All of these are action steps.  By definition, action steps take you away from where you are.  Nothing wrong with this, except when the answer to a particular situation lies right where you are here and now.  Which is usually the case.

An effective alternative to  “movement” coaching is based on the TIbetan meditation “Stay”.

It takes courage and stamina to stay where you are when every nerve and instinct is telling you to move, change something, look outside yourself for an answer or in some way move away from discomfort.

Only by being with the dis-ease and  only by allowing it to stay around long enough can you watch it fall away.  When you have the experience of seeing that the discomfort is transient and not a permanent state; when you realize that it will subside by and of itself if you don’t distract yourself from it  – it loses its power over you.

Sometimes the appropriate action to take is that of no-action. Sometimes the thing to do is nothing.

As Pema Chodron says “This perfect moment is the best teacher.  And lucky for you it’s right here with you all the time.”

So how can you be coached to do nothing?  Simple. Think of a metaphor of repetition.  Whatever works for you.

Buddhists use the metaphor of dragging an ox along a path.  The ox doesn’t want to go to market or to work.  He wants to meander off into the sweet grasses and weeds at the side of the path.  His owner keeps pulling him back onto the path over and over and over again.

It’s debatable whether the ox learns to stay on the path or whether he just tires himself out. or gives up.

It doesn’t matter.  What is true is that the paradox of “Staying” can move you forward, doing nothing can produce  possibility.

This is not suffering. This is just pain. Suffering has a dimension beyond pain.

We label things as problems and react. When we identify problems in our lives and react to them, we generally create suffering.

The cause of this suffering is that we insist on forming permanent attachments to things which are not, by nature, permanent.

To understand this better, try to come up with one thing you have today that you can be absolutely sure you will have tomorrow.

Not your job. You could be fired or your company could lay you off.

Not your health. You could find out tomorrow you have cancer.

Not your family. Your spouse could divorce you; your kids could move away.

Not your house. It could be lost to fire, flood or weather.

Yet, these may be the most important things in your life today.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t cherish and appreciate the people and things that are precious to you? Far from it. We all gravitate towards pleasure and comfort and we all want nice things. Part of the intrinsic nature of being human is that we want good things to last and bad things to go away.

So, to acknowledge that all things fade and pass away in time doesn’t mean that you’ll never have great pleasure in life and that you’re doomed to be unhappy. But the inescapable fact is that everything, the good and the bad, goes away over time.

Nothing is permanent and everything is transitory. No feeling is ever final. It’s just that we don’t act as if this is the case. We live as if certain things are promised or owed to us. Then we’re surprised and hurt when life does what it does and these things are taken from us. We end up with something other than what we think we signed up for.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to drop the attachments to what we already have and what we want and to accept our lack of control over the realities of life.

This is one of the more helpful little nuggets of advice a businessperson can take away from Buddhism. It seems counterintuitive, but in fact it’s perfectly logical when you think about it.

When I suggested to a CEO recently that his employees would be better served if they lost attachment to the outcome of their work he had a typical reaction.

Was I nuts? Where would their motivation come from? How could he suggest that they not work towards goals? Was I seriously suggesting that they should just stop trying?

But of course I wasn’t suggesting that they not try an do their absolute best to achieve a desired outcome.. They should know what they want and work as hard as they possibly could to get it with the knowledge that they didn’t have control over the outcome. So if things didn’t turn out they way they expecte they’d at least have the satisfaction of a job well done.

The idea of lack of control was another stumbling block for our CEO.

Wasn’t it true, I asked him, that he didn’t really have control over the outcomes of any of his projects anyway? He denied this. But he was open-minded and willing to go a little further down this road. And I had had too long a run as a business person myself not to know that deals sometimes go sour for the flimsiest of reasons.

“Haven’t you ever had a deal just crash and burn”, I asked?

“Sure” , he said.

“Why did you do that”, I asked?

“I had nothing to do with it,” he responded” the other guy got bought out by”… then he stopped and caught himself with a smile.

Okay, so there was one time he hadn’t had control over the outcome. And if he could find one example – then there were more.

In fact, unless you have 100% control over every detail which may affect your project including the weather, the economy, the exchange rate, not to mention the health, life and death of all participants – the outcome is never secure.

Our CEO then volunteered that his staff had been devastated when several months of hard work had gone down the tubes. I could sympathize. It’s hard to come back from a blow like that. It’s tough to have to walk into the office the next day and start all over.

“But what if”, I suggested, “your staff had still worked themselves to the bone and done all they possibly could to achieve their desired outcome with the knowledge that it may or may not happen?

What if they would have gotten intrinsic satisfaction from a job well done as they went along? What if they would have celebrated the quality of their work, the camaraderie, the small triumphs of teamwork and ingenuity along the way?”

He thought about this and nodded slowly.

“Sure, he said “if the outcome would have been successful that would have been gravy. But all they were focusing on was outcome, outcome, outcome – not the process of doing.

So when the outcome was whipped away from them they had nothing to take away from the experience but heartache”.

Loosening our death grip on “the way things should be.” is not surrendering to fatalism. Acknowledging that what we desperately want to have happen may not happen is not giving up.

We influence the future day by day, minute by minute by our present actions. We take productive action to move towards our purpose knowing that there’s no guarantee we will get there.

We do the very best we can. It’s all we can ask of ourselves and others.

1. It’s way bigger than a breadbox and it’s in your visual field not between your ears.
2. It presents no problems only opportunities for action.
3. It has what you need when you need it.
4. It doesn’t require anything of you except your presence.
5. You can’t lose it.
6. You can’t fight it.
7. Everybody’s got one.
8. It’s never right or wrong.
9. It supports you whether you like it or not.




10. It’s right there under your nose!

It’s not a call to lemming-like suicide as you might think. Perhaps another C.L. maxim of a similar nature would shed some light. “Give and give until you say goodbye.” Or – as a man named Ecclesiastes once put it “To everything there is a season. And a time to every purpose under Heaven.” Meaning there is a time to run and a time to stop. When it’s appropriate to run you run flat out. When it’s appropriate to stop you stop.

I thought of this today as I was watching a Sunday morning political news show. By the time you read this ,we will either have a new President or a lot of fat cat lawyers will be very busy. I have strong opinions about whom I would like to be our next President. Whatever happens, however, I have let go of the outcome.
Letting go of an outcome is a tough concept for some people. They see it as not having faith in yourself; giving up; being negative. To admit that you may not get what you want may appear to be defeatist. In fact – nonattachment to the outcome of your actions is a strong peaceful position to take in the world. It all comes down to what is controllable and what is not.

My personal commitment to having my guy be the next President is within my control as are my actions which spring from that commitment. I can give money, time and effort. I can attempt to sway undecided voters and I can man the phones to get the vote out on November 4th. But the actual final national outcome of the election is not within my control.

So I give and give until it’s not appropriate to give anymore. I run until it would be unwise to continue running.

I see what Reality presents to me and I respond to it.

This is a dangerous myth because people expect meditation to be like slipping into a hot tub. When they experience discomfort they think it’s not working or they’re not doing it right and they give up. In fact, it’s often not relaxing, at least not initially. In the beginning meditation is like exercise; if it doesn’t hurt you’re not doing it right. This puts off a lot of people right from the start.

They’ve taken the odd Yoga class where you lie on the floor, close your eyes and let your poor body rest. Everybody loves this. You’ve been moving for an hour, your limbs are stretched every which way and you relish the opportunity to let gravity take your muscles and let them drop.

Conventional sitting meditation may become like this over time but it probably won’t be right off the bat. When you sit down and face a wall or close your eyes and there’s nothing between you and the timer but your incessantly jabbering monkey mind it’s anything but relaxing. Horrifying and sobering are two more appropriate words that come to mind. Relaxing it ain’t.

2. You need time to meditate.

You don’t need time to set aside time to meditate. You can meditate for 5 minutes, 2 minutes, in your car, walking or chopping onions. It isn’t a specialized activity which you have to do in a room with specialized equipment. Cut out 15 minutes of TV time and there’s your meditation block.

3. Bad stuff comes up.

Actually this isn’t a myth. Bad feelings or experiences may surface when you sit quietly and meditate. But, as my mother always used to say, better an empty house than a bad tenant. The bad stuff doesn’t materialize because your mind is quiet. It’s there when your mind is busy, too. You just can’t hear it. So – hear it. Listen to it. Acknowledge it and let it go.

4. It’ll slow me down. I need my edge.

Meditation actually hones your edge. If your boss is hyper, your workday is manic and your default mode is just south of Chaos you need to give your autonomic nervous system a rest every once in a while. Meditation will help with this. When you return to work mode you’ll still ramp up to speed pretty quickly but chances are you’ll be a little more focused and centered.

5. Meditation is Boring

What’s boring is back to back re-runs of “Cops” every night. Why? Because they have nothing whatsoever to do with your life. They’re pure escapism. Anything that comes up in, or because of, meditation is about you. Which means it’ll be helpful, interesting and instructive. How better to spend your time than to learn something about yourself and immediately put it to use in your life?

One Myth that is true about meditation is that it’s habit-forming. Once you let it into your life you’ll have a hard time doing without it.

The dog’s head hung over one arm. There was a towel, in case of spills, underneath him.

“Bringing your baby to the beach?” I asked sympathetically.

“It’s his last day,” the man replied.

His name was Chico. The dog, not the guy. He was 17 years old. Coming down to the doggie beach, the scene of many past triumphs, no doubt, for the last time.

So, what do you say? Nothing. But I did anyway. Is he in pain? (No). When are you taking him in. (Tonight). You’re doing the right thing (Like I would know).

I stroked the dog’s leg and he raised up his head and looked at me. There was nobody home. My own little dog stood up on his hind legs anxiously sniffing Chico.

The guy said.

“I had a couple of good sessions with an animal communicator. She told me he was ready but was just waiting for me to accept it”.

Very smart woman, I thought. Whether or not she could talk to animals she could sure read people.

“It’ll be my turn some day,” I said.

He staggered, then, down to the ocean’s edge. I sat in my car and watched him. Thinking how his muscles would hurt the next day after the weight of his sweet burden. How his arms would ache. I watched him lay his old boy down in the sand.

Now would be a good time to say that every fiber of my being wanted to go to him. But this had nothing to do with being. Or fibers.

Once, at my Zen Center, my teacher had said that a true Bodhisattva never hesitates. He sees and acts – always with the appropriate response.

But L.A. is nothing but confluence. There are no discrete things. People, media, events, sometimes anger, weather (or lack thereof) and always cars, cars, cars running together – streaming – into a river of distraction that somehow makes up your day. Like it or not, it’s hard to act.

I didn’t have a story line going through my head about what I would say if I did walk over to the man or what he would say or whether he would even want me there.

I just had a clear picture of me being down there sitting with him at the water’s edge listening to the old dog’s labored breathing against the rustle of the surf.

An hour later I’m on the freeway snaking out over the docks. Would somebody please explain to me how all of the Mad Max container trucks know to hit the road at the same time? My little Toyota was boxed in. Like walking down 5^th Avenue and you can’t see the sky but you know it has to be there. There’s no oxygen. I can only cling to the belief that I will get off and ride on surface streets one day.

Behind me a black car is about 2 feet, I’m not exaggerating – 2 feet, behind my bumper. I’m in the fast lane and already over the speed limit. But apparently it’s not enough. She swerves to my right but finds no opening. She slams back behind me and rides me. I take my eyes off the rear view mirror. But there’s no escape. Her hatred is coming up through my tailpipe, into the steering wheel and straight through my hands where it makes a beeline for my gut.

I turn up my cd player to distract myself. I’ve taken to listening to what could very loosely be called self development cd’s in my car. Although, frankly, anything which develops the self seems to be kind of superfluous these days. But now I’m into Eckhart Tolle.

He’s talking about the difference between object consciousness and space consciousness. How we give such power to things. We have to have this. We need it now. We convince ourselves that we need to ask this question now! This is so important! We make things so immediate and it’s always about us. He’s a good speaker and he laughs often. It is, after all, a subject rich with humor.

The rest of my day was productive. I got a lot of things done. All of it mattering somewhat in the scheme of things.

Periodically, I thought of the guy on the beach. When I ate my lunch it was Chico’s last meal. Heading back to the Coast in the last afternoon; his last sunset.

So many last things for Chico.

I thought how the guy had come down to the beach by himself.

Maybe if I had parked my car and walked up to him he would have told me he wanted to be alone. Or maybe he would have been grateful for some silent companionship.

I didn’t develop a story line in my head. When night fell I let him and Chico slip away. It was, after all, only, a missed opportunity.

It’s a tough sell to try to convince a businessperson that he or she might be better off knowing less; an even tougher task to get them to try knowing nothing for an hour or two.

After all they got where they are by acquiring knowledge – knowledge of their industry, the politics, the corporate structure, who to listen to and who to mistrust. Without their knowledge they’re vulnerable. They’re on a foggy moor without any discernible landmarks or up a creek without a paddle – drifting wherever the current takes them.

And that’s kind of the point.

A Buddhist koan reminds us that “not knowing is most intimate.”

What does this mean?

Let’s say you’re on a plane and suddenly the lights go out and the cabin fills with smoke. You realize you don’t know where the exit is. Suddenly, someone grabs your elbow and says “Quick, I know where the emergency exit is.” You’d be an idiot to shrug him off and tell him that you prefer not to know, thank you very much. You’ll just find your own way out. That kind of knowing is useful and practical.

But let’s flash back to when you got on the plane. If you’re nervous about flying you may have sized up the people around you. Maybe you dismissed the skinny kid with the headphones on as being useless in an emergency; you discounted the older guy already asleep with his mouth open. On the other hand, you got a good feeling about the guy in the suit with the briefcase. You formed opinions about all three based on your belief systems. Are you sure, now, that you know which one just grabbed your arm and offered to save your life? It’s this kind of “knowing”, the kind that formed those belief systems and that you mistakenly rely on as Reality, that we’re talking about.

The kind of knowing that his koan refers to is not the kind of knowing where you acquire a learned skill. No-one would suggest that not knowing how to drive a car is a good thing if you’re planning on getting behind the wheel and jumping on the freeway.

On the other hand, if, after passing your driver’s test, you decide that you really know how to drive better than most, that opens the door to judgment and comparison with others. Judgment and comparison are the opposite of intimacy. They also remove you from Reality, so that you’re acting on what’s in your head at any given time, rather than what you see in front of you.

The word “decision” comes from the Latin. It means to cut off at the root. That’s also what we do when we form opinions. We cut off all other options. Our experience and opinions and expectations grow, calcify is actually a better word, into belief systems.

Sometimes this can come in very handy. When we create a belief system we’re actually writing shorthand for our brain. We simply don’t have time to size up every situation and formulate an action plan on the spot so we carry belief systems with us for handy reference so that we can use them as a basis for action.

But belief systems can also be dangerous because they can close us off to possibility and serendipity. We’re not just writing shorthand, we’re also writing code for our computer of a brain. Like a computer, our brain will continue to use the same code over and over, without reference to what else is going on in the world, until we re-write it.

When you believe you know something, you point yourself in a particular direction. If you’re facing in that direction you can’t see behind you and you can’t see to either side of you – unless you turn to take in another perspective. Your reality therefore becomes what’s in front of you.

Why narrow your field of vision?

When you believe you “know” you also miss the present. Knowing is a static state. It’s rooted in the past and is closed – not open. Not knowing is a state of openness. You look around and take in all information without pre- judgment or labeling. You still process it into a plan of action. But you realize that maybe on another day with different circumstances your actions may have been different.

If you’re the expert and you have information and experience to share then, ok, be the expert. But also be aware how that status affects you and others. There is a subject/object relationship between you and the non-expert. There is a distance and a delineation of roles.

Knowing is exclusive. Not knowing is inclusive.

So how could you re-write your code of knowing?

How many times have you gone into a meeting with a preconception of who’s going to contribute fresh ideas and who’s going to sit and nod quietly? What if your expectations were a self-fulfilling prophesy? What if the quiet guy had great ideas but was afraid to speak out? No-one ever gave him an opening to speak because everybody “knew” he was a dud. What if you left your expectations at the door and went into the meeting inviting input from all? You would bring possibility into the room with you; a fine thing to have on hand at any business meeting.

What if you didn’t know the answer to a question; the solution to a problem; the right way to do things? Wouldn’t that invite collaboration and creativity? Wouldn’t it leave room for the unexpected to make an appearance?

What if you took an hour or two out of your day and didn’t know? How about if you dropped your thoughts, biases and agendas and just looked and listened? But don’t think about what you’re seeing and hearing; just see and hear. You might be surprised at what you notice.

See without thinking.

Look without judging.

Know without knowing.

Not knowing is most intimate.

You can set a meditation block of any length, choose beginning and ending options of a singing bowl or traditional Zen wooden clappers, and the site even has a feature whereby you can save your preferences.

Beats a kitchen timer. 

There is a practice in Zen Buddhism known as zazen. It’s commonly misconstrued as a meditation but in fact it isn’t. True, if you came upon someone practicing zazen you’d either think they were meditating or they had a fondness for non-prescription medication.

Whereas meditation is about achieving some kind of a relaxed state and withdrawing temporarily from the world – zazen is about staying in the world. Zazen practitioners face a wall, keep their eyes open and basically just sit still and perfectly attentive for periods of time.

The trick is to stay in the world but not of the world. Hence the open eyes. An attempt is made to still the chattering ego mind – that internal, infernal conversation which goes on inside your head all day, every day!

A famous zen teacher, Taezan Maezumi said that when sitting zazen we should “let the myriad of things settle.” How often have you wanted to do that? And what constitutes your particular myriad of things – work; laundry; kid’s soccer games; your “relationship” ;bills; mortgage re-fi’s; PTA meetings; dentists visits; oil changes etc. etc. Sometimes there seems to be no end to the “stuff” we all have to deal with on a daily basis.

If you work in a corporate environment where you are continually interacting with others you also have your myriad of office things – politics; project deadlines; sales and/or strategy meetings; pay raises; performance evaluations; mergers; diversity trainings etc. There’s always a demand on your time, energy and patience.

When you practice zazen you let your original, or unconscious, mind out for a breath of fresh air. So often it’s suffocated by the sheer weight of demands our busy minds place on it. So, when you sit quietly by yourself and allow your mind to be clear and open you are whole and unconditioned. Gradually, your breath slow,; your eyelids soften, your jaw releases it’s tension ). Bet you didn’t know that your jaw was tight much of the time, did you?

Your thoughts still pop in from time to time. But you watch them come and go like clouds scudding across a clear blue sky.

Someone once said to me – anyone can knock on your door anytime but you don’t have to always invite them in for coffee. Try to think of your urgent, insistent thoughts as pesky visitors knocking on your door at the most inopportune time – like just when you’d like a little time to yourself.

When you let your thoughts settle and you clear your mind during the heat of a workday it’s like taking a siesta, going for a cool walk around the block and connecting with life outside of your workplace or having a neck massage.

It takes you out of the place where you normally live all day every day – between your ears – and connects you to things bigger and infinitely less comprehensible than your everyday problems.

Consider letting the myriad of things settle for even a few minutes today.

Let your conditioned mind drift like a blossom drifting gently from a tree in Spring. You can always pick it up later. But right now you’re just going to watch it fall.