use bad behavior

to nurture your better angels

I’ve been a Zen student now for two less than one score years and one of my favorite parts about our practice involves cursing and overreacting. I mean that. I’m not being cute. It’s true about Zen that the more of a jerk you are in any given moment, the more data you have to work with, and the more robust your practice gets to be. Let me say more lest some of you read this as a license to amplify jerkiness.

We’re running scripts, all the time. Might as well take a look at them.

Zen is a pragmatic approach to softening tough stories in the heart-mind with the aim of generating a more wise and compassionate way of life.¹ To make this even remotely possible, the practice demands that students be doggedly self-observant and frustratingly personally accountable. This makes Zen the anathema to escapism. Students don’t, for example, get the enduring pleasure of bypassing difficult thoughts, emotions, or sensations. Nor do we get the pleasure of taking ourselves seriously when we blame others for our reactions, and we rarely (read: never²) get to have blissed-out spiritual experiences or transcendent altered states. No. In lieu of all those sexy things, Zen students get to sit for long stretches—stomachs growling, knees cramping, backs destroyed—in semi-complete silence and stillness, and in that space we observe internal activity, acquiring the kinds of self-knowledge no one wants to have.

Not to be irreverent but what the f*ck, right? What kind of nincompoop wants to sit stone-still for hours and hours, sometimes days and days, and pay close attention to the inner world?

To answer my question, which I’m certain you’re now fascinated by, I do. A lot of my friends and colleagues do, too. You can call us weird; I would if I were you.³ But part of the reason we do this weird thing is described in the image below. (FYI, it’s from our Deep Self Design course, which some of you should sign up for in 2025.) Take this image in for a spell and I’ll bring it home with an unflattering personal story.

A hearty Zen practice takes you all the way to the Inward Turn (and beyond), where you can learn to notice, separate from, and surrender faster your reality distortion fields.

True Jerk Story: Morning Sun

This is a teaching tale, and a disclaimer to this story is that I’m telling on myself but also telling a little on my husband, Chet, when I share it. I believe truth is useful and we’re lost without it, so one truth about my husband is that he lays in bed a freakish amount of time on any given day. The man sleeps less like a human and more like a guard dog or a fish, which is to say that he half-sleeps with one eye open, ready for battle and rarely sinking into deep sleep. For this reason, Chet requires long periods of “mattress rest” every day. When he does rise, he shifts into beast mode to get things done. I feel

Daniel Pink

’s When book could solve this biorhythmic mystery. For now, suffice it to say it was a normal day of Chet being guard dog-like and a normal day of me rising after seven-ish hours of sleep to start hours of team/work before he even sits up.

On this particular morning, Chet was disenchanted with the Wonder-Woman level of effort I was making and felt the need to rise from his partial-slumber and start harrumphing about the state of the house, and me, and our dogs. With the world-weariness of Atlas, he trudged into our backyard to clean up an alleged “mess” I made while mansplaining how I must learn how to do X, Y, and Z better.

This felt like outrageous, incendiary hoo-ha and it was not going to fly after five hours of envying his “mattress rest,” so I followed him into the yard using a voice that sounded like grackles screeching and called him an ‘entitled asshole,’ explaining to him that I haven’t met a woman on Earth who gets to luxuriate in bed 11 hours a day only to rise and complain that the work being done to help keep things afloat is lackluster.

As I screeched, Chet worked diligently to ignore me, so I continued standing indignantly atop our outside porch, feeling the need to reinforce my unassailable narrative and, for emphasis (since he clearly was not hearing me), I declared that he was a ‘mega-entitled super-asshole’ and stomped into the house. These indignities flung at Chet were loud enough for my neighbor smoking weed over the fence to hear, and it’s not implausible that this neighbor dismissed my entire body of work at the Center for Deep Self Design because people who run creative-contemplative centers should obviously be flawless people who issue no foul words, thoughts, or deeds. (To be clear, if my neighbor had come to this conclusion, it would be ridiculous on its face since someone with an real inner-science practice knows there’s no such thing as a pristine person.) Neighbor’s imaginary opinion aside, this mud-slinging was not my shining moment as a team member but it WAS a shining moment for Zen practice. Why? Let me share the image again.

In this scene, where do you think I landed on the journey of dots? If you chose the orange dot, you would be correct. I was having a strong reaction to the swarm of stimuli Chet presented and I was aware of this reaction, but I had no agency relative to my blather and was not capable of pausing to choose another path.

And so we arrive at one of the most significant whys of inner-observation: because slowing down, sifting through, and being emotionally honest about what is happening in us gives us a shot at a silver lining.

Only with sincere self-knowledge and a technique for course-correction is there a prayer for a better outcome. How that process precisely works is the subject of a later post about the Deep Self Design method (or you could just come to our course!). But why I would want a better outcome is so my relationship with my husband doesn’t spontaneously combust. We can all get behind that sentiment relative to those we love and, as students of mindfulness know, difficult behavior turns into a benefit if we use it to nurture the better angels of our nature.

In case you’re wondering what we teach at the Center if the leader herself lets the occasional screech fly: We teach authenticity, courage, and clarity.

We also invite guest teachers to share wisdom we can all use.

What we don’t teach is invulnerability, perfectionism, striving, or sainthood—not only because those things are unrealistic, but because they’re uninteresting.

What IS interesting is celebrating and learning from mistakes rather than avoiding them, and embracing self-knowledge even when it scares us. What IS interesting is examining our perceptions and beliefs to discover where they muddle reality and compromise connection. What IS interesting is facing our blindspots and attempting to own our stories while meeting ourselves with compassion at the same time. Imagine a world where not only do we practice that, but our leaders do as well. It sounds impossible, inconceivable, light-years away, but it’s worth imagining. It’s worth trying.

A moment of art to impress upon you the choice we make when we pay attention to our inner life. Image by Kelvy Bird.

Our bi-weekly, free SOL Circles⁴ begin in 2025, so come as you are—cursing silently, judging everyone, overreacting to the task at hand. What better way to learn about ourselves and change the course of habits we don’t love? What better way to shine our corner of the world?

To realer-than-real humanity,
Sun and Liya

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• The first of a workshop trilogy with acclaimed author and groundbreaking spiritual care facilitator Robert (Bob) Falconer takes place on February 15. WHY IT MATTERS TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE truly is not to be missed.

• Course Opening in March 2025: Deep Self Design® Foundations! This is our potent 12-week signature course with a thoughtful, warm learning cohort.

• Coaching Spots Available: If you are in a challenging transition and persistent internal patterns make it tough to resource yourself, we provide targeted experiential mentoring and coaching. Explore how this offering works.

1. It is also about much more, and about absolutely nothing, so think of this as one facet of a multi-faceted, empty practice. Haha hahhhaa! Huzzah! #zenhumor

2. Think of this as an asymptote approaching zero for all of Zen time.

3. We look even more ridiculous when we walk freakishly slowly and chant in monotone. I mean, my god. Stop.

4. Sharing Our Light Circles are free to paid subscribers, which sounds like a marketing ploy but doesn’t feel, look, or act like one.