kokorozendo.life

One of my coaching clients is a high-flyer in the corporate world. He often calls me on his way to the airport, or while waiting for take-off, when there's something important he wants to discuss between our scheduled sessions. I've often sensed he doesn't want to let a single waking moment go unproductive. In many of our calls, we end up discussing strategies for doing less—so that he can carve out some stillness in his workday. But for him, it has been genuinely difficult to let go of his old ways of working.

That struggle came to mind recently when somebody shared the reason why arrival gates were moved so far from baggage claim in airports. It was based on research done at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Passengers only took a minute to walk from the gate to baggage claim, then waited seven more minutes for their bags — and complaints kept pouring in even after wait times were reduced. So the airport moved the gates farther away and routed bags to the outermost carousel. The total time to get your bags stayed the same, but now most of it was spent walking instead of standing still. Complaints dropped to near zero. Now several airports design around that insight.

The essence: human beings attribute silence and waiting to being unproductive, of no value — and any action, any time-filler, to being productive, even when nothing has actually changed. The mind doesn't measure what happened. It measures what it was busy doing while it happened. That is the business of busy-ness. Especially in this attention economy.

This is, in some ways, exactly what Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action bets against. KZD is a year-long online circle of twelve — a small mandala of practice, not a retreat weekend — built around the Enso, the single unbroken brushstroke Zen uses to picture wholeness. Twelve people, twelve months, twelve Petals, each carrying its own Mirror Text and Practice Gate, moving through three Arcs: rooting the self, embodying the heart, and finally glimpsing what Zen calls the liberating view. Nothing about it is designed to feel like a workshop. It is designed to feel like a year — which is precisely where it runs headlong into the Houston problem.

I feel this reflects in the cohort members' responses to this long-drawn course as well. Everyone looks forward to jam-packed, wisdom-per-minute, high-energy sessions over a weekend or three-four days. But when the learning is spread over a year, with enough time in between for silence and reflection, people feel it isn't productive for them. Even if the whole journey is designed to unearth their own wisdom within themselves. Nothing is technically missing in those quiet stretches — the walk is happening either way — but because it isn't dressed up as motion, it doesn't register as progress. That's an indicator of how modern capitalism has conditioned human beings — we've learned to trust the walk and distrust the wait, even when the wait is where the actual work is being done. Most people don't realise this until they're inside a year long practice — the discomfort isn't from lack of progress, but from lack of visible motion.

When François, a French martial artist, who had spent some 2 decades in China and Japan to perfect his Taichi, took 3-4 weeks to teach us Wuji, the empty stance before our Taichi steps began. Whenever he noticed a frustrated face in our small Taichi class at the Zendo, he used to tell us, unless we learn to stand still, we won't learn to move in Taichi. And for those who are used to the busy-ness of life's business, it gets very tough to still body and mind. Once when I asked him, if this suited a slow motion exercise system like Taichi, he spoke about Taiki-Ken, which is similarly foundational for Kung fu practitioners. That entire system is built on the foundation of Ritsu-zen (立禅, "standing Zen"). And it is not a warm-up before the "real" training.

And it is not about standing still. Serious Zen practitioners move from active breath practices in Zazen, to Shikantaza (just sitting) to sit without doing anything particular. Not even with an intent to meditate within a Zendo. In fact, in Zen traditions, there's a word for this: boketto—the practice of gazing at nothing in particular, unfocused, with no goal attached to the looking. It cannot be optimised or performed for anyone watching. Which is precisely why it's so hard to sell to a mind trained to only trust what looks like effort. Boketto is what a yearlong mandala quietly trains — the ability to stay with the space where nothing seems to be happening.

Alan Watts made a similar point in Still the Mind — a mind that never stops thinking has nothing left to think about except itself. There is no room left for anything else to land, not even the world as it actually is. François was training the body to make that room. Boketto trains the eyes to do the same. The mind has always been the last student in that class.

Lao Tzu saw this before airports existed. Thirty spokes meet at a hub, he wrote in the Tao Te Ching's eleventh verse, but it's the hollow center — the part with nothing in it — that lets the wheel actually turn. A vessel is shaped from clay, yet its usefulness lives in the emptiness it holds. A room is cut out of walls with doors and windows, and the room becomes liveable only because of the space that isn't wall. Being gives us the form, he says, but non-being is what we use.

It's the same grammar as silence between notes making the music, the space between bars holding up the song, the window being nothing but a hole that lets the house breathe. We keep admiring the spokes, the clay, the wall — the visible, countable, fundable parts — and forget that none of it works without the hollow at the centre.

Most transformation programs are like 2-minute instant noodles — a packaged, guided tour for those who want instant nirvana. But does it work like that? There are no quick fixes to integrate our shadow and steady the inner life thru stilling the mind. It takes a consistent practice in building our awareness and presence. In fact, after the great success of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one habit that got conditioned, is to have a number of steps/processes for anything and everything in life. Life does not work that way. While there are great similarities and commonalities across all human lives, there is a uniqueness too. The first step in our own transformational journey is to be aware of that uniqueness within ourselves. Where Buddha differentiated himself from others is his realisation about this. Appo Deepo Bhava seems to be his greatest teaching. His own way of saluting his students, Kalyana Mitra has modern resonance in the Irish word of Anamcara pal.

A year-long practice runs on exactly that natural principle. The Petals are the spokes. The time of unscheduled quiet between them is the hub. You cannot wipe blood clean with more blood. And there's no way to find that inner silence and stillness in our minds by adding more thoughts — however sacred they sound, however ancient they are.

Cohort 2 of Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action opens later this year, beginning late November — for anyone ready to walk a year built around the hub instead of the spokes. Write to me at vishy.sankara@kokorozendo.life — start with one thing you're trying to slow down.