Good morning. Welcome to the San Francisco Zen Center. I'm curious, how many people are here for the first time? And how many people have been here for more than 20 years? I guess everybody else must be in between. Well, it's always a pleasure and real honor for me to be here and and speak here. My name is Mark Lester and I feel like I grew up here at the Zen Center. I was a resident from my early 20s to early 30s and these days I get to practice in the business world and a lot of my life and my current activity and vow is bringing mindfulness, meditation, emotional intelligence, and to some degree, I like to think a sense of the practice of emptiness and compassion into the world of business.

[01:14]

And I recently wrote a book that I'm kind of going to weave in talking about this book with also just talking about practice, and particularly, I think, the practice of bringing our lives alive. And the name of the book is called Less, Accomplishing More by Doing Less, and it's really a book about how we bring our lives alive. And I think I'm going to start by just reading from the prologue, which starts with a quote by Mark Twain that says, Having lost sight of our goals, we redouble our efforts. Having lost sight of our goals, we redouble our efforts. There's an old story of a man riding very fast on a horse. As he rides past his friend standing on the side of the road, the friend yells, where are you going? The rider turns toward his friend and yells, I don't know, ask the horse.

[02:19]

I don't know. Paul, you might know where this story actually comes from. Do you know? Yeah, I see it in then text, but I never quite knew where it originated, so now it's an American business story. Yes. Aha, that's good, Ask the Bus, the new version. The taste and intensity of our lives, both at work and at home, leave many of us feeling like that person riding a frantically galloping horse. Our daily incessant busyness, too much to do and not enough time, the pressure to produce a to-do list and tick off items by each day's end seems to decide the direction and quality of our existence for us. But if we approach our days in a different way, we can consciously change this out-of-control pattern. It requires only the courage to do less.

[03:24]

This may sound easy, but doing less can actually be very hard. Too often we mistakenly believe that doing less makes us lazy and results in a lack of productivity. Instead, doing less helps us savor what we do accomplish. We learn to do less of what is extraneous and engage in fewer self-defeating behaviors. So we craft a productive life that we feel truly good about. Just doing less for its own sake can be simple, startling, and transformative. Imagine having a real and unhurried conversation in the midst of an unrelenting workday with someone you care about. Imagine completing one discrete task at a time and feeling calm and happy about it. In this book, I offer a new approach, what I call a less manifesto. And by the way, that my name is lesser is strictly a coincidence. Or is it? I focus mostly on our work life, but the approach is equally useful for our personal life.

[04:33]

In fact, the two hemispheres of our work and personal lives constantly reflect on and affect each other, each changing and reinforcing the other. And while the program requires some explaining on my part and patience on yours, I promise it is simple. and enjoyable to follow. Every life has great meaning, but the meaning of our own can often be obscured by the fog of constant activity and plain bad habits. Recognize and change these, and we can again savor deeply the ways we contribute to the workplace, enjoy the sweetness of our lives, and share openly and generously with the ones we love. Less busyness leads to appreciating the sacredness of life Doing less leads to more love, more effectiveness, and internal calmness, and a greater ability to accomplish more of what matters most to us and by extension to others and the world.

[05:36]

So a lot of people, when they hear about this subtitle of this book about accomplishing more by doing less, it seems impossible, paradoxical. And it is. It is in some way. It's paradoxical, but I would say not impossible. And meditation practice, or zazen practice, somehow we have these ideas about what meditation practice is. When we say zazen practice, I think is more to the spirit of just sitting without expecting anything. This is the ultimate radical practice of doing less, is zazen practice. What if we could sit with complete curiosity and also complete a complete sense of vow, which is one of the things I want to weave into today's talk, which is the theme of this practice period, which Michael and Vicky are leading.

[07:00]

Because in a way, doing less requires a kind of vow. And the vow of trusting, trusting and leaping in and living our lives from a higher place. You know, the word, I looked up I looked up the word vow because I was wondering what it meant. And it's a promise that involves some kind of higher power, something outside of ourselves. And I also, you know, in Buddhist practice, this vow in some way is to vow to live a life that embraces and penetrates what in Zen practice are called the three marks. And these are the three particular categories of awareness and understanding that is said that every Buddhist teaching has to have all three of these, or it's not really a Zen teaching, a Buddhist teaching.

[08:11]

And these are impermanence, no self, and awakening, or nirvana. And in some way, the topic of this book, Leth, and the topic of this talk is about how it looks like these are two completely separate things. Doing Leth, sitting meditation, sitting zazen, stepping out of the busyness in our lives. But there's also this sense of accomplishment. And what is it that we actually want to get done, that there actually are real problems in the world. There's an awful lot of suffering. There's an awful lot of violence. There's a lot of pain. There's hunger. There's things that need to be done. And how can we make ourselves vehicles to be able to solve some of these problems?

[09:14]

How can we find what's in our deepest hearts? This is a story that, excuse me for people who were at the book talk last night, but this is a, I'll tell it differently. But this is, I think, this is one of my favorite kind of real world stories about how these practices actually can be very practical and useful in our day-to-day lives. And this particular story is something that had a lot to do with inspiring me to to persevere and write this book. This is a story that I was asked to facilitate a two hour session in the middle of a three day board of directors retreat out at Green Gulch. But this was a board of directors of a large national organization that was composed of CEOs and heads of nonprofits from all over the country.

[10:23]

And they were meeting out at Green Gulch for three days of a strategic planning session. And I was asked to come do whatever I wanted in the middle of this session. And I walked into Green Gulch, and I came onto the Wheelwright Center. And I was met by one of the CEOs who was in this retreat. And he pulled me aside and said, this retreat is not going well. We just fired the last facilitator. Welcome to our retreat. So I walked into the room, and I could feel, I could really feel the tension that was in the room. And I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I did what I know how to do, which is to teach Zao Zen. So I said, let's all, we're all going to sit some meditation together. Could everyone please sit down? And about... about a third of the people in the room, mostly women, leaped to the front to come sit.

[11:29]

I think it was just such a relief for them, having been in, this was a day and a half, of people being really frustrated, not being able to do strategic planning.

[11:39]

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