Finding Your True Power
In this episode, Marc explores how wholeheartedness, generosity, and mindfulness help us find our true power. He reflects on the hero’s journey as a model for growth, weaving together the ordinary and the sacred. Through stories and teachings, Marc shows how challenges, resistance, and shifting our narratives can become opportunities for transformation.
Support the podcast by donating at marclesser.net/donate.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[music]
[00:00:00] Marc: Welcome to Mindful Leadership with Marc Lesser, a biweekly podcast featuring conversations with leaders and teachers exploring the intersection of keeping our hearts open and effective action in these most uncertain and challenging times. Please support our work by making a donation at marclesser.net/donate.
[00:00:36] Marc: Yeah, so today’s practice episode is called finding Your True Power or Perhaps the Practice of Generosity and Wholeheartedness. We’ll begin with a short a short guided meditation, and then I’ll talk about this topic of. How to live and be more wholehearted through the [00:01:00] practice of generosity, through the practice of finding your deep fundamental purpose.
[00:01:06] Marc: Um, talk a little bit about some models like the model of, of the hero’s journey and some, some lessons from my welding teacher Harry Roberts about the fundamental malleability of. Our narrative and our emotions as a way of finding your true power. I hope you enjoy today’s practice episode.
[00:01:42] Marc: Welcome. I hope you’re doing well right now. And let’s let’s begin with a few minutes of sitting practice together.[00:02:00]
[00:02:04] Marc: So just taking a few moments to to arrive,
[00:02:14] Marc: just noticing what it’s like to be here breathing.
[00:02:28] Marc: Yeah. Can you feel your heart beating right now? So whether you can or not, just the
[00:02:41] Marc: stopping and looking inward. Feeling inward? Yeah. Yeah. Something about. The feeling of practicing together[00:03:00]
[00:03:06] Marc: as much as possible, letting go of the, the to-do lists, the activities of the day, and just. Trying on that. There is nothing to accomplish, nothing to change
[00:03:34] Marc: this practice of radical simple acceptance.
[00:03:46] Marc: Yeah, so checking in, you know, checking in with the breath, checking in with the body,
[00:03:56] Marc: being curious even about thinking mind,[00:04:00]
[00:04:03] Marc: and then seeing if if we can drop in to, you know, feelings. Whatever your feelings. Now
[00:04:17] Marc: any, you know, any sadness or grieving or joy or
[00:04:28] Marc: even some feelings of loving, loving this moment, loving of this earth, this life. Kind of wrapping, wrapping our, all of our feelings in this sense of wonder and appreciation
[00:04:57] Marc: and keeping it simple, [00:05:00] you know, just breathing, breathing in and breathing out.
[00:05:09] Marc: Breathing in, we’re aware that I’m breathing in and breathing out. I’m aware that I’m breathing out.
[00:05:42] Marc: I always often feel a little odd.
[00:05:49] Marc: Speaking, you know, during meditation and zen tradition, there’s usually only, only silence. So please feel free to, um, [00:06:00] stay. You know, you don’t need to. If it’s helpful, these words great. If not great, just um, tune it out, stay with your own. Your own breath, your own body.
[00:06:43] Marc: And I’m going to ring the bell and you can, continue with me as I do some short presentation practice session, or you can continue to sit if that’s the right.[00:07:00]
[00:07:22] Marc: I wanna talk a little bit about a favorite topic of mine. Finding your power or finding your, your true power. And one way that I think of power is. About wholeheartedness not being divided, not being split. You know, from many, from many perspectives. You know, I’m often quoting poet David White who says, you know, the antidote to [00:08:00] exhaustion isn’t rest.
[00:08:03] Marc: The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. Antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. And then sometimes, of course, sometimes we need to rest. I’m a big proponent of, of resting. I love my my daily, my daily afternoon nap, which I perfected during my years of living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center where.
[00:08:30] Marc: We got up crazy, crazy early in the morning for meditation. So I after lunch, I perfected the, you know, the 10 minute or 15 minute nap. And to this day I, I still am a big proponent of rest. But here, I think in terms of finding our power, being, being more this aspiration and practice of.
[00:08:59] Marc: Wholeheartedness, [00:09:00] right. Just doing, doing what we’re doing fully, which wholeheartedness to me means noticing. Noticing when we’re not wholehearted, noticing any resistance and letting it go, and stepping into, you know, and practicing. So for me, I often like to practice washing the dishes wholeheartedly. If there’s any sense of.
[00:09:28] Marc: Wanting to get it done to get onto the next thing, like noticing No, let’s, let’s just wholeheartedly wash the dishes. Noticing the feeling of the water, the dishes, the soap, wholehearted dish washing. And the same is true with, you know, whether I am writing an email or driving somewhere or doing childcare.
[00:09:59] Marc: So [00:10:00] often it’s easy to notice our own resistance. Many different kinds of resistance. But another, another perspective to me on finding your power is this kinda deeper sense of how we are living our lives. And interesting, you know, this. Connection between stepping into integrating everything that is ordinary and everything that is holy or sacred.
[00:10:38] Marc: To me this is the fundamental, fundamental practice of wholeheartedness, is that perspective. And this is, you know, this is such a core. Perspective of that Buddhism presents, you know, Buddhism, mindfulness practice, whatever, whatever language works [00:11:00] for you, right? This is, you know, form and emptiness or again, I think it’s ordinary and sacred.
[00:11:10] Marc: Ordinary and sacred. There’s a, um, beautiful teaching that I. Often come back to from, it’s called God Giving Talk in Suzuki’s Zen, the book Zen Mind, beginner’s Mind, where he’s, he makes a statement that, you know, everything, everything has been given to us, right? Everything has been given to us that our bodies and minds, right?
[00:11:43] Marc: Our breath, the air. If we look around, you know, just seeing, seeing ourselves and others and the world from the perspective of gift, from the perspective of kind of [00:12:00] radical generosity that everything, everything has been given to us is, to me, cuts through this sense of ordinary and sacred and is.
[00:12:14] Marc: Extremely empowering way of seeing ourselves and way of seeing the world, and in this, in this talk, sh Suzuki then says, but since, since everything is fundamentally one, we are in fact giving out everything. Everything that we do. Say and think. All of our actions are an act of creation, are an act of creativity.
[00:12:52] Marc: So again, to me this is, you know, we talk about wholehearted living, wholehearted being, and finding our true power. You [00:13:00] know, when I’m at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, there’s a beautiful, the Tasara Creek runs through the valley. And it’s an enormous watershed, you know, with water coming from many, many different valleys.
[00:13:17] Marc: But I’m, I’m often wanting to find the source, what’s the source of this creek? And to me it’s a great question. Well, what’s the source of our power? And I think the source of our power is this practice of. Wholeheartedness and the source of our wholeheartedness is this perspective that everything has been given to us and that, again, this beautiful perspective that since everything is originally one, right, that, that, that fundamentally there’s no difference between ordinary and sacred.
[00:13:59] Marc: Everything’s [00:14:00] given to us. Therefore we are. We are giving out everything. And this is, you know, a way to practice. This is the practice of generosity practice, of being generous with ourselves, being generous with others, and this feeling, this fundamental feeling of being generous with our own lives.
[00:14:33] Marc: And also in this in this same talk that I’m referring to here by Shira Suzuki, he, he says, well, maybe this is, maybe this is from a different talk, but, but to me it’s from the, a perspective of finding your power is returning again, returning to the source. So what’s the source? And here I would say that.[00:15:00]
[00:15:00] Marc: The purpose, right? The purpose of our lives is to cross the shore, right? From not being generous to being more generous to cross the shore from any sense of lack of wholeheartedness, to be fully wholehearted, right? This is the purpose of our lives, and the secret or the practice is that. We can cross this shore with every step we take with every breath.
[00:15:36] Marc: So we don’t need to wait to be wholehearted, right? So again, this is this beautiful coming together of ordinary and sacred and, and the coming together of what we aspire. To do and be, [00:16:00] and just doing it and just being it, you know, it’s a little bit like, you know, there’s some, there’s some reason that we come to practice.
[00:16:09] Marc: There’s some reason that we go to sit on the, you know, why do we meditate? Why do we practice, why do we get up in the morning? Well, there’s something that we’re, you know, we’re wanting to be more genuine, more. Awake. More emotional freedom, right? Something that gets us to practice, to sit, to sit on the meditation cushion.
[00:16:36] Marc: But then once we sit down, just there’s nothing lacking. The practice is, there’s nothing lacking letting go of all of those aspirations and just being awake, just being wholehearted. And so these, these. These look like two different things, right? But in a way, [00:17:00] integrating them, this is real wholeheartedness, right?
[00:17:03] Marc: The moving beyond, beyond the dichotomy of ordinary and sacred, moving beyond the dichotomy of aspiration and doing right. So. I aspire to be wholehearted in washing the dishes, and suddenly I am, I’m doing it. I’m just doing it. I’m wholeheartedly washing the dishes. Yeah. So finding, finding your true power, finding your true power through the practice of, um, wholeheartedness and another model that I.
[00:17:45] Marc: Find really useful is the model of the hero’s journey when it comes to finding your power. It’s a model, really a, um, a timeless model of finding your true power. And [00:18:00] just a few points on this. Finding, you know, this the hero’s journey. First of all, just the language that we’re all heroes. That we’re all heroes in our own life.
[00:18:13] Marc: Yeah. That it raises, raises the bar of from ordinary to heroic. Right. Integrating the ordinary and heroic and the hero’s journey generally starts with, again, the sense of purpose, right? What is, what is the purpose? And here, here it poses that our, our fundamental purpose is returning, returning to our true home, or maybe even returning, finding our true power as the fundamental journey of all.
[00:18:50] Marc: Human beings or perhaps of all living beings, all, all life. And I’ve always thought it [00:19:00] was pretty great. Right? That’s the first, you know, on the hero’s journey, is this recognition of our purpose, recognition of setting forth, setting forth on the, on the journey and the the next step. The this pattern, this fundamental pattern is resistance.
[00:19:23] Marc: Noticing our resistance. Noticing, refusing, refusing the journey. No. Too scary. Too difficult. Why would we go there? Let’s just go back to bed. We don’t need to push away re resistance. We can embrace it, we can notice it, we can maybe even use our resistance. We can laugh at our resistance. Yeah. Resistance is such an interesting practice.
[00:19:51] Marc: Noticing it and embracing it and letting it go and, you know, and some of the other kind of [00:20:00] fundamental practices, one is. Gathering support. Right? So one way to break through this resistance and step kind of back on this whatever path of finding our power, finding our wholeheartedness is recognizing how much support we have.
[00:20:22] Marc: And, and a very simple way, this is the support of other people, right? The support of our. Family, friends, coaches, therapists, Zen teachers, community, allowing, allowing that, um, support the support of others, depending on others and helping others. And then another
[00:20:54] Marc: important step, um. The hero’s journey is [00:21:00] confronting, confronting challenges and meeting, meeting difficulties, meeting our own our own suffering, our own ways that we feel pain, feel difficulty, feel challenged. So again, the practice of feeling all those things deeply and. Turning them and transforming them, transforming them into power, into our own power, into possibility, into courage, into strength.
[00:21:34] Marc: And, and this means, you know, how we meet our parents, how we meet our mother and our father, you know, to to see. See their gifts and their challenges and to, to work that and to turn that the, that our [00:22:00] own, you know, our own narratives, our own backgrounds, our own story, and to bring it all into the present.
[00:22:09] Marc: How we, how we rework our narrative, how we rework our past. Our parents with events, with any traumas that we might feel, but also to bring up all of our successes and courage and positive stories about our lives. And then I think of the last the last part of the hero’s journey is finding our power and.
[00:22:44] Marc: Returning to our true home again and again. So again, this is, um, a few different, a few different models for finding our power. There’s the model of [00:23:00] wholeheartedness. There’s the model of the practice of generosity and purpose. And there is the model of. The hero’s journey, seeing that we are all heroes on our own journey.
[00:23:22] Marc: I’m often, as I think about finding power, I think about one of my, one of my teachers, one of my teachers and mentors, a who I’ve spoken about from time to time, a amazing human being. Harry Roberts, Harry Roberts, you know, was a Curmudgeony Irishman who happened to be trained as a Yurok Indian shaman.
[00:23:50] Marc: And when I was living at Green Gulch and was charged with finding how to farm with draft horses, [00:24:00] one of the skills I needed to learn was welding. You know, because. Green Gulch Farm had a lot of old horse, you know, plows and different different equipment that was in need of repair and welding was an essential skill.
[00:24:17] Marc: And Harry Roberts was my welding teacher. And one of the lessons that I remember was Harry said that the secret of welding is to realize that metal. Just appears as hard and solid, and that by applying heat to it, we return it to its original state, to its fundamental state, and it becomes soft and we can then shape this metal to however we want to shape it so that we can make it into a form that we can use.
[00:24:59] Marc: [00:25:00] And, and as he often did, he would let out a loud, you know, either either a r smile or sometimes a big belly laugh and say, this, this is the secret of being a wholehearted human being is to realize that things we, and things appear as solid, but that by applying our, you know. Our mindfulness or practice of generosity, we see how malleable we are the world is.
[00:25:38] Marc: This is kind of the practice of selflessness and, you know, of time timelessness. Yeah. That, that everything is much more fluid. Everything is much more fluid. And in this fluidness we have our freedom. We have our freedom to respond, right? This is [00:26:00] impermanence. Impermanence was the word I was searching for.
[00:26:03] Marc: Timelessness and impermanence and that, this understanding, but then going more deeply into, um, the malleability that we can shape, shape by being able to shape ourselves. This is our true, you know, fundamental power, fundamental wholeheartedness. Um, so I’ve always appreciated this simple, profound teaching from my welding teacher, Harry Roberts.
[00:26:39] Marc: You know, the secret, the secret is that everything is fundamentally more malleable. And, and this to me is, you know, the, the practice of. Mindfulness, the practice of meditation is maybe applying our attention. Our attention is like the heat that we apply [00:27:00] to metal to make it more, more shapeable, more malleable.
[00:27:09] Marc: Yeah. So, um, this, this is I think why, you know, why we meditate and. Why we practice to be more wholehearted and to find your true power. Thank you very much.
[00:27:32] Marc: I hope you’ve appreciated today’s episode. To learn more about my work, you can visit mark lesser.net, and if you’re interested in enrolling in a self-directed course. Called Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, please visit mark lesser courses.thinkific.com. This podcast is offered freely and relies on the financial support from listeners like you.
[00:27:59] Marc: You can donate at marclesser.net slash donate. Thank you very much.
[END OF AUDIO]
The post Finding Your True Power appeared first on Marc Lesser.
