I was recently at a business conference of more than four hundred social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and CEOs of successful companies that had some form of social mission. Success and opportunity, joy and celebration were in abundance. After a session on how to raise more capital for your growing business, I was approached by Todd, the CEO of a fairly large and apparently successful media company. Todd and I had talked over many years while attending these conferences, but I did not know him well. He pulled me aside and said that, though we barely knew each other, he trusted me and thought I might be able to offer some assistance. We found an empty room just off the main hallway and sat down, and he began to describe his current situation.
Since the 2008 economic recession, his business had been facing significant challenges. He had lost some key customers, and his revenue was nearly 10 percent below the previous year’s. He was feeling anxious and was not sleeping well. He was having trouble focusing. He found himself irritable and at times reacting angrily with employees. A few key employees had recently resigned, and he was feeling like the captain on the helm of a sinking ship — a large, beautiful ship that he had built over the past fifteen years. His tension and anxiety were also affecting his marriage and his relationships with his children. He felt lost. His business and his life seemed to be unraveling.
I told him I appreciated his openness. How strange to know someone for so many years and never really deeply connect. I also thought I knew what he was going through. It reminded me of some of the times when I was CEO of Brush Dance. At times, I faced significant challenges and didn’t know if the business would survive. This hurt in very personal ways: I felt keenly how much of my own sense of identity was connected to my work and the company’s success. In these moments, the fear of loss, the fear of embarrassment, and the fear of letting others down seemed to drive every decision.
In that moment, I also wondered: How much pain and difficulty was residing beneath the surface for the attendees of this conference? I had developed many close personal relationships with a good number of people there, and I was aware of situations and challenges from many people’s personal lives: difficult family relationships, recent deaths, divorces, cancers and other illnesses, and significant personal losses. Almost no one, though, admitted what Todd shared with me: stories of business and job failures and the significant personal challenges that resulted, like sleeplessness, depression, and anxiety.
I asked Todd if he was interested in exploring a mindfulness and meditation practice. He was enthusiastic, so we started right then and there. We spent a few minutes doing a short guided meditation; pausing, bringing attention to our breath, body, and feelings. Just noticing whatever was there, including the pain and fears. Checking in with our thinking as well as our heart. He expressed his interest in continuing to develop these practices. He recognized that he needed to slow down the busyness of his mind, find more ease and confidence within himself, and change the way he was both creating and responding to stressful situations. I directed him to some websites as well as phone applications that could support him in the continuation of a mindfulness practice.
Then we spoke about steps he might take to build a support system — being part of a group, renewing his relationship with a therapist, taking yoga classes. And we addressed business changes — hiring talented employees, taking a fresh look at his products, rebuilding relationships with existing customers, and reviewing and revisiting his plans to either expand revenue or reduce costs.
Todd’s dilemma is a common one in the business world and the world of work, and it’s one that’s rarely acknowledged or discussed. We each care tremendously about our work lives: the businesses or organizations we are part of or create, the products and services we offer, the problems we solve, the coworkers and employees we nurture, and our personal accomplishments on the job. For many people, this basic need to care, to have your heart and mind fully engaged in a meaningful endeavor, has been squelched — by working in large impersonal organizations or in smaller organizations that don’t honor or recognize the importance of caring, of bringing your full self to work. The solution is not to care less, but to care more, while learning to manage our caring. Caring without equanimity can hurt our effectiveness and lead to personal despair. Not caring enough, or at all, also hurts our effectiveness and can lead to cynicism and despair. Finding the proper balance, and maintaining our balance, between emotions and equanimity is perhaps the most difficult of the five paradoxes. It’s the one I see people struggle with the most, whatever the context. More often than not, when we fall off the tightrope, it’s our emotions that push us.
How do we meet the challenge in every moment of finding, embodying, and expressing the most effective response? We begin by learning and following the practices in this chapter.
1. Look at your life through the lens of the eight imprisonments (page 184): Simply consider or meditate on them, or use each as a journal-writing prompt.
2. Embrace difficult emotions through the practice of feeling miserable (page 191).
3. Embrace joyful emotions by noticing the good in everyday life (page 192).
4. Practice cultivating equanimity (page 197) through the following actions:
Gratefulness (page 198)
Kindness (page 199)
Compassion (page 200)
Sympathetic joy (page 200)
Taking responsibility (page 201)
Letting go (page 202)
Joy of being (page 204)
Minding the gap (page 205)
Seeing challenges as opportunities (page 205)
Being less predictable (page 206)
Not expecting applause (page 207)
Patience (page 208)
5. Practice seeing things as already broken (page 209).
That’s the dirty little secret of the business world, the wrench in the gears of progress. People, mucking up the works with their anger, joy, fear, frustration, love, and excitement. Often, that’s our dirty little secret, too. We want to be efficient and effective, productive and competent, and feelings are almost always messy and disruptive, or unexpected and unfathomable. We’d usually prefer our lives to be structured, orderly, unfolding with clockwork certainty. We know we possess feelings; they get hurt all the time. But particularly when it comes to our jobs, we think we should be above them. We should be able to avoid them, or ignore them, or control them when we want to, when they get in our way and cause problems.
Yet whether we see emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, we can’t escape them. We care. We desire and fear, and we love, and we have to deal with these reactions. The first step is recognizing that emotions are both inevitable and temporary. They pass and they return. Emotions are only a “problem” when we are unskillful in working with them or when we attempt to avoid them or pretend they don’t exist.
Not so long ago, the old assembly-line model dominated the organization of many US businesses and influenced society, and it still has great appeal. It continues to influence today’s corporate culture more than you might think. In this model, most employees are trained to do one specific job, while only a few manage or understand the larger process. People then function much like machinery, as easily replaceable cogs performing a single simple task in the great wheel of industry. On an assembly line, each person does his or her part, with no thinking or emotions necessary, and no collaboration. When the assembly line was first developed in the early part of the twentieth century, it proved to be an extremely efficient method for building complicated products, like cars, and it was soon widely emulated throughout industry and business.
But a funny thing happened. Requiring workers to leave the most essential aspects of their lives at the factory door — their emotions and their intelligence, their caring and concern — created its own debilitating inefficiencies. The most famous example in today’s organizational effectiveness lore is the story of General Motors. For decades at GM, the unwritten law was “Don’t stop the line.” Management believed that keeping the car assembly line going at all times was essential. Clearly, stopping the line, for any reason, meant cars and trucks were not being assembled. But as much as that, according to a thirty-year GM employee, management assumed that “if the line stopped, workers would play cards or goof off.” GM didn’t trust that its own workers cared, and they treated them that way, as unthinking, unfeeling parts that would go idle the moment the line switched off.
As a result of this philosophy and way of working, problems were ignored instead of being addressed. Defective cars, those with missing parts or parts put in backward, rolled off the line and were put into their own special “defective” lot, to await fixing. This lot grew to enormous proportions. At some point, addressing and fixing these problem cars became too costly, and they were essentially abandoned.
In 2008, during the nation’s economic downturn, General Motors went into bankruptcy and was bailed out by the federal government (and the American taxpayers). There were many reasons for the company’s downfall, and many different problems, but one significant issue was GM’s reputation for producing poor-quality vehicles. One major reason for this was GM’s “Don’t stop the line” attitude, which was embedded in the company’s planning and strategy as well as its assembly line. Don’t stop to fix problems; just keep doing what you are doing and everything will be fine.
As part of its federal bailout and restructuring in 2008, General Motors entered into a collaboration with Toyota called NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.). As part of this, GM assembly workers were sent to a Toyota factory in Fremont, California, while several GM managers were flown to Japan to learn the Japanese methodology for building cars. What they discovered was an amazing aha! moment. At Toyota, anyone on the assembly line who has a concern about the quality of a part can stop the line at any time. Problems are addressed immediately, with groups of workers getting together to figure out how to solve them. Toyota managers assume that their workers want to build the best cars possible. Constant improvement is the company motto, and this attitude is integrated into all aspects of car production. Workers might have one job, but they are encouraged to think of the entire process. Teams are assembled to discuss problems, look for insights, and develop better methods for producing problem-free cars. In this way, Toyota has been able to consistently build better-quality cars with greater efficiency and lower costs than its American counterparts.
It is easy to look at GM and see their folly. But are we so different? In my coaching and consulting practice, I notice many versions of “Don’t stop the line.” In some companies, it takes the form of “Don’t question the boss” or “Don’t confront the rude star salesperson.” For my clients, it can translate as “Don’t acknowledge anger or fear” or “Don’t question the plan or path or career I’ve committed myself to.” A problem crops up, and rather than deal with it, or think strategically and critically about how to redesign our situation to eliminate it, we simply shove it aside and keep working. We become unhappy and don’t see this as reason enough to stop the line. Indeed, in many subtle and not- so-subtle ways we are told, especially at work, that our personal happiness and satisfaction are unimportant so long as we do our job. Our daily lives and even our most important relationships can become like assembly lines, in which we move from task to task without allowing ourselves time to stop, admit mistakes or dissatisfactions, and work collaboratively with others to change in ways that are good for everyone.
Instead, our focus, at all costs, is to just get stuff done. It takes courage to stop, acknowledge breakdowns, and ask difficult questions. Thankfully, the business world today has started to recognize the need for this. Making our lives and our companies successful requires listening, flexibility, vision, passion, collaboration, and teamwork — that is, people skills and emotional competencies. Increasingly, companies and organizations are beginning to discover this secret. People who care, people who are emotionally developed and aligned, not only are a competitive advantage but may perhaps be the competitive advantage of any organization.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that working skillfully with emotions leads to greater productivity and stronger leadership as well as a greater sense of well-being. One study listed the top six skills that distinguish star performers from average performers in technology companies. These are as follows:
1. Strong achievement drive
2. Ability to influence
3. Conceptual thinking
4. Analytical ability
5. Initiative
6. Self-confidence
Of the top six, only two (conceptual thinking and analytical ability) are intellectual competencies. The other four, including the top two, are emotional competencies. Clearly, even in technology companies, emotional skills lead to better performance at work.
Emotional well-being has also been connected to profits in business. The cover of the January–February 2012 Harvard Business Review featured a large, round yellow smiley face with dollar signs at the corners of its smile and the headline “The Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-Being Drives Profits.” The world of business, perhaps for the first time since the invention of the factory, is acknowledging the importance of emotions and the relationship between emotions and effectiveness, vision and caring, happiness and profits. Business leaders, management, and owners are exploring how to skillfully negotiate this terrain. And if it can work in the no-nonsense, put-up-or-shut-up world of business, then it certainly is important for each of us as individuals in the heart of our own lives. This is where we develop the emotional competencies that business is learning to want and value. It constitutes a critical personal and spiritual journey of transformation, in which we embrace the very emotions that we struggle with in order to embody the equanimity that makes us effective, so we can quickly regain our balance even when difficult problems arise.
Why are emotions so challenging? Why is there so much emotional despair in our lives, both at work and outside of it? What are some of the unacknowledged dilemmas? Chögyam Trungpa — an important modern Tibetan Buddhist teacher who died in 1987 — spoke of a set of eight states of being that describe dilemmas we all face. He called these experiences the Eight Imprisonments. He called them imprisonments because they are stories, powerful and compelling stories, that limit us and narrow our possibilities. They prevent us from relaxing and opening to just being present, just being happy, and thus they keep us from being effective in our day-to-day lives. Paradoxically, the only way to escape these prisons is to accept that we reside within them. We must embrace our emotions in order to find the freedom to choose how we respond. This is another way we live the insight that we must both know ourselves and forget ourselves. Here are the eight states of being:
Pleasure and pain
Gain and loss
Fame and disgrace
Praise and blame
We all want pleasure and we don’t want pain. Yet by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain we blind ourselves to deeper and more important activities, priorities, and states of mind. Wanting pleasure and avoiding pain is often a state of fear; we’re responding to an anxiety born of our imagination. We reach for certain things and avoid other types of things because we anticipate a certain result. This is a very different state of mind than just being present, being aware, and meeting whatever arises in our lives.
Of course, physical pain is a message from our body that something is hurting us; when we feel it, we know we must do something for self-protection, like pull our hand out of a fire. We might think that emotional pain is different, but the brain does not make a distinction between them. Thus, most pain is first registered and experienced in the same way, no matter the cause, and it’s up to us to develop the presence of mind to distinguish causes and act appropriately. David Rock, in his book Your Brain at Work, beautifully describes and unpacks this dynamic. His focus is the workplace, but his model applies to any human group. His work in neuroscience has uncovered that when we perceive a loss or emotional injury in any of five areas — what he calls SCARF, or status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness — this registers as pain in the brain, just the same as a stubbed toe does. Think about your own work situation and the people you work with. Is it painful, and do people react in pain, when there is a loss of status, whether in title, money, or power; when uncertainty arises that threatens one’s sense of stability and safety; when a person’s autonomy is reduced or taken away, and he or she no longer has decision-making power; when there is a lack of trust and empathy that impairs relatedness; or when fairness is compromised? When any of these threats becomes too great, we withdraw, becoming defensive, and collaboration becomes nearly impossible.
The encouraging news is that our brains and our emotions have a high level of flexibility, or plasticity. We can change how we perceive pleasure and pain and how we respond. As we also know, the same event can sometimes be experienced as either, or both, depending on our perspective in the moment. A scary movie, a good workout, meeting a challenge, love: so many things invoke an inseparable mix of pleasure and pain. By valuing only one and avoiding the other, we miss the essence and lose what we seek. Yet by adjusting our perspective, we can change the game entirely. Through insight and practice, we can embrace experience in its entirety and not be caught up in attempting to manage our experience in a self-protective yet self-defeating way.
It is easy to become attached to, even obsessed with, gain. More, more, more is our cultural anthem. More money, more information, more sex, more stuff. In business we’ve defined corporate responsibility as “maximizing shareholder wealth.” Conversely, we will do anything, at almost any cost, to avoid loss — loss of money, of property, of toys, of status and reputation. Certainly, our culture is obsessed with avoiding the loss of our youth and appearance.
Seeking gain and avoiding loss can at times completely undermine our priorities and sensibilities. Even when we know better, the urge can be impossible to resist. Remember the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s? At first, it wasn’t seen as a bubble. It was a thrilling new economy that magically showered riches on anyone with a website or online enterprise. Who wouldn’t want to be part of such possibility? I jumped in. As CEO of Brush Dance, I created BrushDance.com. For about a year, I became wealthy — on paper. The projected value of the company skyrocketed. Then the bubble burst, and I was left shaken by the emotional pain of loss and failure. Within a span of months the company’s value plummeted, my identity and reputation felt damaged, and the company suffered from the upheaval. Looking back, I’m less surprised that I got involved (since few of us can escape the lure of more) than in how I let my own sense of self become attached to the outcome. It was not healthy or accurate. One day we have more, and one day we have less, and that’s the way of the world.
Fame and disgrace are not just the territory of movie stars, television personalities, and celebrity athletes. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, it’s difficult to avoid seeking fame and avoiding disgrace in whatever world we inhabit. If only — if only we were recognized for our innovative ideas, our sense of humor, our kind heart, our wonderful accomplishments. (If only we would recognize this in ourselves.) We want to be admired; we want to embody a certain persona or particular good qualities. If only others would see us. Maybe this job, this activity, this relationship will be the one. The flip side is the fall from grace: the fear that we will make a mistake, or be found wanting, and be seen as the opposite of what we desire.
Fame and disgrace are powerful motivators. Pursuing one and fleeing the other provides us with lots of energy and movement. Of course, we all want to be known as skillful and competent in what we do. We want a good reputation: to be known as responsible, honest, a person of integrity. These are positive desires. The real issue is this: reputation is the result of one’s actions, and it’s ephemeral. It comes, goes, and changes, and we cannot always control it. We are only being self-serving when we pursue fame for its own sake, when it’s the rationale for our actions. Then we are trying to fill an emotional need that resides within, and this is what becomes blinding and debilitating.
Indeed, fame looks very attractive until you achieve it. I have worked with several clients who would be considered famous within their spheres of influence. I’ve seen firsthand that fame does not solve our problems. Not only do we still have all the same problems and challenges we had before, but now we have new ones. Like endless wealth and ultimate pleasure, fame’s glittering illusion is of some permanent status free from toil, doubt, and pain. And yet striving for this or clinging to it does not make it so.
When things go right, we’d like to hope we’ve played a part in making them right, and we’d all like to be recognized for our efforts. We’d all like positive recognition for the good things we’ve done, for our good intentions, for just being who we are. Conversely, when things go wrong, we’d like to hope we haven’t contributed to the error. If we have, we’d also like to hope that we will willingly accept our portion of responsibility. But only our portion. If others are involved, we want them named, too. And if those others are more responsible than we are, then we may insist they shoulder most of the blame (and suffer most of the consequences). Blame is hard to accept, and we are quick to parse facts and impressions so that blame gets spread around or even shifted entirely onto someone else.
As with all the eight dilemmas, praise and blame are problematic mostly to the degree that we cling to or avoid them. And like all the dilemmas, how we experience them usually rests on judgment. We pick and choose: good or bad, right or wrong, pleasure or pain. Despite our best intentions, we can almost never be certain of all the consequences of our actions. Have you ever had the experience of receiving praise and blame for the same action? Every person has a different point of view, and each can be true (or reflect an authentic, honest response). So, we must learn to accept praise and blame equally, and let them go equally, seeing them as passing judgments of limited perspective and usefulness.
Praise, in the business world, is often treated like an unalloyed positive action. It’s a grease gun for the office’s sticky wheels. I myself often coach executives to unleash recognition and to acknowledge more freely the people around them. My clients will be more effective and create a more effective workforce if they don’t take anyone’s efforts for granted. This acknowledgment, though, must be real and authentic. If we give false praise only to make someone feel better, or only to make ourselves look good in his or her eyes, then it will backfire. Giving and receiving recognition becomes cheapened; it becomes a cover or substitute for real trust, empathy, and connection. Blame can also be a cover, a way to prevent having important, difficult conversations about shared responsibilities, impacts, and expectations. We may feel justified blaming someone for a problem, but by doing so, have we solved anything? Or have we just kept the assembly line moving?
A very earnest Zen student asks his teacher, “How can I avoid the discomfort of hot and cold?”
The teacher responds, “Go to that place where there is no hot and no cold.”
“Where is that place?” the student asks.
“When you are hot, be hot, and when you are cold, be cold,” the teacher responds.
Ah, another cryptic Zen story! This story is also quite famous and was handed down from a collection of stories from eighth-century China. The story addresses the seesaw of our emotions: they swing between extremes, and not always in ways we enjoy. So what do we do? The message is simple: Be present. Show up. Be here now! When you are happy, just be fully happy. When irritated or angry, be irritated or angry. When at work, be at work. When at play, fully play. As Harry Roberts would say with a laugh, real simple.
The trouble is, we so rarely allow ourselves to be fully present, to fully accept the present moment. In practice, this isn’t easy at all. In our modern lives, we have become so split and so distracted that we are not even aware of the splits and distractions. When it is hot, we go racing for the air-conditioning. When it is cold, we go racing for the heater. When we are happy, we worry that it won’t last. When we are sad, grieving, and miserable, we seek any kind of relief or distraction. But if we would escape discomfort and suffering, then we must not resist the present moment, whatever it is. Accept it. If you are grieving, weep until the tears are gone. Be hot, be cold, and know this moment will pass.
The story’s message is to shift our perspective and actions; don’t try to micromanage the world. Stay with what is. Appreciate the beautiful sunsets and the pains of failure and loss, and trust that from this place real change emerges that leads to freedom and equanimity. Don’t spend your energy fighting against your experience. This is a trap.
For instance, when my colleague Todd approached me at the conference, he was in a good deal of pain. He didn’t want to be in pain, and he reached out and asked for my help. Yet the first thing I did was ask him if he wanted to start a mindfulness practice, and in this way fully feel and enter his pain. He did, and the effects were immediate: the experience of pain bloomed and then subsided. Much of the trouble Todd was finding himself in was from trying to avoid his emotions. He was unsuccessfully bottling up his fear, hurt, and anger, and he was lashing out at his employees. As a result, he had lost some of his most talented people. Over time, Todd has continued to face and accept his business situation, and to work with his own emotional life, and he has been making significant progress in putting his business and personal life back together.
Most people don’t like any form of discomfort and attempt to avoid pain and difficulty at all costs. We don’t like to grieve, but grief is a beautiful and natural response to important losses. This practice of embracing difficulty and loss is primarily about noticing, just paying attention and being present and alive for our lives. Any and all difficult situations — whether large or small, whether petty irritations and embarrassments or coping with the death of loved ones — can bring up unresolved feelings, old habits, and patterns that stir up unpleasant emotions and self-criticism. As a practice, embracing difficulty and loss is a way to turn the situation upside down, or at least to look at ourselves and our responses from a different perspective. We accept the difficulties and losses that come our way so that we might learn from them, so that we might use them in a positive way to be better, stronger, more adept. We examine our resistance, fear, and denial so that we might know ourselves better, accept ourselves better, question better, and increase our self-confidence. In this way, we create more possibility for openness and appreciation even in the midst of resentment, jealousy, and sorrow.
One practice that I often suggest to coaching clients (and use myself) is what I call the practice of feeling miserable. This isn’t for everyone, but I’ve noticed that many people have well-honed and time-tested strategies for avoiding difficult emotions and for not feeling bad. At times we find ourselves in impossibly difficult situations. Sometimes we just feel lousy or downright miserable. As I like to say, being a human being is a tough gig. And there are times when, for whatever reason, we just feel pain. Allowing ourselves to fully feel that pain can be a way to open, to expand our hearts. We can feel our deep connection with our families and wider communities, and surprisingly, open the gates to deeper feelings of joy. Allowing ourselves to feel miserable can also be an effective way to not avoid the truth of the present moment; we drop our defenses, stop trying to shelter ourselves, and deal directly and effectively with what is. In a work context, dropping down into our feelings can be the first step toward taking effective action.
I generally do this practice, and recommend doing this practice, during a morning meditation period — just taking a few minutes to check in with myself, noticing any feelings of sadness, grief, and longing in my heart. Just letting myself touch this pain, without bracing or holding back. Then, letting go of these thoughts and feelings, I bring my attention back to the breath and body. Sometimes I use this time to send wishes of well-being, happiness, and peace to my family and friends, to the world, and to myself. This combination of feeling and acknowledging pain and stating my intention to bring peace into the world helps me to settle and opens my heart.
A large part of developing equanimity, which I discuss just below, is developing the practice of embracing joy. However, embracing joy is also a companion to the practice of embracing difficulty. During challenging situations we sometimes can miss the joy, the little surprising things that happen sometimes right in the midst of frustration. See both, in whatever measure they exist.
I think back to the time when my daughter was in third grade. I drove her to school most mornings, down the hill to Tam Valley School, about a five-minute drive. Often the mood during the drive was one of quiet satisfaction, after the morning whirlwind of waking her up, a few minutes of reading to her in bed, getting up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, packing for school, and hustling out the door in time to be at school before 7:45 am. Some mornings the whirlwind was stressful and frustrating. The shout “I can’t find my socks!” blaring from the living room while I was cooking breakfast and packing lunches was enough to crumple this Zen teacher’s composure, giving rise to such thoughts as “I had children, why?” and “Where is the nearest exit?” One of our family myths that survives to this day is the time that I became so frustrated helping my daughter locate her socks that when I found one I threw it at her in anger. Clearly, this story is made up. Or perhaps I was merely throwing the socks to her with a bit too much enthusiasm. In truth, I totally lost it. I was completely triggered. This scene had “amygdala hijack” written all over it (the amygdala being an emotional center of the brain, which constantly scans for threats and rewards). I also recall times at the kitchen table with our eight-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son, having to gently, and at times not so gently, remind them that breakfast was a noncontact sport.
While I remember the frustrations, these have faded compared to the joys, which were woven in and around the difficult moments, side by side. Hot popovers coming out of the oven actually popped, causing smiling faces and cheers of success. Laughter, giggling, and play. Surprising questions and conversations about boys, about girls, about kissing; about life, death, and music. Some mornings just looking at their faces, two beautiful beings, made my heart sing or melt. Many days this joy was tempered, and other times heightened, by the knowledge that they would grow up, and I would not be needed to wake them up, make them breakfast, drive them to school. Today, even the moments of frustration are tinged with longing.
One morning conversation on the way to third grade with my daughter stands out. I asked her if she could remember a time that made her particularly happy. She thought about this but also seemed somewhat perplexed by the question. Then she turned and looked at me and said, “Daddy, I laugh all day long.”
In the book The Art of Happiness at Work by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, Cutler tells the story of interviewing His Holiness. Cutler was describing the challenges and difficult situations many people face at work — too much to do and not enough time, lack of fairness, dehumanizing work environments — and at one point in the conversation the Dalai Lama laughed and said, “Your questions are impossible! It is almost as if you are asking, ‘How can beings in the hell realm learn to practice patience, tolerance, and tranquility?’ ”
Well, in fact, that is exactly what we want (as the Dalai Lama well knows). It is easy to feel good and practice equanimity when troubles are small. But when our life starts to look and feel like hell — when we fall off the tightrope and getting back on seems impossible — that’s when we need help, desperately. Does this situation sound familiar: too much to do, not enough time, and a lack of fairness at work (or in the world)? Sadly, these have become the norm in our culture. Perhaps you scoff at the idea of a dehumanizing work environment: for most of us, the demeaning, restrictive, even cruel working conditions of prior generations no longer exist. However, I also think many people have given up and now accept a debilitating and unfulfilling status quo: sitting in stale cubicles and doing “assembly-line” jobs in workplaces that lack collaboration, honest and open communication, and cultivation of our intellect and creativity. We no longer recognize what we have given up, what we truly want. Many of us no longer see the possibility of supportive, kind, joyful, and even loving work environments.
The word equanimity comes from Latin roots for even and mind. Whatever enters your mind you meet with spaciousness while maintaining, or quickly regaining, your balance. The practice of equanimity is the practice of acceptance without indifference. It is practicing deep caring and love without clinging or attachment. It is the method for negotiating the third truth: accepting what is while fighting for change. As a practice, it’s a way of stepping back to look at our lives and our world as though from a distance so as to see the truth of our situation, and yet to remain emotionally aware, connected, and alive. It is sometimes described as looking over a mountain range with a sense of connection and awe or as looking over all of humanity without discrimination.
Equanimity is a practice that may sound either strange or unattainable to our twenty-first-century ears but is neither. Equanimity is based on the experience that everything changes. Whatever we see or experience is temporary. Equanimity is the antidote to the anxiety and restlessness this realization may cause. Equanimity laughs in the face of security, instead realizing and finding comfort and steadiness in the midst of insecurity. This may sound daunting and impossible, but we do it all the time. Indeed, I call having equanimity a practice because it is an action; it is something we must do, not just a philosophical idea to ponder. One everyday example is found in driving our cars: we zip along at death-defying speeds, simultaneously alert to the myriad and swiftly changing dangers while singing along happily to the radio. Driving safely and effectively means developing equanimity behind the wheel: being neither frozen by fear nor blithely unaware. Now, how might we achieve this in the rest of our life, to make us more effective, calmer, happier?
In Buddhist psychology equanimity is the seventh in what are known as the seven factors of awakening. One of the compelling aspects of Buddhist teaching is the understanding that within each person are the seeds of complete freedom and awareness. We just need to practice, to put our attention to these abilities, to “wake up” to what is — the actuality that each moment, each experience, is fresh and alive. How interesting that equanimity is considered the ultimate or seventh of these practices. The first six are mindfulness, or the practice of attention and present-moment awareness; curiosity, or the practice of questioning and investigating; energy, which is the practice of being proactive and moving through difficulty; joy, the practice of resting in the happiness of appreciating being alive; ease, which is knowing how to rest even in the midst of activity; and concentration, or the ability to focus fully on what you are doing. These seven practices or qualities are sometimes described as limbs on a tree, and we are the tree.
With equanimity, you can see and embrace emotions and respond to them without being caught up in them or giving in to despair or indifference. You could think of equanimity like the “pause” between feeling and acting that allows us to choose what seeds to water. It is cultivating the ability to choose well, with patience and compassion, even when we find ourselves in the hell realm.
It takes practice to cultivate and awaken joy and kindness. Equanimity doesn’t come easily; it is much easier to describe than to do. Yet it can be approached just like any other “creative gap”: it’s possible to identify where you are now, to measure the distance to where you want to be, and then to take practical actions to get there. Just setting your intention to try is the biggest step. This brings awareness and focus, and awareness is the key.
For instance, we all find that it’s easier to be compassionate, kind, patient, and nonjudgmental in certain circumstances, and with some people, than others. That’s natural. This is another reason we must work to know ourselves well, so we can learn to recognize and transform our ineffective and self-defeating reactions. Equanimity is a skill we need when things are most difficult, and we learn it by practicing on our most difficult emotions. So, the first step in practicing equanimity is to embrace our emotions, accept difficulty, and recognize what’s true. Once we can do that, we can transform our difficulties by putting into practice the specific actions below. While these actions are beneficial at any time, and with or without any specific reason to do them, they become powerful, transformative lessons in equanimity when they are practiced in specific reaction to the eight dilemmas and the many destructive emotions they inspire: attachment, fear, anger, greed, frustration, and so on.
In order to bring more consciousness and self-awareness to this work, consider practicing one of the actions below for a week and tracking your experience in a journal. At the end of each day, for twenty minutes, conduct an “audit” of the day: when did the issue come up, how did you react, and what were the circumstances? Notice if there are patterns to what triggers you or to certain reactions. Just notice, and in this way keep encouraging self-awareness in your most difficult situations.
Of all the practices, gratefulness may be the most powerful, and it’s one of the easiest to practice on the run. If you can make gratefulness a habit, many other good qualities follow.
First, begin and end each day by expressing gratitude, and be specific. Name what you are grateful for: life itself, a roof over your head, clean water and air, a job and income, family and friends, the fragrance of a flower, a funny cartoon. Right now, in this particular moment, what are you grateful for?
Spread the practice of gratefulness throughout your day. Consider keeping an ongoing gratefulness journal: write down things you are grateful for as you think of them, and keep this in your pocket and on your desk. Refer to it; open it at random whenever you notice it. Isn’t this why we keep photographs of our family and loved ones in our offices? To remember to be grateful for them? If your work space lacks such reminders, add some. Include photographs of meaningful places, anything that has meaning for you that helps to wake you up and remind you of what you appreciate.
Throughout your day, practice being consciously grateful for small compliments, acts of kindness, and other positive actions. In this way, we can “balance” our natural focus on problems, bad news, and negative events, especially at work. Emergencies, mistakes, and accidents need our focused attention and effective action, but they don’t need to overwhelm our inner experience. Indeed, whenever you find yourself resentful, depressed, and grumbling that life is unfair, practice expressing gratitude, even including for the problem and painful emotions themselves. After all, it’s through difficulties that we learn and grow, so why should we resent and resist them? Practice gratitude for everything, good and bad.
How strange to think of kindness as a practice. Isn’t it obvious? I think most of us want to be kind. It’s easy to forget. Especially when we are angry and frustrated, or when someone else mistreats us or causes us pain, loss, or disgrace, such as when another driver suddenly cuts in front of us in traffic or we get a bad review at work. Then our anger flares up, and we sometimes yell, blame, judge, and mistreat in turn. Instead, when these emotions and impulses arise, notice them, don’t suppress them, let them go, and be kind. Practice kindness when it’s hard to do so. And don’t forget to practice kindness even toward yourself. Often this can be the most challenging.
I taught a mindfulness workshop at Facebook headquarters recently. As we prepared for three minutes of mindfulness meditation, I said to the participants, “You can do this either the easy way or the easier way. The easy way is to follow your breathing or to count your exhalations. The easier way is to just sit quietly.” After we did this, someone commented, “When I get distracted and stop following my breath, I feel guilty, as though I have failed.” I thanked the person and said that this was an important recognition. Being distracted is part of mindfulness and part of daily life. And so are feeling guilty and judging ourselves. When you notice you are distracted, or that you are judging yourself, use this as an opportunity to practice kindness.
This is the practice of actively seeking to relieve the pain and suffering of loved ones, friends, and other people, and it applies to our own suffering as well. Empathy and compassion are basic human traits. The other day a friend of mine was walking toward me. When she was about twenty feet away, she stumbled on a curb and lost her balance. In that moment, as I watched her, my body also felt out of balance. Without and beyond any thinking, I could feel the impending pain of her fall. This empathetic reaction was as automatic as the compassionate one that followed: I lunged toward her to attempt to soften her landing. Luckily, she caught herself and regained her balance in time. Compassion is such a natural, built-in human response. At the same time, our fears, our busyness, and our judgments can cover over this response and lead us to feel separate and alone. Thus, one antidote to our feelings of separation and isolation, to our moments of neediness and disconnection, is to practice helping others.
This is such a simple and powerful practice. So often we get caught up comparing ourselves with others: analyzing who’s ahead and who’s behind, and becoming envious of anyone who seems richer, better, luckier, smarter, or more talented. When you recognize these feelings and reactions, practice sympathetic joy instead. Notice the joy of others and celebrate it. This practice, and it does take practice, is consciously feeling the happiness of others — hearing a child laughing, seeing a loving couple smiling at each other in a restaurant, reading the announcement of a coworker’s promotion. Whatever is happening in your life, whatever you feel you may lack, this practice is always available. For one day, practice sympathetic joy with everyone you meet. Notice what happens, in yourself and others.
There are many actions that undermine equanimity. Blame is at the top of the list. Equanimity could even be defined as the practice of noticing blame, letting go of it, and transforming it with personal responsibility. Blame is the cause of so much unhappiness, whether we are blaming others or ourselves. Blame is finding fault in order to criticize, shame, or punish. This is useless and undermining. It never solves the problem at hand, while invariably sowing unhappiness, discord, misunderstandings, resentment, separation, conflict, and even violence.
When things go wrong, we understandably want to find the cause, but we can remember that we are all board-carrying fellows: everyone’s perspective is limited, incomplete. We can never see the whole picture; no one can. Everyone involved in a situation also has an influence on it, whether directly or indirectly. When we feel the urge to blame, we can practice dropping judgment and instead focus on taking responsibility.
Often blaming happens so quickly and automatically that we don’t even notice. I remember the time that my wife asked me for a recommendation for a designer for a project she was working on. I quickly wrote down the names of two designers that I often worked with and included short evaluations of each designer, naming their strengths and weaknesses. Then, without thinking, I sent my evaluations via email to the designers instead of to my wife. This was one of those oops moments. Though I didn’t say anything very negative about either designer, my note was not intended for them to see. The moment I realized my mistake, I felt blame arise: “If only my wife hadn’t asked me for this referral . . .” Noticing this reaction, I was surprised at myself. Without any hesitation, I was almost instinctually trying to shift responsibility and hide my own embarrassment over my error. But my wife was not to blame. This was a clear-cut instance of misplaced blame, and I quickly let the feeling go. Far more difficult are situations in which someone else’s words or actions do directly cause us harm (emotional or otherwise).
The first step in reducing the tendency to blame others is to identify blaming whenever it arises: stop, notice, and label your reaction as blame. Just notice, then pause before acting or responding. Next, before you explain to the other people all the things they did wrong, ask yourself: “How did I contribute to this situation? Was it 1 percent, or more?” Take responsibility for that contribution, and use that as a basis for taking useful action. Turn that around if you are blaming yourself. Ask: “Am I the only one who contributed to this situation? Was my part 99 percent, or less?” If after doing this you still struggle with understanding who’s at fault in a situation, do the “opposite perspectives” exercise in chapter 4 (page 80). Explore the statement “It’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility.” Even when we or others do something harmful, numerous circumstances conspire toward and culminate in that action; some are within our control and some are outside of anyone’s control. Taking responsibility is a way of identifying the things we can control and the useful actions we can take and opening to new possibilities.
Equanimity is sometimes described as the practice of letting go. This is easier to talk about than to do. Letting go is a skill that takes practice. Emotions reside in the body; you might say our emotional attachments are literally embodied in us. Reacting to them is a powerful, ingrained habit; sometimes our reactions are automatic, instinctual fight-or-flight responses. It’s important to emphasize that letting go is not about avoiding or denying our unhelpful emotions or attachments. It’s about recognizing them as they occur and developing the ability to let them go: to simply release distraction, blame, fear, the busyness in our minds. We can learn this skill through attention training, through working with the whole mind and body, and by practicing letting go again and again.
Meditation practice can be described as the practice of letting go with each breath. With each exhale, explore really exhaling fully, letting go, really not knowing what will happen next. This is the practice of letting go of everything. Pausing throughout the day can be a useful way to practice letting go. When you start your car, pause, take a breath, and let go. Do this when you arrive at work or are about to begin a meeting, or any time the thought pops into your head. Let go and be curious.
There are many contexts in which to practice letting go. As a way to work with and develop equanimity, let’s focus on three.
LETTING GO OF DISTRACTIONS: A good place to start to reduce distractions is compiling your not-to-do list. This is a useful list to keep, a companion to your list of tasks and projects. Write down the things that cause distractions, the things you should not be doing: perhaps, Web surfing, eating junk food, having long, detailed conversations about topics you don’t need to know the details to. However you define distractions, list them, then pay attention and notice. Sometimes it can help to look at what we are avoiding and not getting to. What is it that prevents you from getting done what is important or essential? Is this a form of distraction?
LETTING GO OF UNDERMINING EMOTIONS: Paying attention to your emotional life is the starting point for this practice. Pause, notice, label. What are you feeling? Just notice your reactions and responses. If impatience is an issue for you, focus on noticing and letting go of impatience. The point is not to avoid impatience, or even to lessen it, but to uncover all the places it occurs and guides our actions, and then to insert a breathing space in which we decide how to respond differently. The same practice can be used for anger, jealousy, and any of the eight imprisonments.
LETTING GO OF WORRY: The most powerful way to let go of worry and anxiety about the future is to find ways to be more present. Begin by noticing worry and anxiety anytime you are thinking about what might happen, planning, or fretting about the future. Label these thoughts and emotions as worry: “Here comes worry. . . .These feelings are just worry arising.” Then practice attention training — come back to your body and breath, to your sensations, and examine what you see and hear inside. What other feelings are arising?
As you do with gratefulness, practice the joy of being every day. Every time you think of it, for one breath, just be. Create some routines and rituals to assure that you have at least some “being” time each day — a daily meditation practice, a walk outside during lunchtime, a few minutes of reading poetry to yourself in the afternoon. Explore the art and practice of moving from attainment to nonattainment, from doing and getting to just being. We are such doers. It is easy to turn mindfulness, meditation, and yoga into another activity of doing. Notice this, be kind to yourself, and see if you can shift your approach. Reduce and, when possible, eliminate your unnecessary expectations. What relief! Let yourself experience beyond right and wrong, good and bad, beyond comparing, assessing, and analyzing.
Every situation presents an opportunity for learning, for increasing awareness, and for awakening to joy. Expanding your awareness — about yourself, and in relationship to others and to the world — is like breaking open a treasure chest. You don’t need to do anything. The light of appreciation, the power of your emotional and cognitive gifts, and feelings of profound joy stop being blocked and can flow more freely.
A useful equanimity practice is noticing gaps between appearances and reality. I think we do this all the time, but we don’t like to stay with it and learn from these gaps. I’m often surprised by the gaps in people and companies, between appearances and reality. So often, we put a good face on our own troubles, and we tend to believe (and react to) the appearances shown by others, especially those who appear successful, happy, sustainable. I’ve learned that when you look more deeply — what I sometimes call looking under the hood of a business or a person — you may unexpectedly notice a broken radiator or oil leaking from the engine. Todd’s story is an excellent example of this, as I never would have guessed all the challenges he was facing in his life before he told me.
Though “see challenges as opportunities” is a cliché, that doesn’t make it less useful. I think that most of us need to be reminded to do this, over and over again. We all want things, and yet obstacles, challenges, and difficulties always seem to get in our way. It’s frustrating. But according to the cultural myth of the hero’s journey, there is no way to get what we want except by going through (and learning from) the inevitable challenges we will face. Further, if we resist an obstacle — if we want a promotion that we don’t get and then sink into self-blame — we only cause ourselves suffering and distress without taking useful action. And, really, what is the difference? Whatever we label an experience — as a challenge or an opportunity — it is multidimensional. Our label just signals whether we are resisting or embracing the full breadth of our experience.
For instance, our nation’s current economic crisis is certainly a challenge. There is nothing pretty about unemployment and people losing their homes. These things are painful. And yet, if we embrace the challenges that life presents to us — whether we asked for them or not — then we are making the most of what happens to us. We are learning to handle painful financial hardship with equanimity; perhaps we are learning to make different financial choices. Being a human being is fraught with challenges, small and large. Name some of yours. Identify the opportunities within these challenges, and reach for those.
Certain Buddhist writings advise being less predictable. I find it very interesting, since it can be interpreted in many ways. First, in what ways are you predictable? We develop all kinds of routines, habits, and preferences. Some of them are quite healthy and recommended in this book: exercising regularly, meditating daily, developing an ongoing writing practice, and so on. Are we meant to undo these good routines? I don’t think so. Instead, I think this advice is a guard against laziness, against unthinking torpor, against short-sightedness. Like embracing paradox, it’s a way to wake us up, so we act in ways that are fresh and alive and open to new growth and possibility. Equanimity, like moderation, can sound boring, the exact opposite of the open-ended, risk-taking curiosity that not knowing is meant to cultivate. Notice how predictable your thinking and your responses can be, and play the trickster with yourself. Eat foods you don’t like, wake up earlier or stay up late, read different kinds of books and see different kinds of movies. Explore your habits and assumptions. Play. Be curious. Say yes when you usually say no; get a different haircut. Unpredictableness is another good habit to cultivate.
We all want to be noticed. We all want to be accepted and loved. But our attachment to praise and a good reputation is what makes these part of the eight dilemmas. By expecting or needing applause, we set ourselves up for pain if we don’t get it, or if we are not recognized in the way we desire. So notice when you expect applause, at work and at home. Just notice. Then, see if you can reduce or let go of the expectation. Can you find satisfaction in a job if you aren’t rewarded with attention? Practice the opposite response: instead of silently hoping to be noticed, ask for applause. Can you ask for recognition with love and joy in your heart, rather than judgment or hurt feelings? Of course, it’s wonderful to be applauded for what we do. It’s even more wonderful to receive it when we don’t expect it. Can you recognize and acknowledge your own efforts and feel satisfied in what you have accomplished? Can you have compassion for the hunger in you for praise and let it go?
Patience is another one of those austere, eat-it-because-it’s-good-for-you words. We want to act, solve, work, build, and patience asks us to wait. Patience sounds like the dutiful opposite of freedom, creativity, and fun. No one wants to be told to be patient. I don’t. And yet it is a powerful practice for developing equanimity. It is an antidote to anxiety, worry, doubt, excitement, and all the other impulses that would make us rush, that encourage us to skip all the boring stuff in the middle and read the last page to see how everything ends. People who work with natural rhythms — like farmers, winemakers, and doctors — know from experience that certain activities must be allowed to happen in their own time: planting when it is time to plant, harvesting when time to harvest, and giving the body time to heal. The work in this book has its own rhythm, too. Between the question and the solution is the doing, and what’s in the middle is essential to the outcome. Learning to pause and notice oneself is part of that rhythm; it’s a way of stopping, of practicing patience. Listening requires patience. In business and personal life, developing a plan, building a team, building a brand, and raising capital require patience (or are improved by it).
However, practicing patience doesn’t mean that you always move slowly or that you become hesitant. Sometimes we need to move quickly and decisively; when events move fast, we have to move equally fast to keep up with them. Farmers and doctors also know when time is of the essence, when a quick response is the difference between success and failure, life and death.
That said, another aspect to the practice of patience is physically slowing down and moving less quickly. Notice when you feel under pressure to respond, and instead pause and take three breaths. Find the proper rhythm for every action and decision; allow it to emerge, rather than forcing it. Then, if it comes time to sprint or act decisively, you do so from a place of calmness, deliberation, and clarity.
The great Thai monk Achaan Cha was famous for holding up a teacup and saying, “To me this cup is already broken.” Everything is like this. Everything is beautiful and, simultaneously, everything is already broken. This is the truth of impermanence.
We don’t like to look at the world in this way. We want to hold on to and protect everything we love, and to discard or turn away from everything that is broken. When something breaks, or a person leaves us or someone dies, we are completely upset, and we want to move away from the experience of loss as quickly as possible. Loss reminds us that the world isn’t a safe place, so we try to protect the things we still possess more diligently; we hold on to relationships more tightly. We become stressed, paranoid, out of balance.
We tend to overlook the exquisite beauty of our imperfections. Broken is the nature of things. It is the nature of ourselves, especially ourselves. If we can embrace this, we can more fully appreciate our life, appreciate the preciousness of who we are and what we are, fully accept what comes to us and what leaves us. Whatever comes to us is a gift, a temporary gift. Whatever leaves us is also a gift, even when it is painful and we grieve deeply. What may be most difficult to grasp is that nothing exists that is not already broken from the start.
So, to embody equanimity, one of the most important practices is to treat our cup, and the offerings of the world, as already broken. Waking up this morning, I am now older than I was yesterday. Everyone and everything is. And yet, I just go about my day, my routines, worries, and concerns, without really appreciating this fact. We may succeed in some aspect of our lives and feel happy, content. We may think: Wonderful, now I have the job, or the income, or the spouse, or the home that I want, and I don’t need to worry about that again. But then tomorrow, or a few days later, or a few years later, loss arrives and we are confronted with brokenness again.
“This teacup is already broken” is a wonderful paradox that is meant to wake us up, so we see the ephemerality of life more clearly and accurately — and appreciate how emotions and equanimity walk hand in hand, and how by accepting both we can live with more compassion, kindness, and effectiveness. This leads to an abiding joy in being that’s deeper than any day-to-day happiness.
Experiment with seeing things as already broken. This book will one day be in a recycling bin; it will become dust. So will all your books, your computer, your car. Ultimately, everything that is made and everyone who is born will eventually break down and come to an end. This may seem like the ultimate downer. But avoiding or denying this fact doesn’t make it less true, doesn’t make you more effective; it leaves you more easily hurt, surprised, and unbalanced by the inevitable breakdowns. The other truth is, if you are alive, you are not broken entirely, and the world renews itself constantly. Embodying equanimity means accepting and embracing this bittersweet process, and finding balance within it. Whether the teacup in your hand is broken today or not, can you see the beauty of the teacup, broken and unbroken — of the beauty of the sky, of the people around you, of yourself? Does this help you appreciate the beauty and magnificence of everything in this moment just as it is?
I recently had dinner with a good friend in San Francisco who is a successful businesswoman and media consultant, as well as a mindfulness teacher. We were discussing the rise of mindfulness practice in general and in the corporate world, when at one point she stated emphatically, “I don’t think mindfulness is really going to catch on or be the next big thing.”
“Really?” I responded. “Why do you feel that way?”
She looked serious and said, “The problem is that when most people begin practicing mindfulness, they first become aware of their current pain and unhappiness. You and I know, from having a long-term mindfulness practice, that this is a stage, and that we all need to go through this. I don’t think most people are going to be willing to stay with mindfulness practice if it involves facing and feeling the pain and discomfort that exist in your life right now. Who wants that!”
If you’ve read this far, you’ll know that my friend was right: mindfulness involves looking squarely at our most difficult issues and feelings, some of which we may have spent many years avoiding. In fact, mindfulness often causes us to realize with some shock that our teacup is indeed already broken, and at first this can make us feel worse. Despite its rewards, bringing more attention and awareness to our work and our life brings this risk. Often the act of looking more closely at what we are doing, our feelings, the quality of our interactions, can be painful and disturbing. It is easy to become stuck in a work situation or a relationship or a life where we fall asleep or become numb. The act of waking up to the reality of our situation can be upsetting, even shocking. Yet waking up to what is, I believe, is always better than remaining asleep, to pretending that everything is okay when it is not. Noticing and naming is an important step toward finding real joy and real freedom.
If, in doing this work, you find yourself resisting, or wondering if there must be some easier way, it’s okay. Everyone resists; everyone struggles. When you do, practice kindness, compassion, and patience with yourself, and pick the work back up tomorrow. I think that almost everyone wants to feel good. There is tremendous evidence that happiness is the default state of human beings, and we have powerful social and genetic tendencies toward kindness and compassion. Yet there is no avoiding difficulty, no avoiding feeling pain, discomfort, anxiety, and loss. Naturally, we try: we grasp for happiness and try to avoid pain and loss, and soon find ourselves caught within the eight imprisonments. Mindfulness practice allows us to free ourselves by choosing differently. Paradoxically, we embrace all emotion, all our striving, emptiness, and loss, so we can act from a sense of equanimity, compassion, and caring for a world already broken.
These five paradoxes, or truths, are tools and practices for training ourselves to be more free — to widen our awareness and to take a different approach. We neither indulge in or cling to the comfort we seek nor repress the more difficult emotions that we tend to push away. With this shift, we are changed, and so the world is changed. I’m reminded of a famous story: a king assigns a brilliant builder to cover his entire kingdom with leather. He wants to cover all the rocks and pebbles so his feet won’t feel the pain when he walks about the kingdom. Instead, the builder designs the king leather shoes. The world changes when we change our experience of it.
Many years ago, Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, was leading a traditional, seven-day Zen meditation retreat. These retreats involve a good deal of sitting meditation and a rigorous schedule from early in the morning till late at night. They provide an environment for people to deeply touch, and let go of, many experiences, identities, fears, and emotions. At one point, Suzukiroshi was sitting with the retreat participants. He looked at the fifty men and women, broke the silence, and said, “The difficulty that you are experiencing right now. . .”
He paused. One of my friends, Zen teacher and writer Ed Brown, was there, and Ed said in that moment, after days of meditating and facing the difficulties of life as well as painful knees, legs, and back from sitting for so long, he imagined everyone in the room anticipated some words of relief or escape, some possibility of feeling transformed, or at least better. Then Suzuki continued, “. . .you will have for the rest of your life.”
I believe this stunning, paradoxical remark, though it may have sparked some momentary despair, was Suzuki’s way of encouraging people to explore and practice complete and radical acceptance. His teaching is simply to be present for whatever you are experiencing — the pains and difficulties, the joys and ease. Just show up completely, without wanting, wishing, or hoping that your situation will be different. This kind of presence is, in itself, transformative. With complete acceptance of what is, joy and freedom arise.