When We Unpin Our Hopes

By Jen Ayres

Last month I finished the Zen Leader series, a three-year journey that has honestly changed the fabric of who I am. Zen Leader 3 happened at the right time for me. I’m raring to go, to open up to the future. The pandemic has brought talk of the ‘old normal’ and the ‘new normal,’ but right now who even knows which normal they’re experiencing? And why do we even care? Where’s the adventure in normal? Normality might bring feelings of safety, and of operating within our comfort zone. But how often do our comfort zones imprison us, preventing us from reaching our potential? If there were ever a perfect time to tear up our own operating manual and explore a new existence, it must be now.

ZL3 guides us into opening up to allow in all the possibilities of the future. To manifest the future consciously. In one exercise, Ginny asked us to leave the house and take a walk as our future selves. I decided to walk to the local shop to buy milk, giving my future self the chance to operate in the real world. As I waited to pay, a man in his 60s pulled out a thick wad of lottery scratch cards and handed them to the shop assistant. My first reaction was to sigh, thinking this would take forever and Ginny only gave us 15 mins! But not wanting my future to self to be triggered in this way, with a deep hara breath I let those feelings go and just observed.

I know how it feels when the future seems constricted, I know those who believe only a shift of miracle magnitude will improve the course of their life.

The man had a number of winning tickets which he immediately plowed back into buying more scratch cards, and I was struck heavily by what a gift Zen Leader had given me. We’d just been exploring how to create a boundless future and here I was watching the pinning of hopes to one-in-a-million odds. I don’t know that man or his situation but this moment affected me deeply, then and since. I know how it feels when the future seems constricted, I know those who believe only a shift of miracle magnitude will improve the course of their life.

I feel how fortunate I am to have been through the Zen Leader series, to have Zen practice in my life, to have blasted through old wounds and limitations and found a new way to live with a sense of free-ness, connection and opportunity. I’m profoundly grateful to Ginny, Andy, Cris, Gordon, everyone at Zen Leader, everyone at Chosei Zen and everyone who has taken part in the ZL series with me. This work changes lives. I look forward to training again and again with you all.

If you’ve started the Zen Leader journey but haven’t completed it, I really encourage you to come back to it when you feel the time is right. The journey takes however long it needs to but when you continue to move along it, continue to practise, a new, vast and enriched path of possibility opens up.

Jen Ayres first attended a Zen Leadership program in 2018, which had an immediate and major impact on her life during a very difficult time. She’s (slowly) breathing into Zen practice, gradually understanding just how beneficial this practice is and sharing her journey with all of us

See the recent re-run of Jen's piece after her first Zen Leader experience