Category: Buddhism

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Buddh-ish: Business Planning and Change

2023 has simply flown by for me. It has been a particularly eventful year for me: I had a couple of medical things that were scary, including some gnarly surgery, all of which turned out well (luckily); we did a lot of old house maintenance stuff; I got my motorcycling license and put a deposit down on a new bike; I got engaged1; and I’m currently holding down the fort while the fiancé is off on a two-week solo motorcycle trip for some much needed renewal2.

With the exception of the old house stuff, because there is always old house stuff, none of this was anticipated when the year started. 

I’m a big planner. I’ve got great natural organizational skills which were first honed by my years of repping and producing photoshoots and then rather perfected by attending law school after age 40 while also going through a divorce3. Planning is great; it can really help you be more successful in whatever you are doing. I’m a huge believer that one should make a business plan every year at least for their business. I do and I follow it as much as possible. But planning has its limits: you have to be willing to roll with what life actually throws at you. 

That last part is tough for many people, especially people who like to control. It requires letting go and just riding through whatever the changes are. It means potentially shifting plans and priorities. It requires bending with the wind. Control freaks like me have to learn those skills: the skill of letting go; of being able to sit in uncomfortableness4; of letting things be as they are.

Most creatives, oddly like most lawyers, are control freaks. I think this comes from many of both groups having experienced traumas in our lives, especially as children, but I’ll leave assigning the causation to the mental health professionals to sort out. Point is, creatives (and lawyers) like to control things in their lives and often do not feel well when they feel out of control.

I have a secret to tell you: we are always out of control. 
I have another secret: we always get through it.

What do I mean? Just that humans like to feel in control but really, we can’t control anything other than our own behavior. We can’t even control our own thoughts, often! In Buddhism, they talk about thoughts arising—as if they were their own beings. We can’t control them from arising5, only notice them. But behavior? Yup, that we can control. We can choose to respond thoughtfully rather than react thoughtlessly, for example. Or to be kind. Or to be generous. Or to be compassionate. So, when the world goes on being the world, you do have the ability to choose what you do in it. And, no matter what you choose, impermanence6 dictates that whatever it is that is making us feel out of control will pass even if we do absolutely nothing about it.

Yeah, control freaks hate this…at first. We want to fix, or stop the bad feelings, or hold onto the good feelings… but really, we can’t do anything but ride the waves and choose how to behave well. Once we accept that reality, the bumps in life become much less troublesome, even the big scary ones. 

In my case, all the weirdness of this year, could have easily thrown me into a tizzy. I could have panicked about a gazillion times or tried to force an outcome, but it would have done more harm than good. Instead, I observed the unexpected and rode out the discomforts, without trying to control them. I worked my plans, but changed them as needed to accommodate the unexpected. In the end, I have had a very good year, both personally and professionally. In my work, I have helped my clients and received both many kind words and some greenbacks in the process. I am grateful for it all.

Now, I’m getting to work on my 2024 business planning. And life planning. Knowing that both are as flexible as prairie grass in the wind. I encourage you to do the same. 

  1. It was a surprise proposal, for sure. Also, in case you were wondering, no date set nor is one likely to be any time soon—we’re in no rush and are rather more likely to just elope sometime when we feel like it. ↩︎
  2. Something I deeply encourage everyone to do at least once a year—take some time to yourself to get grounded again. ↩︎
  3. Definitely not a combo I recommend to anyone, but it was a great way to prove up my resilience and organizational skills. ↩︎
  4. I highly suggest reading Pema Chödron’s works on this subject. She’s been incredibly helpful in my practice. ↩︎
  5. Well, most of us can’t. There are higher techniques in Buddhism to train the mind to control thoughts more but, for most of us, just knowing that thoughts arise on their own is enough to handle. ↩︎
  6. Everything is impermanent and constantly changing. In short, there is no there there. Good or bad, it will come and go. ↩︎
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Buddh-ish: Breathing

Every morning I do stretches (some yoga-based, some just basic stretches) while also doing a breathing exercise. The exercise is called Ujjayi and the variation I do is seven seconds of inbreath through the nose then seven seconds of outbreath through the nose. Each breath is into the belly, not the chest and, in some ways, it’s much harder than it sounds. In fact, I started with a shorter interval, and worked up to the 7/7. Now I do 50 of those, mostly while also doing deep stretches. Takes just under 12 minutes. I follow up that practice (usually) with a formal sitting mediation.

I got into the idea of doing formal breathing exercises after reading Breath, by James Nestor. He was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross at the start of the pandemic and also on the 10% Happier podcast; I found his work fascinating. In his book, he discusses just how poorly we humans in modern society breathe, generally, and how that affects our bodies and (importantly) our minds. 

Backing up a bit… I’ve had anxiety issues since, oh, birth practically. Probably all of us, especially those of us with those issues, have experienced someone telling us to slow our breathing when we’re upset or panicky. Generally good advice, but often difficult in the moment. I mean, it’s one thing to be told to slow down and breathe deeply, but how to do that when your brain is set to 11, that’s a trick! 

Nestor, in his book, really gets into the science of breathing and the breath. For a nerd like me, that was incredibly helpful. He experimented on himself with all sorts of techniques so he writes about how doing something might have felt awful (especially at first) but really it was better for the body. The science proved it up, even if it felt like he wasn’t getting enough air.

After reading the book the first time (I’ve read it twice now), I got the app iBreathe to coach me through different breathing techniques. It’s the app I use every day now for my 50 breaths. I also practice the 4-7-8 technique sometimes with that app. 4-7-8 breathing (in for 4, hold for 7, out for 8) helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is what helps us relax and calm down. The parasympathetic nervous system is the counter to the sympathetic nervous system, which is the seemingly wrongly named system that rather than calming us is what puts us on alert or in fight-or-flight mode. 

Anyway, I use 4-7-8 to get through things like scary medical appointments and procedures and really think it was a huge part in how I survived my surgery and its pre- and post-op pain with minimal medication. Whenever I get upset or anxious, I do 4-7-8 and it helps very quickly. 

The 7/7 breathing I do is more about training my breathing generally. 7/7 makes me very conscious to breathe into my belly rather than chest-breathe and to breathe through my nose (both ways), both of which are what my body wants to do by default. Breathing through the nose is much better for us and what our bodies are designed to do, and yet we are a bunch of unconscious mouth and into the chest breathers, as Nestor points out. 

Since I’ve started doing the 7/7 training, I find I become breathless when exerting myself much less than before. I’m just starting to run again, after the surgery, and it feels like I am not struggling with the breath the way I have in the past when running. I attribute that to the training.  I also take fewer breaths, overall. In slowing my breathing, the anxiety doesn’t hit the way it used to or at least nowhere near as often. 

In Buddhist meditation, we often use the breath as an anchor of focus. Rather than controlling the breath, we simply notice “inbreath…outbreath” or maybe count them, as they come naturally. So, breath is a regular part of the practice. Training the breath has, for me, been an obvious outgrowth of that simple practice. Along with traditional mediation, learning to breathe longer, slower breaths, through the nose (7/7) and techniques like 4-7-8, increase my being in the present moment and generally made my life better. I hope this information may help you as well. 

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Buddh-ish: Stress

Today is the first of the new series I mentioned in my last post and the topic is stress. This is a huge problem for lawyers and creatives. These days, pretty much everyone I know has some issues with it, thanks especially to the pandemic and Trump years.

Stress can be a good thing–it helps us do well in athletics, for example, but even there only if it isn’t too great. Chronic stress can be a big negative to our health, both mental and physical.

The folks over at the Greater Good Center have published a quiz to help us evaluate our stress–that quiz is embedded below. After you finish, they offer suggestions for coping.

The really great thing about the Greater Good folks is that they do science-based work. While there are lots of references to things like mindfulness (a very Buddhist-y thing), they don’t offer woo-woo but rather evidence-based ideas. There are concrete things to do which, if you’re anything like me, makes all the difference in the world. I mean, it’s one thing to say “lighten up” but it’s much more effective for me if someone suggests something active like “write in your journal at least 3 good things that happened to you today.”

So, if you’re feeling stressed, I’d like to suggest you take the quiz and try some of the options suggested. Tailor them to your own life and try some things just to see if they help. I know, for me, meditating every morning as well as taking the time to do about 10 minutes of breathing exercises (I do it with deep stretches) make all the difference in my day. I can go back to these tools every time I feel the stress crank up, too.

As always, I hope this helps.

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New Series for Creatives and Lawyers: Buddh-ish

As many of you know or may have noticed from this site, I’m a lawyer and a (bad) Buddhist. Some people think this is contradictory, but really, it’s not. My Buddhist practices enhance my lawyering skills.

Now, I say “(bad) Buddhist” because I’ve never formally “taken refuge” (formally taken vows) and consider myself secular and still struggle greatly with the idea of reincarnation; but I have to say that studying Buddhism and practicing as I do has made my life, including my work as a lawyer, immeasurably better.

For example, in lawyering I have to deal with people who get nasty, who lie, and who generally would have made the 30-year-old me react by verbally ripping them to shreds in very personal attacks. Now, I don’t take their behaviors personally but instead take a more objective view of it all. Those people are experiencing their own suffering and striking out–like a reactive dog. That doesn’t mean I let them walk over me/my clients, not at all, but I do stick to the law and the facts rather than attacking the people themselves. Oddly, this often has the additional result of frustrating the hell out of the opposition as I don’t rise to their bait and works as a sort of intellectual jiu-jitsu making them stumble. More often than not, their further attacks just make me laugh to myself at the absurdity of their actions while I stay on-point and get the job done for my client.

In an example from my personal life, I’m pretty sure I would not have gotten through the medical stuff I just went through (I’m actually not fully healed yet, but well on my way) without a strong meditation practice. It doesn’t make pain magically disappear or anything like that, but it does help to remind me that all things are impermanent, including pain and fear, and learning to focus on the breath helps when relaxation is much needed. I suspect that I got off the heavy meds a lot sooner for it, but that’s just a guess.

Anyway, in an effort to help others, in some posts this year (and maybe longer) I’m going to pay less attention to the law and more to some Buddhist and Buddhist-adjacent topics and tools. I’m calling the series Buddh-ish, because I’m a goofball and like the linguistic shorthand. The point of all this is not to convert anyone (any Buddhist who tries to convert someone to Buddhism is doing it wrong, IMO) but rather to offer up some of the tools/practices I’ve used and have found helpful so that you can try them out for yourself if you choose. None of it requires changing your own religious/spiritual beliefs and all if it is offered with the best of intentions.

The first post will go up in the next few days. Until then, I’ll leave you with what I say at the end of every meditation:

May all beings be happy;
May all beings be healthy;
May all beings live with ease and in safety;
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

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