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Last month I finished the Zen Leader series, a three-year journey that has honestly changed the fabric of who I am.

It’s not surprising in an environment where almost everything around us is changing nearly constantly, that our species is so attached to keeping things the same.

It seems that wherever we turn, we are confronted by a world in disintegration, with little rationality or compassion.

The first 6 months of self-employment have been interesting, revealing. As a one-man-band selling your own time, there’s nowhere to hide.

An image we sometimes use in Zen training is likening our mind to a body of water. When calm and quiet, it reflects the conditions around it clearly; when stirred up and turbulent, it distorts everything.

In essence, patience is the ability to tolerate discomfort. It’s a useful skill, and one that is being put to the test right now: a full year into a pandemic.

In my Zen training over the last couple of weeks, I have begun to notice a divide that exists between me (my ego), putting ‘me’ at the center of the result, against a more profound sense of self (my true nature) which sees the issue with radical honesty.

I have been struggling with zazen recently. While I am still sitting, my real meditation these days is to visit a stream near my house nearly every day.

Since my last blog post, where I stated, ‘I’m not a morning person’ I’ve been trying to let go of the labels I’ve gathered and glued firmly to myself over the years. It’s taken me time to realise how unhelpful they are and this new blog post was supposed to focus on this very topic.