ago, a study was done, which has stayed in my mind, where when the neuroscientists were first beginning to study meditation, and they would put people into a FMRI machine and monitor their brains and normal people, if you ring a bell repeatedly every 50 seconds, eventually the attention extinguishes itself and the sound of the bell no longer evokes any big response in the brainwaves.

When they put experienced meditators in the same situation, every ring of the bell evoked a fresh and complete response. It was always new. Now, one thing that I have noticed about myself in the past years since the results of the 2016 election and everything that led up to it, I have noticed I never get over my shock and my surprise at what has happened to a country that I thought I knew but, obviously, did not know.

I hear some other people speak and it sounds as if they’ve somehow acclimated to the truth of this, but for me, as you described yourself this morning, every single day I look at the newspaper, and I am freshly stunned by who we are, and I mean the large we, the entire– not only the American culture but the world’s culture. Can you imagine being in Britain right now with what’s going on there? It is just as chaotic.

Then in completely other ways, imagine being in Ukraine this morning. Imagine being a refugee trying to cross the Mediterranean this morning. Imagine being a young woman in Iran protesting the head scarf enforcement this morning. As somebody who came of age into the first Earth Day in 1970, I was a young person then. I looked at that event, and I thought the world was going to change.

It is 50 years from that day, everything we needed to know, we knew in spring 1970, April 22nd, the first Earth Day. We had seen a photograph of the whole Earth. We knew the environmental crisis that only now are governments beginning to take seriously and respond to. We could have done this 50 years ago. The civil rights movement was in full cry in the ’60s when I was a child. How can we have made such little progress?

The ideas of Buddhism of compassion, of not clinging to some sense of self and other, that was also completely available to us. By the time you and I were children, how is it that these truths have not yet been found worth embracing? That is, for me, one of the great koans of the age, is how the forces of fear and reification, and, forgive me, greed have managed to forestall the obvious that is needed.

[00:12:38] Marc Lesser: Yes. I’m fond of saying that greed, hate, and delusion have been quite popular for at least 2,500 years. It is stunning. I think both the sense of hope that you described and the sense of not exactly hopelessness but the despair of turning back this– it looked like– so maybe the lesson is it’s not a straight line. Perhaps we’re still– Again, maybe it’s my cautious optimism that likes to think that– Well, there’s something–

It’s also amazing looking at how much people’s consciousness seems to be growing around Buddhism and meditation. Those ideas continue to grow and spread, and partly through people like you and your work that you are in stealth and not so stealth ways bringing consciousness into the world through your writing and your poetry.

[00:13:54] Jane Hirshfield: Poetry is such a small backwater in the culture, but somehow over the centuries, a few lines of poetry have stayed with people, and they do affect how we think and feel and what we recognize and what we’re able to see.

Can I read you a couple of poems I’ve had? As we’ve been talking, various poems have been coming into mind, and one of the ones was one I had thought earlier that I might want to open with, and we’re well past opening, but I have a poem from earlier, which is called Optimism and I think it’s relevant to this point in the conversation. I wrote it with the environment in mind but also my personal need in mind. It had both behind it at the time that I wrote this.

Optimism.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs, all this resinous, unretractable earth.

There is that poem, and I also want to give you a poem that I co-translated but did not write. It’s a thousand years old, written by the great woman poet of Japanese literature, Izumi Shikibu, who lived in the Heian Court in the year 1000. Most of my life, I’ve thought of this poem as a poem about the necessity of being permeable, and only this morning did I see it as also a poem about optimism.

It’s very short, 31 syllables in the Japanese, 5 lines in English.

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

When I translated this, I had all of the words, I had all the images, and I couldn’t quite understand the meaning. I just understood a great poem was there. I worked with a Japanese collaborator, Marco, our attorney, and we would do word-for-word Japanese into English. When the penny finally dropped after a week of studying it, I finally understood it, and then I was able to bring it into these English words.

What I understood was that it is a poem about not walling yourself up too tightly. If you are afraid of cold winds, if you are afraid of grief, sorrow, loss, fear, anxiety, every one of the emotions that we human beings so often try to push away from ourselves because they do not feel comfortable, you will also be walling yourself off from the radiance, from awakening.

The moonlight in Japanese poetry often means the fullness of things, but of course, it is also a trope for Buddhist awakening. Just this morning– Poems always have multiple meanings. They can be understood different ways in different contexts at different times in your life, and it stunned me, it surprised me, but only this morning did I realize, “Oh, that’s also a poem about optimism.” Here it is again.

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Maybe it is only when your house is ruined that the moon will come into it. I also have a poem about surprise, but maybe that’s enough poetry for this moment. Up to you. [laughs]

[00:18:34] Marc Lesser: As you were reading that poem, I remembered that– For me, after I left Zen Center and found myself doing work in the corporate setting, that one of the core gifts I think of Zen and Buddhism and maybe of poems like you just read is shifting our relationship with pain and difficulty. That was so present and unique to the conventional business world where the assumption was pain bad, don’t look there, and somehow opening to that, having a different relationship was a major shift kind of feeling some of that in that optimistic poem that you just read.

[00:19:34] Jane Hirshfield: You’ve just named a theme that has run through my poetry from the beginning until now, and I think that’s because it is fundamental, as you just said, to the work that poetry does, which is– You probably remember from our time at Zen Center there was a phrase that was much repeated in those years, I don’t know if it’s still is, “Say yes to everything.”

Learning to say yes to what is difficult was, for me, a lifelong task. Has been not only the task that the world asks of us, but the task I wanted to learn how to do, how to live a 360-degree human life and understand that that is indeed, if you are going to live at all, you will have to be open to every possible weather of our existence. This theme has run through my work from beginning to end.

It is indeed the path that poems show us. Poetry offers, as Buddhist practice offers, a way to stay inside the difficult moment and understand that it too leads to the moonlight coming through the ruined house’s roof. It is the beauty of poems married to the difficult circumstances which so often provoke them into existence. That lets you feel that a life of alloy, a life of hybridity, a life of the mixed is fuller, more satisfying, more interesting than a life of not even the sweet, but actually the saccharin that is so often what our culture proposes.

The saccharin is not only bad for you, but it is delusional. It’s mostly simply dissatisfying to me to look in only one direction without your eyes ever moving. The retinas tire, the cells in your eyes glaze over with exhaustion. We need change to refresh us, and we need reality which includes both the amazement of awe and the terror of something snapping in the woods behind you when you’re not quite sure what it’s going to be, and the grief of inevitable losses.

This is the terrain of poems, is to say, “Oh, yes. I want to include that, also. I must include that also,” because what a human awareness wants, and a human heart-mind wants is the fullness of what the world actually will bring, whether we want it or not.

[00:23:02] Marc Lesser: I noticed that the phrase that I was anticipating when you talked about the often used phrase at Zen Center, which I think is parallel to the one you named, is, “It’s good for your practice”.

[00:23:21] Jane Hirshfield: [laughs]

[00:23:24] Marc Lesser: Which, in some way, essentially, it was used pretty much anytime anything was painful or disappointing. “It’s good for your practice.” It’s a kind of saying– It’s another way of saying yes in a slightly different way.

[00:23:44] Jane Hirshfield: Then there was that other wonderful word, which is just to say “that’s interesting”. Very interesting. Interest likes surprise. What’s wonderful about interest is it is an opening of a portal because to be surprised or to be interested or to be curious, all of these are states of mind and being in which we are outside of judgment. They are prior to judgment. There is a great purity and joy in the taking in of things.

Now, judgment, I also have a poem about that. I have a poem about so many things. Judgment is interesting to me because as much as Zen and Buddhism often proposes that the way to opening is to avoid picking and choosing, that famous phrase. The perfect way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing. Of course, we pick and choose all the time.

I think the perfect way doesn’t mean becoming stupid or apathetic, or nondiscerning. Discernment is one of the great qualities of all of the paramitas is to recognize when your foot is falling into quicksand and when your foot is landing on something that allows you to take the next step forward, but it is not to be attached to, these judgments, these recognitions. It is just, “Oh, this moment.” This moment. It’s information, and information is interesting to us and delicious to us.

From infancy, evolution has created in human beings a creature who wants to find the world interesting and sometimes wants to find the world amazing and sometimes wants to drop off body and mind and be beyond all forms of judgment or weighing just inside and extending without boundary in each moment into the absolutely unnameable fullness and emptiness that existence is.

Those moments don’t last. We come back from them to the world of picking and choosing, saying, “I think I’ll make rice for the monastic lunch this morning, or I think I’ll make white beans for lunch today.” That’s necessary too. You were a head cook, weren’t you? Were you head cook at Tassajara?

[00:26:56] Marc Lesser: I was.

[00:26:57] Jane Hirshfield: Yes, I remember that. [laughs]

[00:27:00] Marc Lesser: I was completely surprised, talk about surprised, that I kept being asked to do different jobs in the kitchen. From that summer that I first met you, I was the dishwasher, and then I was on the kitchen crew, and then I was the assistant to the head cook for a year, and then I was the head cook. I feel like I grew up in the Zen kitchen.

It was also surprising as almost like a training in seeing the world of work through completely different lens, that it was some strange combination of letting go and service, as well as this very high standard of what great good tasty vegetarian food is like, but somehow held lightly. It’s almost hard to– and I think I’ve spent my life in some way aspiring to work in that way and to try to teach others to work in that way, but it’s still a bit of a mystery what all was happening there.

[00:28:27] Jane Hirshfield: Being a young feminist when I was at Tassajara, I think I was the only woman student who never did any time in the kitchen at Tassajara. Of course, the karmic result of that was when I moved to Green Gulch in 1979 and Zen Center was just opening Greens Restaurant, I was immediately assigned to work in the kitchen at Greens.

I arrived there and had cooked at Madison, who is an old, old friend at that point, said, “Oh, Jane, it’s so wonderful to see you. Remind me your history with cooking at Zen Center.” I said, “Deb, I don’t know how to hold a knife.” She turned white, and then she taught me how to hold a knife, and I cooked at Greens for its first three years of dinners.

[00:29:14] Marc Lesser: This seems like a perfect setup for a poem about surprise.

[00:29:19] Jane Hirshfield: Ah, we will have that then. All right. Everything described in this poem is true.

I Wanted To Be Surprised.

To such a request, the world is obliging.

In just the past week, a rotund porcupine,
who seemed equally startled by me.

The man who swallowed a tiny microphone
to record the sounds of his body,
not considering beforehand how he might remove it.

A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread.

How easily the large spiders were caught with a clear plastic cup
surprised even them.

I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.

Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.

Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly.

What should not have been so surprising:
my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others.

What did not surprise enough:
my daily expectation that anything would continue,
and then that so much did continue, when so much did not.

Small rivulets still flowing downhill when it wasn’t raining.

A sister’s birthday.

Also, the stubborn, courteous persistence.

That even today please means please,
good morning is still understood as good morning,
and that when I wake up,
the window’s distant mountain remains a mountain,
the borrowed city around me is still a city, and standing.

Its alleys and markets, offices of dentists,
drugstore, liquor store, Chevron.

Its library that charges, a happy surprise, no fine for overdue books:
Borges, Baldwin, Szymborska, Morrison, Cavafy.

[music]

[00:31:56] Marc Lesser: Thank you. I’m a little surprised. I don’t know why, just that my heart is bursting open being here with you this morning and your generosity and the lifetimes that you and I have known each other, so thank you.

[00:32:13] Jane Hirshfield: You’re very welcome.

[00:32:14] Marc Lesser: I also want to go on and on. I feel like we’re just getting started, so maybe this is part one.

[chuckles]

[00:32:24] Jane Hirshfield: At another conversation to follow at some point.

[00:32:27] Marc Lesser: Yes. Is there anything at all that you would like to say or do or read as a way of closing this section?

[00:32:38] Jane Hirshfield: I’ll close with one more poem because poets always like to close with poems. There are things– One of the things maybe we can talk about next time is an idea that in some email or other past, back and forth, which is the permeability of selves, because none of us is only oneself. The nature of what is self, what is not self, the portals that connect the two and lead between them, the fluidity of pronouns in poetry. You can say I, and it means we, and you can say we, and it can mean human, non-human universes, galaxies.

I’m going to close with an intimate poem having to do with this house and room that I sit in, and a kind of calibration of our personal lives and the large of the lives. Right out my window, there is a redwood tree, second-growth redwood tree. We also share a hometown, Marc and I, and it is a town that was logged over to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, but redwood trees have a way of coming back, and one has been coming back near this house. I will never remove it.

Someday, its trunk will get large enough that it– and the house will be having an even more intimate conversation than they do now, but it was here first, and I think that’s important. I’ll close with this poem called, simply, Tree.

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

[00:35:05] Marc Lesser: Jane, thank you. What a treat and delight to get to spend this time with you, and let’s do it again.

[00:35:16] Jane Hirshfield: Thank you, Marc. Good luck with everything, and I hope that everyone listening today has a bit of immensity tapping at their windows, even if it might eventually break them.

[music]

[00:35:37] 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 to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[music]

[00:36:01] [END OF AUDIO]

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