How to Embrace Uncertainty and Navigate Life Transitions with Paul Agostinelli

In this episode, Paul Agostinelli offers a shift in perspective on approaching life with a sense of profound responsibility and empowerment. Paul and Eric dive into the concept of karma, the interconnectedness of all beings, and the impact of self-centered tendencies on individual and collective well-being. Through his experiences and teachings, Paul invites others to embrace uncertainty and explore ways to navigate life transitions in a more meaningful way.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Gain insight into the profound concept of karma in Buddhism and its relevance to daily life decisions
• Explore the powerful impact of actions and thoughts on life outcomes
• Learn effective strategies for navigating life transitions, making choices, and embracing change with confidence and clarity
• Discover new ways to define spirituality that is meaningful to you
• Uncover the secrets to integrating professional and spiritual growth, finding harmony and purpose in career decisions and personal development

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We think we have more control than we do. We
tend to create problems where they don't exist, and we
think we can fix problems that we can't fix.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't

(00:38):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

(01:12):
for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Paul Agostinelli,
a Zen Buddhist sense and founder of zenant Work. He
co founded three startups and led strategy for several others.
In addition to leadership at Zenwork and eon Zen, Paul
currently serves on the faculty and board of Willow Farm
Contemplative Caregiving Center, and since twenty nineteen, has led the

(01:34):
Mindfulness program at Red Mountain, Colorado, Residential Treatment Center for teens.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Hi Paul, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Thanks Eric, it's good to be here with you.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, I am happy to have you on. I don't
ever know whether to call you Paul or what I
used to call you, sense because you were my zen
teacher for several years. So this is a conversation that's
long overdue, and I am really happy to be happy.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
I'm happy to be here too, chatting in this way.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yeah, we are sitting in your zendo in Boulder, Colorado.
I love to do interviews in person, so it's great
to be here. Let's start like we always do with
the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking
with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

(02:20):
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second,
and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins, and the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, well, this parable is a very vivid illustration of
what in Zen Buddhism we understand is karma. Right, is
that everything that we do say or even think has consequences,
and everything we do say or think kind of supports
seeds in a certain way. We have this collection of

(02:57):
things in one wolf that we're labeling good and another
that we're labeling bad. And there's some interesting questions kind
of embedded in the parable itself too, Right, It's like,
are they really good? Are they really bad? What does
it mean to be good and bad? Or what does
it mean to feed? You know, each of these wolves?
And then the deepest one is well, who is doing
the watering? Right? That's the core kind of question. So

(03:19):
just to say a little bit about those aspects too.
The good and bad part is something that we understand
and Buddhism that I understand from myself more as wholesome
and unwholesome, okay, or self centered and less self centered okay.
The bad is more self centered, less wholesome. These are
words that I find more resonant.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Today's skillful and unskillful.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, I mean in a way more in alignment with reality.
I think that's where the wholesomeness comes in. It's not
wholesome in a moral sense, you know that that's good,
but it's wholesome that it includes more of reality. It's
a whole or actually picture of reality. And that's why
self centeredness is actually less in a chord with reality,
because while we do have individual selves, we're also intimately

(04:08):
connected with everybody else. And when we're acting or speaking
or thinking in ways that reinforce an independent self that
tends to be out of a chord with reality and
tends to have deleterious effects for ourselves and other it
causes suffering. It's a really nice kind of template, right
to look at. It's like, what are the tendencies? Okay,
I like that too, this word to look at tendencies

(04:31):
instead of qualities. We all have more or less wholesome tendencies,
more or less self centered tendencies. We all have them.
And what do we do with these tendencies? How do
we feed them? This is the question of feeding it, right,
so when we speak in a certain way, when we

(04:52):
act in a certain way, and when we give a
certain quality of attention to certain of the tendencies, it
tends to reinforce them, and it tends to have deleterious
effects down the line and other and likewise, you know,
likewise with the more wholesome ones. So it really sets
us up with a really nice landscape for how karma
works and how every moment of every day, thinking, speaking,

(05:17):
and acting, we are watering certain seeds, certain tendencies or not.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah, I love that interpretation and it's the one that
makes sense to me in that Yeah, it's kind of
where we put our attention, is kind of what tends
to grow or flourish. And I also love that word tendencies.
And like you, I've done a lot of one on
one coaching work with people, and I find tendency a
really useful word because if we go stronger than tendency

(05:45):
to quality or personality or traits, we're reinforcing a sense
of stuckness.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Right.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
But if we don't acknowledge that there are tendencies in
a certain direction, we overlook what are and sort of
stumbling blocks. And so that's also a word I've sort
of independently arrived at as a really useful one.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, exactly. And it takes away the duality the right
of the situation that we need to eliminate something and
have the other one be the victor. You do have
the language and the parable which one.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Wins, yes, right, yes, and neither of.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Them really win. It's just supporting certain tendencies and diminishing others.
You may know, Eric, there's a very famous en coon
which is its own kind of Buddhist parable in a
way around cause and effect, which is the co on
of Yakujo's Fox. An old man appears in the Dharma
hall from Master Hyaka Joe, and he's in the back
and he listens to dharmatags and Yaka Joe goes up.

(06:41):
This is an ancient Chinese master from the Golden age
of Zen. Right, and he goes and he says, well,
who are you? And he says, well, many years ago,
I was a teacher and I was asked if an
enlightened being is beyond the law of cause and effect.
And I told this person that he is, or they are.
An enlightened person transcends cause and effect, and for that

(07:03):
error I was condemned to be a fox for five
hundred lifetimes. This parable also has a four legged in it. Yeah,
not a wolf of fox. So the man says, please
say a turning word to me so that I can
be released from this curse, if you will, and Yakuju says,
you cannot ignore cause and effect, and then he's released

(07:23):
from this bondage. Right, So we can't say, you know
good and bad. We can't separate those. We can't say
enlightened is beyond cause and effect and deluded is not
beyond cause and effect. We're always in the thick of things, right.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
I've been working on a project around The Dowday Ching,
which is a book I love, and I know that
part of the reason I think I was drawn to
Zen without even knowing it is it tends to be
a little bit of a marriage between Taoism and Buddhism,
and The dowd Ay Ching has been a book I've
loved since I was eighteen years old. But I was
reading a philosophical interpretation of it and they used a
phrase in there. They called it consume umatory relatedness, and

(08:02):
I love that idea that, like our relatedness to every
other thing, consumes everything. It is the true nature of reality.
So how could you in any case be beyond that?
How could you be beyond you know, cause and effect? Now,
cause and effect is a very complicated thing, right, It

(08:23):
reaches back to the beginning of time in some ways, right,
which I find a fascinating thing to contemplate.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, exactly, And it really it opens it up to
the great mystery, right, because there's so many interconnections of dependencies,
multiple causes from multiple effects, all of them intertwined in
a very complex way. And then when you add in,
you know, even your thoughts or creating effects, right, what
subtlety is involved in that? Yeah, it's nothing you can

(08:50):
ever really conceptually grasp. It's nothing you can even fully
be aware of, right, even it's some kind of a
neutral witness, it's just impossible to do that. So we're
kind of thrown back upon ourselves in a posture of humility,
in a posture of wonder, in a posture of really
recognizing the mystery of all this, but also recognizing the

(09:11):
power of our intention when we put it towards what
we want to nourish with our feeding, with our watering,
what we want to nurture.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
So I want to explore karma a little bit more
because we don't talk about it often on the show
using that word, and it's a word that's made its
way into the popular parlance. Right, and we have different things,
but you use the phrase all our thoughts, behaviors, actions
have consequences. Now, if we're oriented in a Western religion,

(09:44):
idea consequence is being imposed by someone who is setting
the rules and imposing consequence. That's not what we mean
in this case. Say more about what that word consequence
means in this context in the Buddhist context.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yes, right, consequences has this almost kind of punitive or reward,
you know, kind of quality to it. But effects is
probably a better word. You know, cause and effect, the
law of cause and effect. So karma literally means action,
and we understand the law of karma to apply to
volitional action. So it's something where where the self or
the being right makes some kind of a volition or

(10:22):
a willful action speech or thought. Okay, that is what
then creates a consequence. It is a law of consequence
that things unfold from that in the same way that
certain chemical combinations produce their effects. That the laws of
physics apply. It just happens. It's not any person or
any you know, even consciousness in a sense that has

(10:46):
written these down. Although I'm not one to say whether
that's true or not. Perhaps you know, it's just as
true as and as observable as the laws of physics.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
And then when we look into the subtlety of what
these volitional actions are, I think this is where we
can get into, well, what do we mean by good
or bad? Or positive or negative? And I think the
more subtle really discernments are wholesome or unwholesome, and selfish
or unselfish. And when we see that when we're acting
in a selfish way, or we've acted in a selfish way,
the effects of that on other people and even on

(11:20):
ourselves tend to have some kind of a distorted quality
to them. They don't open up into harmony, into peace,
into connection, into alignment, into these things into peace that
we know and we feel in our bodies are kind
of are in accord with a deeper, more benevolent nature.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Yeah. I often think of karma too, in a sense
that any thought or behavior that I do makes it
more likely that thought or behavior will happen again yeah, right,
almost as if I'm, like you said, I'm planting the
seeds of my future right there in that thing. I
think the question of volitional is really interest though, and

(12:01):
I talk on the show sometimes I'm really interested in
how much choice do people have? Do we all have
equal amounts of choice? And I'm throwing away the debate
about whether we have free will or not at all
because I just don't find it useful framing. But you
might say that the decision for me to do a
certain thing, say, something that we would regard as unwholesome,

(12:24):
and somebody who suffered severe trauma and their response to
that trauma is the same action. We may have different
levels of volition in that behavior, you know. I think
about it with addiction a lot, right, because the amount
of choice I feel like I have now around drugs
and alcohol feels radically different than fifteen years ago, you know.

(12:46):
And so how do you think of volition in that way?

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah? I think you put your finger on it that
there are more or less degrees of volition. But as
you know, being a teacher of spiritual habit development, you
know that there are always these choice points. Yeah, right,
So when those choice points come in and then with
the choice that you make, that's the one that is
going to be the most say, karmically impactful. Yep. Right,
it's kind of when people start meditation, you know, and

(13:11):
you probably teach this too. There's that moment when you
know you've lost the count of your breath. Right, there's
that moment, and that's a choice point right there. You
can choose to go back to your practice, or you
can choose to go off into that fantasy right because
it's so good, or you really need to resolve the
problem that you've been fretting about. Right. Oftentimes it's a

(13:31):
very subtle choice point, but it does come. Karma is
created from that choice right there. And those choices are
available no matter how traumatized you are, no matter how
much in addiction you are, those choices are certainly available.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Yeah, and I agree. I think there is always some
degree of choice, you know, and believing you don't have
it is not a very good recipe for future success
in any endeavor. Right, You have to believe that you
have choice.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
You know.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
Sometimes when I think about that, every thought I have,
every action I do is producing karmic effect or consequence.
I can get a little freaked out.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
It's daunting, isn't right. Yeah, it's intimidating.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
So how do you position that so that that's an
empowering idea or an idea that leads to better choices
and not to like chronic neurosis.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, it's an excellent question. It's an excellent question. And
here's what I've observed and how I take this on
in my life, because this is a path for me
as well. Is taking full responsibility is the path to
the life of deepest meaning and purpose. Really to take
it on. One teacher in my lineage goes so far

(14:42):
as to say, really awakening is to see everything that
happens as the same as what you do. What you
do and what happens to you are the same thing. Okay,
Now that's a pretty powerful statement, right. You can kind
of misunderstand that in a way and say, well, you know, like, oh,
you caused this aggression to happen to you. It isn't that.

(15:05):
It isn't that. It's that if you take on full
responsibility for your life, not in a moral sense, you
know that this thing that happened was good or bad,
and I'm blameworthy for that, but that I am intrinsically
fully participating in this thing that I call my life,
whether I'm conscious of that or not, and I try

(15:26):
to actually raise my consciousness of that participation. You just
are left with a sense of profound responsibility to know
that everything you do, say, or think has these consequences,
and there's such a great fruit of that. The fruit
of that is this amazing empowerment, and it's this amazing
sense of meaning and significance, even enchantment. It's something that

(15:50):
I've come more and more these days to connect with
in terms of my practice and the work that I
do with my coaching clients is to bring the inherent mystery, magic,
enchantment of human life alive. And when when we take
a responsibility for our lives, we come into great contact
with that. As long as we are putting the responsibility elsewhere,

(16:11):
putting the agency elsewhere, we lose that contact and we
get up all in our heads about planning things or
pushing responsibility off. So I don't know if that answers
your question. It is daunting, it is intimidating, but it
is it's the path of a great empowerment and joyful life.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Right.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
We'll talk maybe in a little bit about right view.
But it strikes me as that's a form of right view,
because I think the thing that gets in that statement
by the Bizen teacher you just gave sounds a little
bit like the law of attraction, which means I attract
these things to myself, which I don't have a problem with.
I have the problem with the reverse of it, which

(16:47):
would be thinking that somebody in Israel right now or
Gaza right now attracted that right. That seems cruel and
in any circumstance, though, I do think the truth is,
like you said, we are responsible for what we do
in response to what occurs to us in our life.
We may say that what occurs isn't fair or right
or should be different, but it isn't. Yeah, and we

(17:11):
do have choice of response. And I think it's why
you know, people like Victor Frankel have become so admired
is because he's showing, in the direst of circumstances, this
responsibility for his own choices. Talk about somebody who has
very little choice right in a concentration camp. Your choices

(17:31):
are extraordinarily limited, but within the ones he had, he
took responsibility for them.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yes, Yeah, exactly. I've been rereading Victor Frankel recently as well,
and he's impacted me a lot. The other dimension that
I wanted to bring out with that statement is what
happens to you and what you do are the same? Well,
who is the you here? We can get into that
deeper level, Well, who's doing the feeding? You know from
the beginning, So what's happening to you and what you're

(17:59):
doing or the same? Now that isn't necessarily just the
limited you that you identify with. That is the bigger
you that includes all beings. Okay. It's an invitation to
kind of open up into the fact that we're affecting
each other all the time. We're all a part of
this interdependent hole. So the spiritual path is one to

(18:21):
recognize more and more that we're not limited to this egoic,
individualistic self right, that we are intrinsically our nature is
one with this awakened consciousness that we are this, this
is us as well. So what happens to that and
what that does you are the same.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
The term right comes from the Buddhists Eightfold Path, which
is part of the foreknoble Truths, and I don't want
to unpack all of that. Some of our listeners will
be very familiar others that's a whole world for you
to dive into. But one of the parts of the
eight full path is right view. And you recently did
a podcast conversation. You have a podcast called The Game
of Zen, and a recent one was sort of talking

(19:21):
about right view. And I think this is a really
important one because what we're talking about is how we
see reality. Right. What could be more crucial than that? Right,
what I see directly impacts everything else that comes after that.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, it really does. It affects our actions, our speech,
and our thoughts. Right is how we can say, it's
a frame, so how we're taking things in. If we
have a limited, self centered view of the world and say,
other people, then we're going to interpret them in a
certain way. This is just an example. Right, they do
something perhaps aggressive, you know, towards yourself, and if we

(19:58):
only see them as separate beings, who are you know,
acting in a certain way with a certain amount out
of agency, then we're going to say, well, I need
to punish them perhaps, or I need to seek revenge
to that. It's just absolutely going to condition what you
do because of that worldview. But if you have a
view that is larger, you know, perhaps it includes an
understanding of trauma, It includes an understanding of the conditions

(20:20):
that may have created that behavior from that person. It
might even extend to the understanding that you're more intimately
connected than either of you know. You know, then you
issue were in some mysterious way. You know, perhaps you
have a view you know that that kind of encompasses
a certain magical unfolding of the universe and a mind

(20:43):
of not knowing towards why that might have happened and
how it could actually help you. You're obviously look at
things very differently, and then you're actually you're going to
respond to it differently as well.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Yeah, I mentioned at the beginning, we're here in Bolder
and we've got some snow out here, and you know,
I was driving the other day and it was snowing,
and I just thought about, like the difference between if
I go and take the minute to clean all the
windows you know that are available to me, versus drive
with them covered with snow, right or you know, you

(21:12):
have to use your windshield wipe or fluid like every
thirty seconds to see out the window. But when if
you don't, all of a sudden you realize like you're
still seeing I mean it's a dangerous view.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great image, and then life becomes
very difficult and challenging and fearful.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Right, But the more expensive your view is, then it
actually it's more easeful and you really understand to negotiate
your life.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
And would it be safe to say that a right
view is a more back to a word you used earlier,
wholesome view. It's a view that includes more.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
It includes more.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
That seems like a pretty common sense. I think everybody
listening can understand that. And then the next question would be, well,
how do I know if I have a right view?

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Right?

Speaker 3 (21:53):
Because we only tend to see what we can see. Yeah,
and so are there any sort of questions we can
be asking ourselves or certain things that if we're engaging
Cognitive biases are interesting because there are ways of actually
going am I not seeing something right? I might try
and go, well, am I seeing accurately? I think so?
And then I learn about a cognitive bias and I

(22:15):
look at it through that lens and I go, oh, no,
I wasn't right. Are there things like that that we
could say are helpful for us in starting to establish
a view that has more of the whole of reality
in it.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
It's a great question. And I'm chuckling a bit because
Scott my partner in the podcast Game of Zeny, and
he went right there as well. He's like, well, how
do I know if I have right yeah view. It's
a very urgent kind of question for us. So a
couple of dimensions to the answer to that. First off,
that metaphor you just gave is really great. Right, your
windshield's clearer, you know, if your windshield is clear versus
it's covered with snow, You see the landscape ahead, you

(22:48):
see where you need to negotiate. You can drive a
lot faster, you're functioning at a higher level. Okay, you're
crashing obviously a lot less. So in a very just
prove it out kind of way, it's right there. The
other thing to say, because it's not always clear, it's
not always clear, is you get reflections back from say
a teacher or a mentor or the people that you're

(23:11):
actually engaging with. Right, this is what life is actually,
it's developing the discerning and deeper views of the world
as we go through it, make mistakes, realize the blind
spots we had. Even as a zen teacher, you know,
I can come upon Holy Cow, I'd like miss that
whole area, you know, I guess that whole part of

(23:32):
that person or of that situation. There's always more to
learn about a person or a situation. I mean, look
at something like say the conflict in Gaza or in Ukraine.
There's so many dimensions to it, so many dimensions obviously,
but if we just circumscribe around a certain few and say, well,
this is the whole picture, and then we get all

(23:53):
ideological and you know, heavy handed about which way to go,
it's very limited and other things, you know, always always
come out. So in our personal life there's a certain
kind of trial and error, you know, with our attunement
to write view, our vision, our view.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
And I think it's worth that recognition that, you know,
in my Spiritual Habits program, I say, you know, it's
not a phrase I came up with. I don't know
who originally said it, but we don't see the world
as it is. We see it as we are. And
even that if we really take that seriously and realize
that means all the time in every situation I'm seeing

(24:29):
it based on my conditioning and my filters. That opens
up a curiosity to say, what might I be missing
and what you just said about, like the conflict in
either Ukraine or Gaza. I'm amazed by how quickly I
will read I don't know one article and suddenly think
I understand that situation and now I have an opinion. Yeah,

(24:53):
I have gotten a lot better at that, which maybe
I'm at the opposite extreme now, which is where I'm like,
why do you think I would have any idea? Yeah,
like I've spent thirty minutes or an hour or two
hours of my life learning about something that is this
vast and complicated. But we all have these I think
the word they use on social media today, I'm probably

(25:13):
out of date. It's probably old term is hot take. Right,
we have this hot take immediately right on things that
we just don't know much of anything about. And you
said at one point about right view, and this is
similar to kind of what I think I'm pointing at,
which is that a right view is that you recognize
that all your opinions and beliefs are provisional. Yes, right,

(25:34):
Say more about what that means? What do you mean
by they're provisional.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, well they're not the whole picture. They're not the
whole picture. And even if they're a really big picture,
everything changes all the time, as we know, so they
might not be anymore the full picture ten minutes later,
or ten months later, whatever the case may be. So
always always provisional. Nothing is ever definitive in terms of
an absolute sense or in terms of a temporal sense, right,

(26:01):
so we always have to be mindful of that. Just
always mindful of that is how much we don't know.
But I do like this phrase relative to kind of
how you were holding your own opinions, because I'm the
same way too. I'll read a really well informed or
what sounds like a really well informed account of some
of these complex, you know, situations, and I'll go, oh, yeah,
that's what's going on, you know, so we should do

(26:22):
this right. But just a few minutes later, you know,
I will rest into the complexity of the situation and
just say, well, maybe not so much. But we do
have opinions, right, We can't deny that we have opinions,
And we also have situations that we want to do
something right in. So this is not a prescription for passivity.
Right of doing nothing and saying I don't know anything,
it's to just really hold a weight. I like the

(26:44):
phrase strong opinions lightly held yes, okay, or clear opinions
lightly held okay. I know where this opinion is coming from, right,
I know the source data that I'm taking in and
is it true or not, and weigh that and then
still if it looks like it's all credible stuff, I
can have a opinion about something but still hold that
lightly because everything changes and you ultimately don't know.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
Yeah, And that's why I was saying, I think sometimes
I swing to the opposite extreme, which is I don't
know anything about anything, so I can't have an opinion
about anything and I can't do anything.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah. You know.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
One of the things about Zen that I liked, and
it's really embedded in Taoism too, is that if you
do have right view and you're more connected with you know,
I'm going to use a phrase without defining it well,
but true nature that spontaneously the quote unquote right response emerges,

(27:37):
you know. And I've always used an example in my
own life of that of like, if I tried to
argue to you the value of a single dog's life.
It would be hard to do because we'd say, there's
been a billion dogs, and there's how many of them
are now, and there's too many dogs, you know, I mean,
you know, like it would be hard to make a
good intellectual argument for the value of one dog's life.

(27:59):
If I walked outside and I saw a dog that
had gotten hit by a car, laying by the side
of the road, that was suffering, you couldn't argue me
out of wanting to take care of that dog, you know.
And to me, that's that response emerging naturally, even though
intellectually a situation doesn't make a lot of sense, but
viscerally it does. Meaning emerges that way for me. Sometimes.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, zen doesn't have much to do with intellectual arguments,
right right, Yeah, this is related to right view too.
We say, compassion is the natural functioning of wisdom, and
perhaps you've heard that, right, So wisdom is right view.
Wisdom is a really deep seeing into the nature of reality,
the nature of the self. That's what wisdom is. And
we do say, like you say, compassionate action actually is

(28:42):
the functioning of that view. That's just a wonderful way
to look at it. So we have to practice actually
both the wisdom part and the compassion part.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, there's the clear seeing, which is the right view,
clear seeing the nature of reality, the nature of the self,
the nature of cause and effect, how that all works.
Then we have to not be passive, not be just
kind of rest in that clear seeing. Which is a
risk on the spiritual path, is that we kind of
hang out there. It's like, oh, wow, I see, Oh,
I see what's going on. But it's inert, right, that's

(29:12):
the word. It's passive or inert. And people can hang
out there for a long time, they can spend their
whole lives there, right. But no, if you choose to
really develop your spiritual identity, your spiritual personality, if you will,
then you are going to put yourself out there into
situations where you can engage with people, you feel their pain,
you feel your own pain, and then you work to

(29:33):
better that whole situation. That's compassionate action, and it comes
from a clear seeing of what's going on.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah, and I think this might be a good time
to pivot to the next area. Broadly, I wanted to
go into in addition to be a transmitted Zen teacher
and having a Zen songa. You also have a business
it's called Zen at Work, and you do a lot
of coaching work with people. And there's a phrase that
you use that I wanted to shepherd us into this

(29:59):
area with and it's you talk about the often overlooked
ways in which professional, personal and spiritual growth are interrelated.
Say more about that.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, so we have these areas of our lives, right,
our professional life, our personal life, and our relational life. Okay,
that we I think intrinsically we kind of compartmentalize those
in a lot of ways. And that compartmentalization has really
bad effects, really discordant on harmonious effects. So all sorts

(30:32):
of bypassing results. If for example, you know, you know
the term spiritual bypassing. That's when you just try to
become an enlightened being and you don't take care of
your personal development, right, your relational intelligence, emotional intelligence if
you will, and you might even you know, bail on
your professional career if you're just going to go join
an ashram for decades. Right. You can also make the

(30:53):
case that you know, monks of old who didn't have
a family and didn't have a profession, we're basically professional bypassers.
You know, that's actually what they did by design, and
it is what they did by design, right, that they
actually did. But in our society, you know, there's hugely
terrible effects you know, to doing that. So they are related,

(31:15):
but in ways that we really have to acknowledge. We
have to recognize that when we're having difficulties, for example,
dealing with our work environment, Okay, it may show up
in our personal work. We may need to do some
personal work around that in order to make that a
more harmonious situation. Problems within our relationship are going to
show up. You know, in our personal work. They're all connected.

(31:38):
I guess I would say it's usually overlooked, you know,
the fact that they're all intimately related.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Yep. And so professional work makes sense. I think personal
we can say that's our relationships with other people. And
then spiritual growth. That's a term that a lot of
people don't resonate with. You know, we've done some audience
research that shows even within our audience, which is a
pretty te audience, that term doesn't work for a lot
of people. What's another way of putting that that people

(32:06):
who don't like that term might resonate with, might have
some value to them.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, I would say, so spiritual growth is a shifting
sense of yourself. Maybe this is more resonant. It's a
shifting sense of yourself into an identification with a larger beingness.
Do you think that would be more resonant.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, yeahh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
So spiritual you know, I remember reading I think it
was Ken Wilber years back he said, well, there's actually
nine formal definitions of the word spiritual, okay.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
And there's at least probably fifty other permutations that you know,
it's one of those words that when it pops into
people's minds, it has vastly different meanings exactly.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
So they have something that there is connoted by that,
and then they have a response to that. So I
think perhaps this is helpful. Spiritual development is about shifting
your sense of yourself into something higher, a higher consciousness,
a higher awareness, a high connectedness. That's what spiritual development

(33:03):
is all about, or.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
A broader view, you know, seeing our place in things. Yes,
more accurately, it would be another sort of rephrasing of that.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
What is the nature of that hour, what is the
nature of the eye, What is the nature of the me?
That's what spiritual inquiry is. It's the inner inquiry into well,
who is this person that is apparently having these experiences? Yeah, okay,
now we're getting into you know, deep dharma here. That
is what the spiritual path is about. There's a quote

(33:32):
from the Genjo co on Zen Master Dogan's famous piece,
I think perhaps I've talked with you about it somewhere
down the line, but he says, to carry the self
forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things
come forth and experience themselves is enlightenment. Okay, So the
only difference between what we call enlightenment and what we
call delusion is that in one there's a person having

(33:55):
an experience and in the other there's just experiences having themselves.
It's kind of an interesting, really way to look at it,
and it's very it's very stark. So it's been well
understood over the millennia that there is a path of
learning who we are, who we are, that we're not
just selves having experiences. And this is our default mode

(34:16):
is to think that we're selves having experiences. But when
we actually notice, well, oh boy, when I was like
right in the middle of that ecstatic experience where was
I there was no me there right when I'm in
the middle of you know, playing that athletic game or
having a peak experience in some way, we've all had
experiences deep flow states where it self disappears. So that
is touching into a higher consciousness which is present all

(34:40):
the time. It's always here. You know this, you know
you're a student of these things. So that's what spiritual
development is. It's learning to internalize and see and bring
to life this way of carrying yourself forward in the
world that isn't limited to your self identification.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
And so how how does that inform our professional world?
Let's start there excellently, Like, so you work with people
who are high performers who are coming to you for something. Generally,
what are they looking for that you are going to bring?

Speaker 1 (35:17):
Yeah, it usually manifests some sort of discordancy. Right, there's
a they lose a job where they're looking for more
impact in their job, or there's a disconnect you know,
in the environment that they're in, or there's a question,
right they want to perhaps explore a more entrepreneurial direction
than another direction. So what comes to us there is, well,

(35:40):
how do I make that decision? How do I proceed
forward in the midst of this, and the spiritual you know,
framework changes everything if you try to answer that question,
those questions, those deep questions about your life from an
understanding of yourself of well, this is what normal career

(36:00):
looks like, this is what success looks like, This is
what failure looks like. This is what a bad decision
looks like. This is what a good decision looks like. You're,
in a sense, you're kind of prescribed according to a
very conventional way of what all those things look like,
and you're not really necessarily getting in close contact with yourself,
which is really where your deepest meaning and purpose and

(36:23):
joy and happiness and flow are ultimately going to come
if you're going to base it on external standards, and
we've all internalized these external standards a lot. So I
help people to kind of reframe their professional challenges in
terms of what they're manifesting and what they want to manifest.
It makes all the difference. As they turn inward, they

(36:46):
can see that what they used to consider to be,
say a setback or a bad turn of events, actually
is a very beneficial turn of events. So I've worked
with people who, you know, out of work, got a
year severance from their high paying job, and now they're
getting close and the fear starts to come up. I
really need a job. And I start working with them,

(37:08):
and they start to enter into a place which is
much more excited, much more creative, much more options wide open,
to the point where two months in they're turning down
jobs that they tell me they would have taken before
they started working with me, because their orientation and they're
focused is now based on a deeper place within themselves.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
You know, when we were talking about spiritual I think
that sort of recognizing that you are more than a
limit itself. To me, it seems a little bit like
the deep end of the pool, right, and a way
in there, to me, is always about what you said.
It's about meaning, it's about connection. It's about recognizing who
am I, even on a relative level, right, not even

(38:09):
in an absolute sense, but a greater clarity of who
I am based in the circumstances of my life, you know,
and I think you know that idea of framing problems
as potential opportunities is a real big thing, right, Like
the transitions in my life have been hugely beneficial to me,

(38:30):
but I didn't see it at the time. Of course,
transitions are very difficult.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
You know.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
The story I tell most often here is, you know,
I had formed a solar energy company and poured five
years of my life into it, and it was like
my baby, my dream, you know, and I had to
shut it down and I was devastated. But out of
that came this podcast. And I am so much more
suited to do this than I was doing that, right,

(38:54):
and so at the time I had to have that
openness to what's next. And I think you do a
lot of work with people who are in transitions. Yeah,
And there's a Buddhist term for transition, which is called
the Bardo. And so you talk about the Bardo of
transition or the Bardo of work, and you talk about
some key things that can help us navigate these transitions

(39:18):
in a deeper way. Do you want to share what
some of those key ideas are.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, yeah, So a little background on that, because I
think it's a really rich sort of template. But the
Bardo comes from the Tibetan word for this interstitial zone
in between death and life. So person dies and then
they're in this in between zone and then they get reincarnated.
So that's the description of the Bardo, and certain things,
according to this Tibetan Buddhists belief, happen, you know, in

(39:44):
that zone. Okay, So you know, you don't have to
believe in all that, and frankly I don't necessarily believe
in all that either, But there is a landscape of
being in between one place and being another and moving
for it. There's a way which the self responds to
that dynamic, right to that landscape. If you will, I'll

(40:06):
boil the keys down a little bit. I have five
in my Barter of workbook, and I'll kind of boil
it down to three. The first phase is really dealing
with the previous place you were in, Okay. So the
primary emotion is going to be grief and potentially anger. Okay.
So there's loss, and then there could be anger based
on how that happened, or even that had happened at all, right,

(40:28):
because we don't like change. So you might not be
angry at anybody in particular, but you're just angry that
the universe threw this at you. Okay. So you have
to honor those emotions. You always have to embody and
feel emotions in order for them not to be trapped
in your body and then have those drive your behaviors
later on, which is, you know, frankly, what most of

(40:49):
us do with these things. So my first key is
to really recognize the anger, recognize the grief, and give
that proper you know, ritual, the proper time in order
to do that. Then we enter the next phase, which
is the really rich part of the bart. This is
the chaotic zone. This is the place where things are
happening left and right. We don't know which one is meaningful,

(41:10):
which one is going to lead somewhere, which one you're
even interested in? Right, all of these things coming up.
So once again there's an art and a skill which
can be supported from help from a guide to really
be in this place and to look at as a
time of opportunity, as a time of interest, is a
time of new things emerging, but without having that problem

(41:32):
fixing mind to clamp down on it, or that fear
mind that doesn't want this to continue, right, this mind
of uncertainty.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
I mean, I went through what looked to be a
big transition a while ago, and I had the grieving
part pretty well down. You know, that second part sort
of being in the in the change. I knew it
was going to lead to new things. I've just had it.
I've had it happen enough, I've got the experience, and
yet to your point, I just kept going. But I
don't know what it is, and you know, I want
to have something like what is it going to be?

(42:02):
I don't know yet, And that uncertainty is really a
challenging place to stay in.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
It's a really challenging place, and it's being more and
more recognized as the source of the greatest richness for
moving forward. There's just a piece in the New York
Times just like four or five days ago about the
Wisdom of uncertainty or something like that, and people are
doing these studies about how really working with uncertainty and

(42:27):
welcoming it in and learning how to work with it
what we and Zen call don't know mind, right, not
knowing mind produces positivity, positive outcomes, obviously, resilience, great flexibility,
and actually great happiness down the line. Yeah right, Yeah,
that's the secret Sauce here, is to be able to

(42:47):
learn to be with that uncertainty. It was an interesting
thing about that. Chaos too. Chaos is a natural, say,
rhythm of creation, you know, things are in a certain
state and then they get completely jumbled and chaotic. You
had I Guess recently on your podcast talking about order, disorder, reorder.
So it's that disorder phase. I mean that disorder phase

(43:07):
is an intrinsic part of the universe, of the way
nature unfolds and develops, right, and we're no different. So
to really embrace that uncertainty, that disorder with positivity and
good spirit, that's going to yield, you know, really good outcomes.
Our posture with respect to these states is everything, right,

(43:31):
we're talking about karma. So we can respond to the
grief and the anger in a way that we're trying
to fix it or push it away, and that's going
to perpetuate it. We can respond to this uncertainty and
the chaos in a way that tries to minimize it
or resist it, or push it or make it, make
it go away, and that's actually going to distort it.
All right, But when we embrace it, then it moves forward.

(43:52):
And what does it move forward towards? It moves forward
closer to the next incarnation. And now this is my
kind of third phase. As we get sort of something happening,
we just apply a kind of a discipline to our
life and we open our ears. We open our eyes,
we open our minds, and we start to pay attention
to serendipities and affinities and people that we meet, and
we start to get in touch with this magic of

(44:14):
the universe that is going to start to resonate with
what you really want to happen in your life, what
you really want to be. I know this sounds a
little bit like that law of attraction you mentioned earlier.
There are resonant frequencies that we put out, and there
are filters that we put on ourselves to keep us
from seeing opportunities. So this is just the way it works.

(44:38):
And to cultivate the mind that's really open to those things, magical,
mysterious things start to happen and connections start to unfold.
So then we move into that.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Yeah, And I think the thing that's worth saying through
all of that, and again having sort of been there
recently and been through it in the past, is even
those different things that you're talking about, embrace seeing the
grief and opening to it and letting the uncertainty be
The uncertainty doesn't mean that it's not still deeply uncomfortable.
Oh yeah, points all right, So some of this I

(45:10):
think is like you said, it's learning to just say, yeah,
this is really uncomfortable. Yeah, and it's okay, I don't
have to fix that.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And as you know from impermanence,
you know, everything changes. As my teacher used to joke, Okay,
so you're in a rough spot, Okay, one of two
things is going to happen. It's going to get better
or it's going to get worse.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Sounds like an exact sort of Zen teacher thing that
you get. You're like, why do I study Zen again?
Why did I sign up for this?

Speaker 1 (45:44):
And but but it's true, is it it? And things
always change? Is going to get better, it is going
to and then one of those things happens and then
guess what.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Yep, it's going to get better, it's.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
Going to get worse. But what do we do actually,
our resistance to that truth keeps it static. Yeah, right.
As you know, you know, if you do this in
meditation or if you've got some good emotional intelligence, you know,
if you kind of contract around a feeling, it perpetuates it. Yeah, right,
So you can't do that with the uncertainty. You can't

(46:14):
kind of resist it, you just have to feel. And
then I guess this is the way to put it.
Everything is bearable. There are very few things that are
not bearable, you know, in this amazing human capacity that
we have, there really is. And you know, you work
with the cravings of addicts. You know those can be
at the extreme of bearability. But moment by moment, everything

(46:37):
is bearable.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
Yeah, And I actually think that idea and that recognition
was a key to me out of addiction.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
Right, because addiction is sort of the end point, the
logical conclusion when you don't think you can bear much
of anything. Right, every situation needs to be altered. I
can't take it. I can't take it. I don't like it,
I don't want it to And it's this constant altering
of reality in ways that become extraordinarily destructive. And so

(47:07):
for me, a big part of it was realizing, like,
I can go through any emotion, no matter how unpleasant
it is, and I don't have to fix it. Doesn't
mean that I don't try to respond to it wisely,
doesn't mean that I don't seek help, but it means
that I don't have to directly alter it and in
my case via chemicals. That's when I felt like, oh,

(47:29):
I can do this. Is that idea that everything is bearable,
even though God knows there's lots of things we sure
wish we didn't have to bear, and the people around us,
we wish they didn't have to bear. But it is.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly, And that's all that meditation is
really too. It's just being fully, fully present with your body, mind, right,
just being there, and these amazing things result from that.
You know. It isn't oh I managed to gut that
out right, That's not what's happening right here. What's happening
is that you're actually opening up a capacity and a

(48:06):
new identification, a new empowerment around you know, where does
that even come from? Right? Your your ability to be
with those things, Where does this consciousness come from? It's
completely vast and unknowable, right right, So as you deepen
into your experience of that being this wow, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
While we're on work, let's hit a couple other things
related to work. We've done a couple episodes in the
past about burnout, and you say, burnout does not come
from busyness. It comes from being overly attached to outcomes.
Say more about what you understand burnout to be and
what causes it and how we can work with it skillfully.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Yeah, okay, And there's there's a few, you know, real
valuable understandings of burnout. And this is this is mine.
I'm in the faculty of a Cause to Pause contemplative
caregiving course that's done, you know, every year or twice
a year. We do it sometimes to help people who
are working with end of life care, you know, hospice volunteers,
and also people who have loss you know, coming in

(49:06):
their lives or present in their lives in terms of
elderly or ill family members. So burnout is really prevalent.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Right in in caregivers.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Right. So here we've got a kind of archetype you know,
of intensity with respect to burnout. Many of us feel it,
but this kind of really helps us look at it.
There is a way in which we want an outcome
from the work that we're doing. Obviously, we want people
to get better, We want people to feel better, right,
we probably don't want them to die, okay, but we're

(49:35):
not in control of that, Okay, But very naturally we
have an attachment to those things happening. Right, When our
energy is attached to the outcome, our emotions get very
much wrapped up in that and we really find ourselves
depleting our stores of emotional energy because of that attachment. Now,

(49:57):
when we're able to apply ourselves with full heart and
we know what we want, okay, but we have to
be clear about what we want too, Because we may
want the person with the terminal illness to get better,
it's not going to happen. We want the person to
not die, that's not going to happen. Right, These things
are happening, So we have to be very clear that

(50:20):
we're not attached to an unreal outcome, But we have
to be clear that we would like a certain outcome. Okay.
Now that's easy when you're in the caregiving profession, right,
But it might not be as clear actually in another
professional setting. Right. So we actually should be clear about, well,
what is our desired outcome from what I'm doing here?

(50:41):
Am I doing this to check off a box for
my boss? Am I doing this to help the group work? Okay?
What am I really doing this for?

Speaker 3 (50:50):
It?

Speaker 1 (50:50):
It very much helped to really clarify what you would
like the outcome of something to be in a very
kind of somewhat pedestrian example. You know, sometimes I say, well,
the purpose of this meeting is to have a meeting, okay,
And that sounds ridiculous to a certain extent, but it isn't.
It's like, well, this team actually needs to come together
once a week or once a month and actually see

(51:12):
each other and talk to each other. Okay. Now that
kind of goes against you know, certain kinds of efficiency.
You know, recommendations is like everything should have this kind
of agenda, and it's like and that's mostly true, but
you can also have these subtle, you know, perhaps other
softer intentions for something that are very important I have

(51:33):
to happen. So if you're clear about those things, then
you've got a sense of what the outcome you want
to be. So you want to be really clear about
your outcomes. But then the key is not to be
attached to it happening or not, cause sometimes it's going
to work out, and sometimes it isn't. And if it
doesn't or it doesn't work out exactly the way you want,
and we want things to work out exactly the way

(51:55):
we want again, so much emotional energy is going to
go into managing your reaction to that that's no longer available.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
And that falls into the category of things that are
extraordinarily easy to say and extraordinarily difficult to do, which
is to say, I care about the outcome, but I'm
not attached to it. That's a nuance that people have
to learn, you know. And that's why programs like the
one you're talking about are so helpful, is because that's

(52:24):
a balance that can be really, really, really tricky. But
I know from my caregiving experience is that what you're
saying is really true. When I think I should be
able to fix it, I burn out. I get frustrated,
I get frustrated with the person, I get frustrated with myself,
I get all that. When I'm better able to say, well,
I'm going to show up here and be the best
version of myself in this situation and do what I can.

(52:46):
Knowing that, as we said, a lot of this is
out of control, it makes care giving easier. I still
think taking care of a parent who has dementia, there's
no way that that becomes an easy thing. So I'm
not trying to ever say that, but boy, there is
a way of orienting towards it. And You've said this
a couple times that our orientation to our intention around

(53:07):
can make a really big difference. And you know, I've
just seen this over the last seven or eight years,
as Ginny and I've gone through a lot of caregiving.
I have to kind of let go of thinking things
will be better. And in some ways I found terminal
illness something like dementia to be a helpful thing because,
like I looked at her level of cognition and I went,

(53:29):
it's never going to be better than it is today.
I know where it's going. I don't know the pace
it's going. But there was a certain freedom in that,
Whereas my mother has been dealing with chronic pain and
so you keep trying to fix it, and that's been
harder for me because you think there is a way
perhaps to fix it. I just noticed that distinction when

(53:50):
I know I can't fix it. It's sort of like
that old, you know, serenity prayer idea, you know what
can you change? What can you accept? Some things are
really easy to see they fall into one of those
two camps. A lot of things don't, and that is
what makes that ambiguity of them so challenging.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
It is very challenging. You put it very well, and
you mentioned the word control, right, the word control, and
then the fix it mentality, and that's what is often
cultivated in professional settings. You know, it's like, here are
the things that you're in control of. These are your KPIs,
here's your problems that you have to fix, and our
minds go there. It's like we think we have more
control that than we do. We tend to create problems

(54:28):
where they don't exist, and we think we can fix
problems that we can't fix. Okay, So those three related
kind of delusions, you could say, really are at the
heart of this orientation, right that you're talking about. Yeah,
so to really recognize we have so little control, we
have so little control. And I've been working with one

(54:48):
you know fellow who's above a large digital organization, and
this shift from control to influence has just completely changed,
you know, his working style. He's less burned out, he's
less stressed. Right to go from, well, you're not in
control of these things. You're not in control of how
these people are going to respond to what you do.
But you have an immense influence, yes, you know, with

(55:10):
the way you speak and the way you look and
the look on your face and all of these, you know,
subtle things, you have influence, and over the course of
a few weeks, you know, he was able to have
this big aha moment of the influence he had versus
the control, and he has much less burnout and much
more joy, happiness, and lightness in his work.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
Yeah, you're right in the professional sense. That's really where
it gets so tricky, because we are given goals, we
are measured on an outcome, so of course we're attached
to it and to your point, recognizing the extent to
which we can't control, but we can influence. And I've
always thought that's a useful word because we'll say to
someone like, you have no control over what someone else does.

(55:50):
That is true, but you do have influence. That's right, right,
that's right. You know, I don't have ultimate control of
what my son chooses to do, but I do have influence. Right.
It's an ambiguous state. There's a great book by Andrew
Solomon called Far from the Tree about neurodiverse people, and
he talks in there about for some people, if you
have like a degenitive eye disease, that's going to cause

(56:12):
you to be blind and there's no known cure. You
just can accept being blind. Right. I'm not saying it's easy,
but you know where your work is, and if it's
something you know, you know you can fix, it's easy
to direct all your energy there. But when it's ambiguous,
that's where I think life gets so challenging. I've talked
to a lot of people over the years who go,

(56:33):
I don't know if I'm in the right place my job,
and they alternate between I should accept the way this
is and make it better, like this is good enough,
I can make it better, and then they on the
other side flip over to this is the wrong place.
I got to get out of here, and they stay
moving between those two poles forever.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
That's right, So.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
What's a way if you're sort of there? What are
some questions that might help you start to think your way?
I guess maybe thinking your way out of it isn't
the answer. But where would you start? What sort of
questions would you start asking? Somebody who described that very
common dilemma.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Yeah, it is a common dilemma. And I have several
people I'm working with right now, right there who's right there.
So it's a discernment process. You know. That's what I say,
if you set yourself up with a framework for discerning
what's happening, because people can go years bopping back and
forth the way you just said, so all that is,
they're great questions, right, it's a great consideration. In some ways,

(57:26):
it's like it's already the second step. You've actually recognized
that you have a co on in our zen language. Yeah,
there's a co on in my life because this job
isn't working and I think I want something else, but
I'm not sure. It's beautiful that you're brought to this place.
That's a great place to be now. But now you
have to take the next step, which is to really

(57:47):
this is to answer your question. In more specificity, I
coach people to really embody and feel into with discernment
both paths. Okay, this is how I've done co on
work with you. This is how we work with coons
is we actually allow our intuitive intelligence to arise from
our body around prospective paths or perspective answers or perspective

(58:10):
resolutions to life path questions. So really specifically, I would say, okay, well,
envision what is the situation in your current job that
brings you more joy. Okay, can you envision something again,
if this is not an intellectual exercise, can you envision
something that actually brings you joy? If the situation was
set up in a certain way, and usually there's there's

(58:31):
something there. It's like, yeah, if I had more authority,
or if I got a promotion, or if I were
working with this team, you know, something very specific can
come in. It might take a day, it might take
a week, but something specific may come in. If nothing
comes in, well there's some great information, right, Okay, So
then you go, well, why are you doing this? And
then it's oh, well I'm doing it for the money.
Oh okay, all right, well that's not good enough. We

(58:52):
want you to get to a place that's really serving
your soul and your deepest intention. Then I do the
same thing with the other side of things, right, what
might be these other paths that light you up that
you might want to do? Okay, everybody has their own karma,
everybody has their own interests. You know, we go deep
into whatever that person might be interested in, and this

(59:12):
is where those kind of magical serendipities and affinities kind
of come in. So I'll have people keep a journal
over on that side of things, and what are the
things that you know, A magazine they read, a person
they met at a networking event, a business idea they
had that came across a LinkedIn job description that they saw.
It was like, WHOA, I didn't think I'd be interested
in that, but there's something about that, right that intrigues me.

(59:35):
Throw those things down into the journal. Okay, just get
it out, take a step, take another step towards these
serendipitous affinities I call them, and explore those. That's the
way out of that paralysis of back and forth is
you just make movement down those paths and then something
happened sooner or later.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
Yeah, movement is always a generally good idea, you know,
because it's that staces where where we just think about it, Yeah,
over and over, right, And to your point, I think
it's that being willing to take that energy that you're
ruminating and think in different ways. And that's often what
like a coach or somebody can work with, you know,

(01:00:16):
because I think that discernment does not happen alone. I mean,
there are elements of discernment that only happen alone. But
for me, true good discernment always involves other people, absolutely right,
It's essential for me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Yeah, It's like, I mean, you need a mirror to
see your face, right, So the coach or the mentor
spiritual teacher is a mirror to you to help you
see yourself. That's that's all. It's one of the ways, yeah,
in which they were.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
Well, I think we are suddenly and quickly at the
end of our time. You and I are going to
continue a little bit longer in a post show conversation
where we're going to explore some of these issues a
little bit more listeners, If you'd like access to the
post show conversation, ad free episodes, a special episode I
do called Teaching Song and a poem, you can go
to one feed dot net slash join and we'd love

(01:01:03):
to have you as part of the community. And we
will have links in the show notes Paul to where
people can find the Eon Zen Sanga, which is a
great zen soga and has options for people who want
to participate remotely, which is what I did for quite
some time. We'll also have links to your zenit work
and people can book introductory free sessions with you to

(01:01:23):
see if you might be a good fit for them
and we'll have links to all that stuff, and so
thank you so much for coming on. I'm so glad
we got to actually have one of the conversations you
and I often have outside of this forum in this forum.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Thanks a lot, Eric, I've really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
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