Year of Discovery: Week 3 (Origin of Suffering, Blankness and Mastery)

This week, I focused a lot of my thinking on spirituality, blankness and mastery. I reflected that this Year of Discovery is truly a Year of Finding My Soul Mission, the same one that I found when moving to Kenya and later, starting Moringa. I have shared this with only a few friends before (because I was afraid of sounding crazy), but there was no logic or reason that made me move to Kenya. If anything, there were probably 1000x more reasons to not move to Kenya. Ultimately, I had an incredibly deep gut feeling that I surrendered to, and the story that I tell now in hindsight about my move to Kenya paints a lot more clarity than what I really felt at the time.

I’m learning that my ‘Year of Discovery’ is really about exposing myself to more fascinating deep thinkers to learn about global trends and dynamics, to provide more fuel to my heart and gut, and to ultimately land on a core challenge I want to be part of solving (accompanied by a life setup that is truly enabling). This is also a time of relinquishing control, humbling myself to learn the basics of key skills and understand the complex dualities that each of us holds everyday. It’s not about black or white; it’s about staying in the grey.

Buddhism: the Second of the Four Noble Truths

I went to a talk by a Buddhist monk this last week, where we spoke on the second of the Four Noble Truths which focuses on the origin of suffering.

The monk said, “The more you believe that your happiness is most important, the farther away your happiness will be.”

What immediately came to mind was the self-help book genre that focuses on self-love, self-soothing, and self-importance as the cornerstone for enabling us to move out of our own suffering. It claims that if we love ourselves more, then we will suffer less and find more peace.

What the Buddhist monk taught almost flipped what the self-help genre teaches on its head. Rather than giving most importance to our own happiness, the monk was sharing this idea around the ego in Buddhism that the more strongly I feel I want to be happy, the less I will be happy, and the more I will suffer. That in self-cherishing, we believe that our happiness is most important, and when something around us (like an expectation that hasn’t been met) occurs counter to our happiness, then we feel deep anger and resentment. We believe our personal happiness is more important than that of others. Self-grasping accentuates our belief in the importance of ourselves.

In Buddhism, we often take about delusions — or the stories we tell ourselves (which aren’t the facts). The monk shared that when delusions arise, we need to:

1. Identify the delusions (self-cherishing, attachment, self-grasping)
2. Oppose the delusions by cultivating opposites (anger vs compassion, jealousy vs rejoicing or being happy for others, etc)
3. Eliminate the delusions (through meditation and practice)

What resonated the most with me on these teachings was how often deep frustration at others or at the world has caused my suffering — the root of that being that I believed my happiness was most important. For example, when someone spoke to me rudely this week, I immediately jumped to anger because I felt I should have been spoken to in a kinder way. I also jumped to self-judgement: was there a way that I was being or speaking that warranted that type of reaction? Rather than having compassion for them by understanding the reflective nature of their animosity — the words they say that hurt me is probably hurting them inside just as much if not more — I was quick to react and make a delusion or story out of why they were so rude (even if not I didn’t show it externally). The reality is that I’ll never know and all I have in my control is to cultivate compassion for them and their suffering.

Similarly, during the COVID time, I’ve often felt constrained by the government restrictions that called for lockdown and a stripping away of our day-to-day lives and experiences as we knew it. Logically, I knew it was the right thing to do to protect lives, but I oscillated between that and a suffocating feeling that I needed to ‘have freedom’. We are against a self-centered mind and I learned that it requires lojong, which is mind-training in Tibetan Buddhism. When I meditated deeply on my feelings, I found that I was prioritizing my happiness in a way that was only creating more suffering for me and others around me. As I practice directing my energy towards compassion for those suffering during this time, I turned to my new constraints with opportunity:

• What are my choices? What can I do today within these constraints that will enable play and discovery?
• How can I surrender to my circumstances instead of hold onto a false sense of control?
• Whose happiness am I working for today? I am one; others are countless.

Since the Buddhist talk, I also reflected on the fact that compassion is not a weakness. It’s not being soft and being easily taken advantage of. It’s deep wisdom that all humans suffer and in knowing that, we can stop the cycle that creates more suffering and instead, end it by practicing compassion. A poem that I found which resonated deeply:

A Traffic Light in the Rain (The Truth of You)

Pain travels

until it reaches the person

who can look at it and say,

“No further. What was done to you,

you did to me. But I will not do it

to someone else.”

And these people

are the reason

the world is infinitely better

than it should be.

For me, meditating on compassion has been a key theme for this week. Some questions:

• When am I not being compassionate with others and prioritizing my own happiness over those of others?
• When is my self-grasping creating an ignorance that isn’t allowing me to cultivate compassion?

Lots more to continue meditating and reflecting on with this.

Blankness and Mastery — Dr. Sarah Lewis

Being able to listen to fascinating podcasts and reading books by introspective authors is such an incredible gift that this generation has. We live in an era where we can access some of the greatest minds through the touch of a button.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy said in a Tweet this week as he turned 36:

“Surround yourself with people so good you can’t help but be humble and feel a little out of place. Keep meeting more people that are better than you. To be interested is a better goal than to be interesting. It’s also a less competitive game.”

Surrounding myself with great people not only includes the incredible old and new friends I have who push my thinking and inspire me with their own journeys every day, but it also includes the great thinkers in the world who I can listen to, exposing myself to new ways of thinking. Greatness is all around us and it’s up to us to allow our intuition and energy to naturally gravitate and flow to it.

Someone who pushed my thinking this week was Dr. Sarah Lewis, who speaks on blankness and master in this podcast with Brene Brown. For Lewis, blankness is the expanded vista that allows possibility to happen and creativity to flow. Other key definitions from Lewis:

• Success = focuses on arriving at a peak point
• Mastery = focuses on reach, assesses the gap between where we are and where we want to go, requires endurance and a commitment to a curved line
• Perfection = inhuman aim motivated by concern by how people view us

What resonated most with me came from my reflection on my journey at Moringa. Since the beginning in 2014, I had always been quite uncomfortable about the images of success in our society — whether it be awards, recognition, or accolades. I often felt that people who gave us awards didn’t really know me or the company deeply and I wondered how they had found us or why they chose us. Constantly, I held a tension that on one hand, I believed it was too early for us to be winning so many awards (I was afraid that the recognition would foster a sense of comfort in an end state and fixed mindset) and on the other hand, I knew external validation had a role to play in motivating the team and helping them see the amazing work we were doing — the forest from the trees.

Over time, the irony is that the more external metrics of success we hit (like revenue, size of customer base, size of the team, the amount raised), the more concerned I was about perfection rather than mastery. I became increasingly afraid of not being liked and feared my mistakes would ruin Moringa’s reputation.

“Successes are my greatest threat to derail my pursuit of mastery” — Brene Brown

In the early days of Moringa, I was always the first to say that I didn’t know what I was doing. Every day was a blank canvas and I felt a jolt of amazement by what we were learning and deep gratitude for the people who joined our team that I was lucky enough to learn from. My heart knew the work we were doing was important, which was validated by the feedback we were getting from our students and employers, and I allowed that energy to drive me. Over time with the ‘success’ we were achieving, a fear inside of me grew that by continuing to say that I didn’t know what I was doing, I would present myself as a leader that was confused and that people wouldn’t want to follow. I started to box myself in, problem solve on my own and try to present more refined ideas and strategies to the team, rather than feel like I could and should be my fully authentic self that was quick to call out what I was learning and what I didn’t know.

What I learned from this podcast and my reflection afterward is two-fold:

1. Continue to focus always on mastery above all else. No matter who I am and what I’ve achieved in life, I know ultimately where my learning gaps are and what I’d like to learn more in. I built Moringa in a heavily ‘learn by doing’ way and was quite street-smart (I didn’t even know what systems and processes really were when starting Moringa). I read tons of articles and talked to many people to benchmark how they were leading and managing along the way, but most of it was a true trial by fire. Today, I’m focusing on mastery — taking courses in management and finance, learning from people who are masters themselves or who have deeply studied the masters — so I can continue to learn the skills I need so I can ultimately drive the change that I want to see.
2. Allow the past to be, appreciate the deep learning curves and forgive myself for any suffering I’ve caused because of my learning journey. “You can’t seize the opportunity of blankness if you’re belittling yourself about the failures.” I want to move into blankness and a strong creative process, which means I need to allow my judgments of myself and the past to subside. And to know that what I’m doing today will allow me to get to where I need to be.

Questions to reflect on:

• What is your soul mission? What do you feel like you’ve been given to do?
• When I quiet my mind, what emerges? How can I better cultivate deep listening to my inner compass?
• In what ways can you embark on a creative investigation today in the pursuit of mastery?
• In what ways are you taking past metrics of success into the future? What would a blank slate look like today? What would you want to master?
• In what ways are you focused more on what people want from you vs what you want to pursue? In what ways are you so comfortable in your success that it’s threatening your path to mastery?

I have an incredible amount of gratitude for the hard work that so many people in my life and beyond are doing in their inner worlds. True art and innovation come from the space and time we are brave enough to give ourselves that allows for childlike wonder. It comes from giving up our counterfeit control and allowing for real emergence, whenever it comes.

A great Buddhist talk I listened to this week: Remembering the Appointment with Life. I hope it serves you the way it did me.