The One You FeedHow 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
To learn more, click here!
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.
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 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 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 Mindfulness program at Red Mountain, Colorado, Residential Treatment Center for teens.
Hi Paul, Welcome to the show.
Thanks Eric, it's good to be here with you.
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.
I'm happy to be here too, chatting in this way.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
Today's skillful and unskillful.
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 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 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 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, and acting, we are watering certain seeds, certain tendencies or not.
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 to quality or personality or traits, we're reinforcing a sense of stuckness.
Right.
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.
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.
Wins, yes, right, yes, and neither of.
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. 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 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 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.
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 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 reaches back to the beginning of time in some ways, right, which I find a fascinating thing to contemplate.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
Right.
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 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.
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 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, 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. And so how do you think of volition in that way?
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 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 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.
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.
You know.
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.
It's daunting, isn't right. Yeah, it's intimidating.
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.
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 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. 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 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 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, 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.
Right.
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 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 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 are extraordinarily limited, but within the ones he had, he took responsibility for them.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, yeah, it's a great image, and then life becomes very difficult and challenging and fearful.
Yeah.
Right, But the more expensive your view is, then it actually it's more easeful and you really understand to negotiate your life.
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.
It includes more.
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?
Right?
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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, Say more about what that means? What do you mean by they're provisional.
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, 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 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 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.
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.
Yeah. You know.
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, 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. 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.
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 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.
Yeah.
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 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 better that whole situation. That's compassionate action, and it comes from a clear seeing of what's going on.
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 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.
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 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 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, 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. I guess I would say it's usually overlooked, you know, the fact that they're all intimately related.
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 who don't like that term might resonate with, might have some value to them.
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.
Yeah, yeahh yeah, yeah.
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.
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.
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 is all about, or.
A broader view, you know, seeing our place in things. Yes, more accurately, it would be another sort of rephrasing of that.
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 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 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 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 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.
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?
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, 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 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 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 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, 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.
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 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, but I didn't see it at the time. Of course, transitions are very difficult.
You know.
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, 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 in a deeper way. Do you want to share what some of those key ideas are.
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 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 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, 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 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, 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 fixing mind to clamp down on it, or that fear mind that doesn't want this to continue, right, this mind of uncertainty.
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? I don't know yet, And that uncertainty is really a challenging place to stay in.
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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Yep, it's going to get better, it's.
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 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 is bearable.
Yeah, And I actually think that idea and that recognition was a key to me out of addiction.
Yeah.
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 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, 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.
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 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.
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.
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 their lives or present in their lives in terms of elderly or ill family members. So burnout is really prevalent.
Right in in caregivers.
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 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, 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 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? 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?
It?
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 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 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 we want again, so much emotional energy is going to go into managing your reaction to that that's no longer available.
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 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. 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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. 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 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, 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.
That's right, So.
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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
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, 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.
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.
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 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 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.
Thanks a lot, Eric, I've really enjoyed it.
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed pods. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneufeed dot net slash Join The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.
