One of the best ways to set ourselves to success in any endeavour in life, is prepare ourselves the best for a potential failure. While it is true, with respect to skills, strengths and ability, it is better to strengthen our strengths than bridge the endless gap of lack of it. That does not work in the area of mindset and attitude.

How much ever we reframe ourselves with positive thinking and paper over those fears with hope, fear of failure, performance anxiety lies in some distant corner of our mind, like that potassium permanganate capsule. And the moment it gets burst in a beaker of water, it colours the water in no time. The same with that capsule of fear of failure / performance anxiety in the darkest recesses of our mind.

And only way we can purge it out of our system is, putting the 1000 lumens headlight of awareness right into it. All human transformations begin with awareness. In management parlance, there is a cycle of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Unless we bring out what is there in our unconscious mind to the effervescent light of awareness, we will never be able to transform it.

This is where the ancient practices come alive. The way to do it is those Stoic exercises on death or Jesuit memento mori. While I learnt the Stoic exercise from the annual Stoic Week organised by University of Exeter, Fr. AMA taught me about the Jesuit practice of memento mori. Once we visualise what is the worst that can happen in our endeavour and then survive those torrid feelings in our body, it dissolves itself. The nervous system learns it has already “died” and returned. The capsule loses its potency. This is not just a mental reframing but a physiological release — the body itself learns freedom.

Athletes too have discovered this gate. Sports psychologists train competitors to rehearse failure — missed shots, falls, defeats — so that when the real contest arrives, the body does not recoil. The fear has already been faced. And Phil Jackson, the “Zen Master” of the Chicago Bulls, brought this wisdom to Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates. He taught them meditation, breath awareness, and detachment from outcomes. In his method, the game was not just about winning but about presence. By rehearsing loss, by facing impermanence, the Bulls dissolved their fear and played with freedom.

I have been a student of spirituality and meditation for some 30+ years. And I did read quite a bit (in fact late Dr. Satish Inamdar, KFI Trustee and Director of The Valley School had said to me once, I will find my “way” when I stopped reading!) and did my quota of channel surfing and spiritual shopping in my life. And the search kind of ended while watching an NBA basketball match on TV in West Haven. Seeds of Zen were planted in my mind in the most unlikely of places. West Haven.

During June 1998. That was my first visit to the land of Baseball and Basketball. Both Greek and Latin games for me as a spectator. In the NBA final, Chicago Bulls were playing against Utah Jazz. What got my eye and attention was Chicago Bulls Coach Phil Jackson. There was an article in NYTimes that he used to make players like Dennis Rodman, who was an out and out rebellious, rule-breaking toughie, and Scottie Pippen and the larger-than-life Michael Jordan, all managed by the Zen Coach, Phil Jackson. I would have read and reread his book Sacred Hoops more than once. He was deeply spiritual with Native Indian and Zen philosophy. In fact, Jackson spent a large part of his life studying Buddhism and its principles, from his mentor Shunryu Suzuki. Jackson wrote, “What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn’t involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I’d tried. Zen is pragmatic, down-to-earth, and open to exploration. It doesn’t require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith.”

Fourteen years later, in 2012, after my own experiments with truth and lies of spirituality, I did a hard landing into Bodhi Zendo and Zen, and real spiritual seeking started.

AMA Samy and Bodhi Zendo were different. I would compare Bodhi Zendo a bit with Esalen of Big Sur, CA. One of the most beautiful places of learning I had visited. It was not as regimented as a Vipassana session. It did allow a good amount of personal space to oneself. Sometimes a good conversation, a good joke and laughter at the dining table along with some yummy food, is as good as anything else in this world towards one’s spiritual seeking.

Secondly, AMA Samy had one of the best collections of books on spirituality, philosophy, theology and psychology I have seen in my life. (AMA seems to have read most of them.) When I was a full-time student of MA Education at APU Bangalore, I had to write a term paper on Phenomenology of Krishnamurti’s teachings as an assignment for Dr. Kaustav Roy. I was searching for a book of Heidegger at the Zendo library one December afternoon. AMA walked in to keep some book and he asked me what I was reading. When I explained to him my struggle with that phenomenology paper, he spent 15–20 minutes to sum it up for me like a précis. I ran back to my room, and jotted down in my notebook whatever I could remember. That assignment is one of the few for which I got an O grade. And getting it from Dr. Kaustav Roy was almost like a Fields Medal. 🙂

Thirdly and most importantly, no one demanded that the camel got to pass through the eye of needle test of Faith first and salvation later. The Kalama Sutta poster on the wall said it so succinctly: “Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts.” And AMA Samy did practice it to every dot in the i and j and crosses in the t. Though he had a tough and rough demeanour as a Zen master, there was an endearing quality of integrity and compassion about the man. He took his spirituality and teaching seriously, not himself. That was absolutely refreshing to my tired seeking mind.

Even then, it took me 3 years to seek to be accepted as AMA’s Zen student. As the saying goes, once bitten twice shy and the cat which falls into a hot water tub will stay even from a cold water one. Heidi, a co-student of AMA in Japan with Yamada Roshi and later AMA’s student, spoke to me and asked me to join Bodhi Sangha.

And I did decide to seek to be accepted as a student of AMA Samy, after reading this passage in one of the books written by him:

“The master cannot give you satori; she/he is there to guide, to challenge, to test, to confirm. In truth, all the world is your teacher, the whole life of birth and death is the training field… Zen, therefore, is a teaching by negation, negating everything that the student supposes Zen to be, hoping that the student will realize that by not being any particular thing, s/he is everything; and that by not being any particular self, s/he is selflessly all selves.”

Coming back to our theme of this note: what emerges here is not just resilience, but antifragility — the capacity to grow stronger through stress and shocks. By rehearsing failure, we do not merely withstand adversity; we integrate it, and in doing so, we gain from it. The process unfolds as a living cycle:

Awareness → Acceptance → Integration → Freedom.

We move fear from the unconscious (where it controls us) to the conscious (where we can work with it). By mentally and emotionally surviving the worst-case scenario, we integrate the experience, and the capsule loses its potency. What remains is not naive hope, but a confident, grounded presence.

As the saying goes, hope for the best and prepare for the worst is the best strategy. Not pessimism, but resilience. In Zen terms, it is living with the certainty of impermanence while still planting seeds of joy and trust.