Norman and Marc talk about work as a spiritual practice, and as a Zen practice. They discuss how to shift from fear, anxiety, and burnout to approaching work as a means to make an offering, and to help and benefit others. They address the practice of confidence and humility, and the lack of distinction between benefitting others and our own wellbeing. And they touch on meditation as a way of not fooling yourself, at work and in all parts of your life.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Norman Fischer is a poet, writer, and one of the world’s most prominent Zen teachers. He is the former Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and founder/teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation.

---

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[music]

[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis, and ever-shifting. Now, more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

My guest today is Norman Fischer, poet, writer, and one of the world’s most prominent zen teachers. Norman is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and currently is the founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation. In today’s episode, we talk about work as a spiritual practice and as a zen practice. How to shift from fear and anxiety and burnout to work as making an offering, as helping, and as benefiting others.

We talk about the practice of confidence in humility and how thinking of others instead of ourselves just might be the key to our own happiness. We touch on meditation as a way of not fooling ourselves at work and at all parts of our lives. I am really pleased to welcome Norman Fischer.

[music]

[00:01:28] Marc: This is Marc Lesser, and welcome to Zen Bones, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. I am really thrilled to have this time with my dear friend and teacher and buddy, Norman Fischer. Welcome, Norman.

[00:01:42] Norman Fischer: Hey, Marc. Great to be here. It’s a wonderful rainy morning out here at Muir Beach in California.

[00:01:50] Marc: Norman, I was wondering this morning that many years ago, you and I started a nonprofit called the Wright Livelihood Institute and I don’t know what happened to that. Somehow it led into Company Time workshops that you and I have done, I think, starting more than 25 years ago that we did several times a year. This question of what does zen have to do with work, what does work have to do with zen? I know this is a topic that is dear to your heart and practice. What are you doing these days with zen and work?

[00:02:35] Norman: [chuckles] Well, it’s funny because I don’t really do much work. I’m not at work out there. When we lived at the Zen Center together, I was always very admiring of all the people who did all the work. The people who worked in the kitchen like you and you had expertise in kitchen work, but I especially admired the carpenters. We had a whole building crew at the Zen Center. Those were many decades ago when we were literally building the Zen Center and building all of its various ancillary institutions.

There was construction going on all the time and I was so impressed and amazed by all the people who did that work.

Then of course, one of the insights of zen, which is very obvious, like all great insights, completely obvious, there’s no living without work. You can’t go through a day without some kind of work because the world is material. Whatever consciousness you have depends on that you have a body, and if you have a body, then you have to clean it, you have to feed it, you have to take care of the poop and the urine that comes out of the body. All of these things require daily work.

Actually, I work every single day. I clean the kitchen, I put food on the table, I clean up the house, I pick up, I put away, I do laundry. Work is actually unavoidable, and like everything else in life, zen’s insight is that living is spiritual practice. Everything about being alive is to be seen and understood as a spiritual practice. Work in zen practice is very explicitly considered to be a spiritual practice.

As you know, Marc, in contemporary zen monasteries, and not only contemporary but throughout the history of zen, there was always more work going on than there was meditation. I think that nowadays, as for many centuries, the monks at a hagi spend more time cleaning than they do meditating. Polishing the wood in the hallways, on the floors, and on the beams of the building, taking care of things, and keeping everything beautiful. They spend more time doing that than they do sitting in meditation, probably much more time.

[00:05:22] Marc: It was just curious to me, Norman, the way you described your work, which of course the work of taking care of the necessities. Then I was smiling, you reminded me a little bit of our mutual good friend Kaztana Hashi, who describes himself as lazy because he’s never– If you walk into his office, he’s got literally five computer screens.

A little bit like you, I know that you are always writing talks, writing poetry, counseling people, preparing for retreats, leading retreats, leading multiple zen groups, and there’s a way that you do that so seamlessly that it’s somehow so aligned with your being that it doesn’t even feel like work to you. Which I often think is the real. If there’s an aspiration for zen and work, it’s to be so aligned with what you’re doing that it doesn’t even feel like work.

[00:06:31] Norman: Yes. That’s an interesting point, what in the end is work? From early on, I had this thought about work. In my first poetry book from 40 years ago, I think there’s a little poem in there about work. It’s something that says something like, work is moving something from one place to another, or making something that didn’t previously exist out of materials, and everything else is play. [chuckles]

I think of work as physical activity. I don’t think of– Most of the work that is done nowadays, so many people are working in abstract terms when they’re working with communication or they’re working with ideas or they’re working with non-material forces. I want to just hold that there because of course I’m aware of that and I want to think about that. Here’s the thing, in zen, work is exclusively a practice. There’s famous zen sayings like a day of no work is a day of no eating, that every day I work and therefore I eat, and if I don’t work I don’t eat.

There’s also the famous zen phrase chopping wood and carrying water. The whole phrase is something like, “What is my miraculous zen activity? It’s chopping wood and carrying water. These are the kinds of miracles that I engage in every day.” I would say that it’s really important because everybody, no matter how abstract their work is, in a way, like you just pointed out, my work is very abstract. It’s giving talks, it’s studying texts, it’s talking to people about their practice, it’s meditation. In a way, you could say that the main work that I do is not physical work, not work as I defined it a moment ago. Yet at the same time, I also work every day.

Now, the temptation would be to say that the retreats and the talks and the books and all this, this is really important stuff. This is high-level stuff, people really pay attention to this and they value it. The fact that I’m cleaning the toilet is just something I barely pay any attention to because that’s not anything. Who cares about that? My point here is that actually it’s very important for everybody to realize that they are doing work in the very literal sense of physical.

Moving something from one place to another or creating something or cleaning something in the physical world. I think it’s actually very important for everybody to pay attention to those things and actually make those things real and value those things. I think to me, I actually do consider it to be just as important, actually to be honest, more important. The cleaning up the sewage mess in my house that happened last week in the storms, to be more important and more significant than my Dharma talk. I really do.

I think that if we all thought about that and made that commitment to ourselves, it would make a big difference in our world. Because I think what we’re doing is we’re spending a lot of, we’re throwing away our opportunity to really appreciate our lives by jobing everything out. There are people who never clean anything because they hire people to clean everything. There are people who never cook any food because it’s all takeout. I think it’s very important to pay attention to that stuff.

[00:10:19] Marc: Yes, I agree totally. I’m remembering that when we would start our workshops for business people, we’d often use the quote, this expression of leaving your soul in the parking lot before you went into the office. There is, you’re describing I think, a non-dual approach or a radically different approach to work. That there is this tendency to bifurcate.

Or that people, when they walk into their office or– I was just with a group, teaching a workshop to these elite wildland firefighters. This young man who I thought was a wonderful person, he really suffered a lot from, he said, I become a different person when I’m a leader in wildland firefighting. In fact, he said, “I’m kind of an asshole.” It’s interesting, it’s a little bit like, I think he was expressing a version that, “I leave my soul. I have to give up.”

I suggested that he maybe play with the idea of can he be a bit more kind and compassionate with himself and still be just as effective in the work. Even with this work of firefighting and jumping out of helicopters, why does it need to be this whole different way of being? I think what you are suggesting is just such potent, a very practical practice of less bifurcation and more seeing it all as practice.

[00:12:13] Norman: Yes. I think that, let’s say that there are two aspects to doing that. One aspect is what I was talking about there, mindful, simple physical work that everybody does or ought to be doing. Focusing on that is just as important as everything else. That changes the way you behave in the everything else part, when you focus equally on the right physical work.

There are the practices, mindfulness, being careful, paying attention to what you’re doing, recognizing that there’s nothing more important in the world than cleaning the toilet when you’re cleaning the toilet and giving it your best shot. That’s one aspect of the work. That aspect really, that’s classical zen work. That’s literally carrying water and chopping wood, physical work on a very simple basis.

Then there’s all this other kind of work, like the one this example you decided is a question of leadership. I think that this young man probably feels like, “Well, I’m a leader now, I’m responsible now, therefore this is serious. Therefore I better not be soft and humane. I better be a tough ass because this is really serious. I’ve got to command respect and I’ve got to get it done, so I got to, so on and so on.” There’s a whole ideology behind the way he behaves.

In zen we would say that one aspect of work is as I said, careful, mindful activity, and physical work, but then the other aspect of work is the body serves a dedication to the benefit of others. That the only reason to do work and all work, including the physical work, is actually an offering to sentient beings. The world is, everybody suffers, it’s hard to be human. Goodness knows at this moment we’re aware of a tremendous amount of suffering all over the world among people for various reasons that are quite severe and serious.

The idea is all my activity, all my work is really dedicated to being a benefit to others. I clean the toilet, not for the toilet only, but to clean up the drek and crap of all sentient beings. I clean, I prepare food not only to feed myself and my family, but to feed all sentient beings. That’s my spirit in doing it. Therefore, if I’m leading a fire crew, if I’m giving a dharma talk, if I’m leading a retreat, this is not work that I’m accomplishing for pay and reputation and kudos, this is actually a selfless offering to sentient beings.

I try to train my mind to really and truly look at it that way. When I do, of course, I’m going to behave differently. Because, for example, if I’m the fire crew guy, the sentient beings I’m serving are the trees, the people whose homes might be threatened, and mostly, the people that I work with every day. To care about them and be kind to them is just as important as the goal of the task.

As you pointed out to him, to be kind to the people you work with is probably going to be very beneficial in the end for the goal that he’s trying to realize. In that way, you go to work and whatever your work is, chances are really good that you’re working in some way with other people. Thinking of them and their benefit and their happiness is part of your brief of your work. Then doing everything that you do as well as you can possibly do it, knowing that everything you do is influencing the world, and you want it to influence the world in a good way. I want to do a good job, I want to be as conscientious as I possibly can.

[00:16:27] Marc: I think you are unpacking a key insight of zen and work. That you mentioned the bodhisattva ideal, this insight of zen that everything we do is for the benefit of others, we’re here for the benefit of others. That reminds me of, I think of that Dalai Lama quote where he says, “if you want others to be happy, practice compassion.” Then interestingly enough, he says, “if YOU want to be happy, practice compassion.”

I think there’s interesting insight there about because so many people feel a sense of stress and anxiety in their work life. There’s a doctor who I’ve become friends with and who sits with me, who brought me in to do some work with brain cancer patients. He ended up in the hospital with anxiety attacks because it’s hard right now being in healthcare with Covid and with a shortage of nurses. It’s easy to lose sight of that practice of helping others and somehow remembering our own well-being and getting caught by that stress and anxiety. There’s an interesting practice edge there.

[00:17:5] Norman: Yes. Once you think that there’s some kind of difference between your own well-being and the well-being of others, you’re already in trouble. [chuckles] Once you say, “Well, I guess I have to sacrifice my own well-being for others,” you’re already in trouble. Because there really is no difference.

The bodhisattva path is not about a kind of extreme altruism at the expense of oneself. The bodhisattva path starts from the deep recognition that there is nobody here in myself other than my endless engagements with what is outside myself. That is what I am. To take care of myself is to take care of others. To take care of others is to take care of myself. Of course, I’m aware, oh my God– I think that as you and I know, Marc, from our many decades of experience with practicing zazen, that when you have an ongoing meditation practice, it makes it very difficult for you to fool yourselves.

When you are beginning to go down the drain because you’re overexcited or overextended, you can’t help but notice. You can’t help but notice that letting that go on for too long is going to just make a mess out of everything. You’re not going to be very helpful to anybody else once you’re in the hospital for anxiety disorder. You start taking care of yourself as the most effective way to ultimately take care of others.

There’s no contradiction, there’s no– To me, the whole discourse about self-compassion and whatever, not overdoing empathy, to me, I really don’t– I understand why people say those things because they’re operating in a framework of ordinary self-other framework. In Buddha Dharma, as you and I both know, there is no contradiction there whatsoever. The actual quote that Dalai Lama I think is referring to there, I think it’s a verse in Shanti Devi that says something like, “If you want to be miserable, think only of yourself. If you want to be happy, think only of others.”

That, most people say, “What? That’s crazy,” but actually, it’s true. If you think of others, you’re going to take care of yourself. It won’t be like, “Oh, my God, I feel so guilty. I’m taking a vacation I shouldn’t be taking.” You’ll feel absolutely happy and completely seamless about taking care of yourself. You won’t be worried about how you’re not doing anything for others. Because what others are we talking about? What others are there? There’s only here in this moment. The whole world is here.

There’s no contradiction there. The point of view of practice, I don’t think it’s just zen practice. I think it’s all the Buddhist practice. I don’t think it’s just Buddhist practice, I think it’s all authentic forms of spirituality. In the end, the view that you have and the way you live your life is like the opposite almost of the way people think of things. The way the world is constructed in people’s minds, the way we understand the world is guaranteed to produce anxiety and confusion and all the things that we see all around us because it all flows quite naturally from the way we understand the world and the way we understand ourselves.

Our practice proposes that we train our hearts to understand things in a radically different way, and that’s where that verse comes from. To be miserable is to think only of yourself. To be happy is to think only of others. That’s really true within a spiritual worldview.

[00:22:34] Marc: You probably have seen some of the science, the studies, they call that the default mode network. Which is the part of the brain that is thinking about yourself, which apparently, a study you’ve probably seen says that the average American does more than 50% of the time, and it is correlated with unhappiness.

[00:23:00] Norman: Yes.

[00:23:02] Marc: You were quoting the Dalai Lama and Shanti Devi gave us some of the older texts.

[00:23:08] Norman: That [unintelligible 00:23:09] surprising.

[00:23:10] Marc: Science is discovering all of the obvious things that the contemplatives have discovered. I loved too how you were just talking about meditation practice as the way, the practice of making it harder to fool ourselves, and maybe easier to see the reality, the truth of the lack of distinction about self and others.

[00:23:39] Norman: Yes. Somehow, over time, the practice of meditation, along with some reflection really changes things quite a bit.

[00:23:51] Marc: I was trying to remember some of the other insights, lessons from all of those years of teaching workshops for business people. I think really what you’ve just talked about is maybe at the base insight of this, doing work. That work is essentially an offering, that benefit. That quite naturally it will take care of our own well-being. That it’s practice to see work as a spiritual practice. Radically crazy idea.

[00:24:34] Norman: Yes. Part of that reminds me of what we were talking about, just before we started the podcast, this idea of how much are we concerned about the results of our work and our own place in it. This one, this is I think, a key point and a difficult one. Because I think you need to have a certain amount of faith. Here, again faith comes not just from a hopeful belief but from the experience of your meditation practice and your reflection over time.

You have to have a certain amount of faith that if you really and truly do your best, work hard, slough off, but work hard, do your best, and you’re a decent person to the people you work with and everybody you come in contact with, that somehow things will work out okay. Therefore, if you get promoted, that’s great. Everybody likes to be promoted. If you get fired, that’s too bad. Nobody likes to be fired.

You really don’t have to worry about it that much. Just do what you do, take care of yourself, take care of everybody else, and don’t worry about it. You’ll be okay. I think a lot of the anxiety is that now that we have this wonderfully efficient hypercapitalism, what that means is that the minute a worker is not sufficiently productive, they’re gone. We’ve been working very hard for the last decade to make sure that no worker in any sphere of life [unintelligible 00:26:29] .

That everybody has to be maximally productive every single moment, otherwise they’re gone. Everybody is worried about their job. Now, it used to be that if you were a college professor, you had tenure, and you didn’t have to worry about your job. That’s out. Now, college professors, all can lose their jobs at any moment with a wrong word or a bad look or whatever or not enough publication at the right time. I think that is a great source of anxiety, worried about whether or not we’re going to keep our job, whether or not our production is good enough. How is our reputation doing. Is our stock rising or falling, and all of this?

I think that in order to do work as a spiritual practice, you absolutely cannot let that get the best of you. You really have to have some kind of confidence that if you do work, if you’re a decent person, it’ll work out. Will there be ups and downs? Of course. Things happen. You’ll have setbacks but then you’ll get another job or whatever it is that will happen. So many people I know– I know some people who are professors who were casualties of this new technological university.

Though they had tenure, they were basically forced out of their jobs. They fought it mightily and they were so upset, and so on and so on, and then a year later they say, “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I am retired, I’m doing other things that I really enjoy,” and that was a great thing. Or you lose your job and you get a different job. Or you don’t work and you find a way to survive.

Things go the way they’re supposed to go. Who can figure it out? Who can manipulate it? Who can ensure that if I do this, that will happen? There’s no straight-line causality, and you’re happy. You always figure out how to survive one way or the other. You have to have confidence in that and not worry so much. However, if this, then that. I do this, and then that happens, and God knows how that happened.

You have some trust that things will work. It’s really important not to worry so much about, “Does the project succeed? Do I succeed?” You can’t really worry about that. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Pay attention to how you’re communicating, pay attention to everybody around you, and then trust.

[00:28:59] Marc: Yes. I think that you use the word faith and trust but you also– I think there’s something about, in the work world, confidence. Kind of a deep confidence. Maybe it’s a confidence that contains humility.

[00:29:18] Norman: Yes.

[00:29:18] Marc: It’s interesting. The shortcomings of our language, the integration in a way of completely confident and completely humble at the same time.

[00:29:30] Norman: Yes. If you’re not worried about your performance every minute, then you have that confidence, and you’re not afraid. You’re not afraid. I think that so many people, it goes together, right? Anxiety, upset, and fear all go together. If you can overcome your fear, then you are going to be a confident person.

Just like you say, a really confident person does not need to deny his or her mistakes, does not need to pretend that he knows everything. Real confidence is, “Oh, let’s learn something new here. Let’s be wrong and let’s be happy about that because I found out something I didn’t know before.”

[00:30:14] Marc: Well, Norman, I feel like we’re just getting started. Maybe with some confidence and humility, I can say that I hope this is part one maybe of some– We’ll do this again. [chuckles]

[00:30:30] Norman: [inaudible 00:30:30] Good to see you, Marc.

[00:30:34] Marc: Anything you would like to say or read or do as a way of ending our time here on this podcast?

[00:30:44] Norman: Yes. This is never done on podcast because you’re not supposed to do this. I think it’s bad radio, it’s bad audio. I think we should end with three silent breaths. You can take three breaths and if the listeners are– We can challenge whatever listeners there may be. We can challenge them not to turn off the podcast now because we’re going to end with silence before saying goodbye. See if you can actually stop what you’re doing and just breathe three silent breaths with us before we say goodbye. Let’s try to do that, okay? You and I will just breathe.

[00:31:27] Marc: Okay. Let’s do that.

[pause 00:31:30]

[music]

[00:32:01] Marc: Norman, thank you, and may your good health continue.

[00:32:05] Norman: You too. Be well.

[music]

[00:32:12] Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

[00:32:37] [END OF AUDIO]