Good moment, dear reader.
I want to begin slowly today. No grand thesis to prove. No ten-point framework to deliver. Just… a few thoughts that have been sitting with me since last evening — the way certain things stay with you through the night, and are still there in the morning, quiet and patient, waiting to be looked at.
I run a year-long inner work program called Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action. We are six months in. A small, earnest cohort of people who signed up — bravely, I think — to spend a year doing the kind of slow, uncomfortable, unglamorous work that does not fit into a reel or a listicle.
Yesterday morning, I put a reminder in our Sangha community group.
Our planned Sangha Dialogue — 27 May, 8:30 PM. A gentle nudge into the shared stream of our days. I typed it out, pressed send, and went about my morning. Thinking nothing more of it.
Now — I want you to know I am smiling as I write this. More the kind of smile that arises when life arranges itself into an accidental koan. A reminder about presence… that no one noticed.
A message about gathering… that dissolved somewhere into the scroll. Between a forwarded recipe and a motivational quote, most likely.
I thought: well. There is something here worth saying out loud.
So here I am, saying it. Not to my cohort only. But to anyone who might find themselves in it.
Dogen said: To study Zen is to study the self.
I have been living with that sentence for years. It does not get smaller with familiarity. If anything, the longer I sit with it, the more I find it has rooms I had not yet entered.
Because here is what I think Dogen was pointing at — and what I believe is true not only of Zen, but of any genuine inner work:
It is not about what we accumulate.
Not the knowledge. Not the frameworks. Not the vocabulary. Not the certificates on the wall or the books on the shelf or the meditation apps on the phone with the streak counter that quietly judges you every morning.
It is about integration. Shadow integration. The slow, uncomfortable, often unglamorous work of meeting the parts of ourselves we have been managing, performing around, quietly afraid of — and bringing them home. Bit by bit. Season by season.
That work… does not happen quickly.
It cannot be rushed. It cannot be hacked. It cannot be summarised in a bullet point or captured in a ninety-second reel.
And I think — I gently suspect — that this is where many of us are finding it hard.
Let me tell you about a marshmallow.
Back in 1972, a psychologist at Stanford named Walter Mischel ran a simple experiment. He brought children — four years old, five years old — into a small room. On the table in front of them, he placed one marshmallow. Then he made them an offer.
You can eat this now. That is perfectly fine. Or — you can wait. I am going to step out. If the marshmallow is still here when I come back, I will bring you two.
Then he left.
Some children ate the marshmallow almost immediately. Some waited — and the waiting was exquisite to observe. They covered their eyes. They turned away. They sang to themselves. They petted the marshmallow as if it were a small animal. They did everything in their power to hold the discomfort of — not yet.
What I find most moving about this experiment is not the outcome data. It is the image itself.
A small child. A single marshmallow. And the enormous, silent battle between now and later.
Because that battle — dressed in different clothes, playing out on a different stage — is exactly what many of us are navigating in our inner lives right now.
Any genuine inner work asks you to invest in something you cannot yet see. To practice something whose fruits are not immediately measurable. To sit with the discomfort of I am not sure this is working, I am not sure I am doing it right, I am not sure anything is happening at all — and to keep showing up anyway.
That is the marshmallow.
And the gratification… is genuinely far ahead.
Now. About attention.
I want to tell you something first. About who I was as a child. Because I think it matters.
I grew up reading big books. Not summaries. Not excerpts. The full, brick-like, glorious things. Gone with the Wind. The Count of Monte Cristo. Arabian Nights. And Ithihyamala — that magnificent Malayalam collection of temple legends and folk stories that my grandmother kept on the highest shelf, which made it, naturally, the first thing I wanted to reach. I read these not as tasks but as worlds I moved into and lived in for weeks. You did not rush The Count of Monte Cristo. You let it take you. You surrendered to its pace.
And cricket. Five-day Test cricket.
We were living then in Thenkara. A small village — and I mean small in the way that really means something — no electricity, leave alone a television. The world beyond our village arrived slowly, if at all.
But there was Kanna mama. My father’s cousin. He lived in Mannarkkad, in a big ancestral house. And that house was always — always — open. Not just for us. For everyone. For the whole extended, sprawling, uninvited crowd of us who would assemble there for the big game or simply because there was nowhere else to go and Kanna mama never, not once, made anyone feel like there was anywhere else they should be.
Five full days for a Test match. The host family never once complained. Never once hinted that the crowd was too much. The house was simply… open. Food appeared. Tea appeared. And we watched. Hour after hour. Day after day. The long, slow, meditative rhythm of Test cricket — the building of an innings, the shifting of pressure, the patience required of both batsman and bowler and, crucially, of the watcher.
That is a kind of attention that is very hard to describe to someone who has not felt it. A sustained, willing, wholehearted giving of your time and presence to something unfolding at its own pace, on its own terms, with no guarantee of a dramatic finish.
And then there was the night of 21 June 1986.
Brazil versus France. World Cup quarter-final. Guadalajara, Mexico.
My father decided we would go to Kanna mama’s house to watch. My brother and I didn’t need convincing. And so we walked — from Thenkara to Mannarkkad — in the rain. I don’t remember exactly how far. I remember the rain. I remember my father walking ahead, steady, not complaining. I remember the particular quality of that anticipation — the feeling of moving toward something through discomfort, because the thing was worth it.
We arrived. The house was full and warm and loud. Kanna mama’s house always was.
Brazil lost, as it happens. On penalties. One of the most beautiful and heartbreaking matches in the history of the sport. Zico missed the crucial kick. I can still see it.
After forty years, I can still recall both team lineups. Every name. Every position.
That is what deep attention does to an experience. It burns it in. It makes it yours forever.
Kanna mama passed away three weeks ago.
And here is one of life’s quietly astonishing circles: he left his sprawling ancestral house almost right in the middle of Mannarkkad — that very house, the one we walked toward in the rain that June night — to Thenkara. The village we had walked from. The place where we lived in 1986 with no electricity, leave alone a television.
His house came to Thenkara where I started that long walk to watch … a football game ! . All those years later.
I don’t have a neat way to say what that means. I am not sure it needs one. Some circles don’t need explaining. They just need witnessing.
Now I look back at all of this — the big books, the five-day Tests, the walk to Mannarkkad in the rain — and I see something I could not have named then.
We were, without knowing it, practicing the marshmallow.
Every single day.
We were practicing the art of staying. Of not reaching for the easier thing. Of letting something unfold at its own pace and trusting that the unfolding was worth your presence.
And now… I catch myself reaching for my phone four minutes into reading a book I have been meaning to sit with for weeks. Not because anything has arrived. Not because anyone needs me. Simply because the silence of reading has become, in four minutes, slightly uncomfortable. Slightly too slow.
The phone is the marshmallow. And I eat it.
I tell you this not as confession for its own sake. I tell you because I am swimming in the same water as everyone else. The current pulls at me too. Every single day.
We live in an age that has been ingeniously engineered to shorten our attention. Instagram reels. T20 cricket — where an entire story of contest and drama and reversal, that once unfolded over five long contemplative days, is now compressed into three electric hours. Fast food. Micro-learning. The podcast that delivers the key ideas from a book in eleven minutes. The listicle summarising a work that took a human being seven years and great personal suffering to write — delivered brisk and tidy, before your coffee goes cold.
I use these things too. I am not standing apart from any of this.
But I want to name what it does to us. Cumulatively. Quietly. Over time.
It trains us away from dwelling.
It trains us to expect resolution quickly. Insight quickly. Transformation quickly. And when transformation does not arrive on that timeline — when the practice feels dry, when the book doesn’t open, when the sitting produces nothing but a restless leg and a wandering mind — we conclude, almost automatically: something must be wrong.
Nothing is wrong.
You are simply being asked to walk to Mannarkkad in the rain.
To show up for the five-day Test.
To let The Count of Monte Cristo take as long as it takes.
To let something work on you the way a long, slow monsoon works on a hillside — not dramatically, not in a single downpour, but reshaping everything, steadily, over time. The hillside does not announce its transformation. It simply receives the rain.
And one morning — you cannot say exactly when — everything looks different.
I want to say something now that I hope lands gently.
The practice is the returning. The quiet, undramatic act of coming back — half-asleep sometimes, carrying more than you expected sometimes, having eaten the marshmallow sometimes — and being here anyway.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said something I have returned to more times than I can count: Each of you is perfect the way you are… and you can use a little improvement. Both things simultaneously true. You are exactly where you need to be. And you are still unfolding. This is not a contradiction. This is the Enso itself — complete, and yet still being drawn.
Let me be honest about one more thing before I close.
When I began my own journey — the longer one, the one that eventually led me to this work — I was deeply uncomfortable with not knowing how it would turn out. I wanted the map. I wanted the guarantee. I wanted someone further along to look at me and say: Yes. If you do this, you will arrive there. And there is worth going.
Nobody said that. Nobody could.
Because the whole point — the irreducible, inalienable, sometimes infuriating point — is that you have to walk into the not-knowing. Through the rain. In the dark. Not knowing if Brazil will win.
What I can offer — not as a promise, but as the quiet testimony of someone who has been walking longer and has fallen more times than he would like to admit — is this:
The walking changes you.
Not in the way you expected. Not on the timeline you planned. But it changes you in the way that lasts — quietly, irrevocably, from somewhere so deep inside that you often don’t notice it happening at all. You only notice it later, looking back, when you realise you responded to something the way you never used to respond. When you find a small spaciousness where there used to be only a wall.
That is the fruit. And it takes its own time to ripen.
It cannot be reminded into existence.
Not even by a WhatsApp message on a Tuesday morning.
So.
Be tender with yourselves.
Be patient with what is quietly ripening in the dark.
Trust the slow monsoon.
Walk to Mannarkkad, even in the rain.
And if, on some days, all you can do is remember that you are on a path — that is enough. That remembering, however fleeting, however sandwiched between a recipe forward and a motivational quote — that is the path. You are on it. Even now.
One question to sit with — no need to answer it anywhere but inside yourself:
Where in my life right now is something asking me to wait… and what would it mean, just for today, to say yes to that waiting?
Sit with it.
No hurry.
In Gassho — Metta and Mudita,
Vishy Sankara
kokorozendo.life
P.S. If something in these pages stirred something in you — Cohort 2 opens September 2026. No hurry. No pressure. Just — you will know if it is for you.
