Mindfulness is both profound and potent. Marc Lesser suggests that it is not about holding the busy world at bay, it’s to cultivate a more alive, responsive, effective and warm-hearted way of being within the world as it already exists and within a life you already live. This deep dialogue explores how to find composure right in the midst of the storm and ways to integrate mindfulness into our daily life. He shares the story of how, with no experience as a cook, he ended up as chief cook at a major Zen retreat center supervising fifteen people to serve three gourmet meals a day to seventy residential students and seventy to eighty overnight guests. This taught him to summon up a sense of kindness in a highly stressful environment. He says when you are hot and tired and the pressure is on, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” From this experience he helped to develop Search Inside Yourself (SIY), a mindfulness-based leadership training program which he helped develop at Google. Zen priest Norman Fisher was asked to attend an early meeting of SIY. When he learned that he was expected to speak, he quickly jotted down some notes on a blank piece of paper and spoke “off the cuff.” With permission, Marc was able to turn the seven guiding principles spoken that day into the core principles for teaching mindfulness. In describing the seventh principle he writes, “The intention of the Seventh Practice is to see or recognize the most important thing in any given moment. Even in the midst of our busy lives we can’t avoid challenges, or problems, or grief, or death, but when we feel confused and overwhelmed, we can remember: eep making it simpler and simpler still. Each moment in each day, keep making life less complicated, so we are more focused, spacious, and present. So we prioritize the most important action to take.” Here we explore some of those seven principles.
