Tag Archives: Maia Duerr

Book Review: Work That Matters and Right Livelihood 2.0 for values that matter more

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Work that Matters: Create a livelihood that reflects your Core Intention
Author: Maia Duerr
Publisher: Parallax Press

Disclosure: I was provided the book by the publisher for an honest review. Maia Duerr and I have been friends for almost a decade and she know I’m incapable of not calling something for what it is. 

There are unending lists of books on how to shift, change, pivot from your currently dissatisfied life to one that is enriching (personally and financially). Some are planners that navigate the complex world of job search and selling your talents. Others tie together finding a new career with finding that hidden inner self who can flourish if just given the career shell in which to do so. Very few offer a deep dive into the center of making any change: who you are and the values that shape you. More precisely, few authors have the chops to weave together Buddhist principles of ethical living through Right Livelihood and the demands of our modern craving world. Acknowledging that the 21st century is vastly different from the socio-economic times of the historic Buddha, Maia Duerr crafts what she cheekily calls “Right Livelihood 2.0”(I’m short-forming that to RL 2.0), a way to find a value-congruent path among the challenges of today’s financial and economic potholes.

In Work That Matters, Duerr takes on this challenge with surgical precision and an unblinking gaze. She begins with the reality that we are all averse to change, even if change means realizing our dreams. Astutely, Duerr shines the light on our well-cultivated talent to turn away from anything that results in discomfort. After a chapter of getting to know her and one that lay the framework of “Liberation-based Livelihood”, we dig deep to recognize and uproot our craftiness in deluding ourselves that “here” is better than “there”. Psychologically wise, she names the resistance as it is likely to show up – the five hindrances that masquerade as social media jaunts, diligent house cleaning, re-framing the current situation as “good enough”, and so on.

After setting up the three foundations – self-awareness, resilience, and persistence – Duerr introduces each of the six keys to Liberation-based Livelihood. What impressed me is the amount of time I took on Key 1: Becoming intimate with your Core Intention. This chapter captures the current arc of practice in the secular world of mindfulness: a call to clarify our values and (as I discuss in my own research) to examine closely the incongruence we experience when we are not in alignment with those values. Thich Nhat Hanh, a teacher Duerr and I share in our own practice, teaches that our values are the North Star; the intention is to use them to navigate the waters of our lives, not to live on the star itself. Over the years, I find deeper and deeper meaning in that teaching. The most recent is that our values are not intended to carry us above the world as it is, they are not to segregate us in a holier-than-thou bubble. The dance of our actions carry us close and far from the core intention of our lives and this is where the beauty of change resides.

In Duerr’s teachings, we sense into the experience of the mileage we put in approaching and avoiding this center. The chapters contain several reflection exercises, of which the question “What is your relationship with this key?” will be the most challenging yet most rewarding. In essence, this exercise takes the measure of our congruence with our heart’s center.

In Key 3, Break Through Inertia and Take Action, Duerr ups the challenge. I can sum that up as “quit jerking yourself around.” In other words, get out of your head, you’re not fooling anyone with that perfectionist stance, and be human. Thankfully Duerr is a quite a bit kinder and offers key practices in each chapter that are detailed and incisive.

Key 6, Building Allies and Asking for Help, offers a truly challenging practice in an individualistic and self-centered world where allies can quickly become foes and survival instincts drive selfishness. The reflection exercise can evoke disappointment and sadness as much as gratitude and appreciation. I had to remember that the idea we should be surrounded by hordes of dear and beloved friends is likely a construction of our social media-infused world. Although relationships confer positive effects of good health and wellness, social psychology research shows that while we can hole a circle of about 150 friends (Dunbar’s number) we really only have a handful (maybe only 3-5) of intimate relationships. It becomes a bit tricky then know how to load the demands on our intimates when we need help. So, Duerr’s conceptualization of Key 6 is all the more important to read carefully. She defines connections as allies, not friends, drawing on the word as a derivative of alloy, the capacity of the combination to create a different and stronger material. These are connections that generate new and creative outcomes through support, sharing of resources, and creativity.

In the current environment of uncertainty and toxic, divisive relationships, Duerr’s book is a welcomed resource. We may be facing years of economic challenges and job loss is definitely going to take its toll. The gift – and gist – of Work That Matters is crucial in the face of the truth that we can no longer simply find a job ladder that will carry us to our Cloud Nine. Many of us will be confronted with losing our work and careers. The mission statements of most organizations are crafted to resonate with our ideals. The work on the ground, however, has been and remains vastly different from those ideals. But more of us will be faced with seeing the incongruence between what we believe in and what the organization requires us to believe in. And, there is a reality of survival that keeps many of us frozen in our tracks, unable to consider a change for many important reasons. Even if Duerr’s teachings don’t allow us to break away, perhaps they can help us become stealth ethicists in a world that now desperately needs some.

the heart of mindfulness practice – walking the mountain closer

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DSC_0153I’ve been journeying. Nowhere special. Just these inner paths of tangled neural wiring, trying to unravel a few connections, solder others and snip out the truly fried ones. This work of un-self-making is a tough one. If I’m not careful, I end up more tangled and frazzled than I started. More often than not, I forget the intention (to drain the swamp) and resort to playing whack-a-mole (or alligator) in futile attempts to resist assimilation into unwholesomeness.

The great thing about having kalyanamitras is that one can spend a morning whacking moles and the afternoon having an hour of gentle guidance about how to cultivate compassion for the critters. After all, even moles suffer. If you’re looking for some of that gentle guidance, by the way, I do suggest you access my dear spiritual pal Maia Duerr who has a terrific new venture called Guidance & Encouragement Sessions.

The conversation with Maia folded neatly into a book I was reading, Walk Like a Mountain by Innen Ray Parchelo (published by Sumeru Books).  As much as I avoid my tangled mess of neural circuitry, I avoid walking meditation. However, Parchelo makes it very compelling from the start of the book where he lays out the framework of a journey (who doesn’t love a road trip) to the end where he brings us home to ourselves with a caveat of the necessity for humility. Walk Like a Mountain packs a wickedly dense amount of information into 204 pages. Not only does Parchelo draw together the threads of Buddhist teachings on walking meditation, he takes us down side roads and up mountain paths of archetypes and ecological history of landscapes he has walked. Furthermore, the chapters on preparation and adaptations to walking (disabilities) are seductive in convincing me that this might just be something I could do. The “Journey” chapters are really practice sessions; you could almost make them into a walk-focused sesshin.

As I read through the carefully structured instructions to cultivate wholesome movement through space, it became clear that a practice that contains even a smidgen of reluctance (i.e., my resistance to kinhin, indoors and out) is really a resistance to the totality of practice. More than that, it is a reluctance to enter the deeper aspects of practice. Parchelo writes frequently in the book of Jizo Bodhisattva who walks into the hottest of hells to save sentient beings. And it struck me that relegating walking meditation to the status of “grit your teeth and get it over with” misses the heart of practice.

To doubt the walking of the mountain means that one does not yet know one’s own walking. It is not that one does not walk but that one does not yet know, has not made clear, this walking.

Dogen, Mountains and Waters Sutra

The heart of mindfulness practice is to connect with our life just as it is. Sitting, standing, walking, talking, writing, eating, sleeping, defecating, urinating. It’s all movement – some large, some micro – that bring us into intimate connection with the emerging self. There can be, as Parchelo makes clear with respect to the “Zen of running/biking/tennis etc”, no substitutions.

Life. Just this.

The guidance conversation with Maia complemented Parchelo’s work on the power of navigating true to one’s intentions. In the case of entering the heart of mindfulness practice, it is dwelling in the space of our life that is vibrant and life-giving. It is a coming alive and bringing the mountain closer to our center.

Tomorrow, Frank and I lead our very first residential retreat in secular mindfulness practice. I may wear my rakusu anyway. Just because. It’s a frightening and exciting prospect of watching forty mountains walk six steps closer to the heart of an intimate life. I’m hoping Dogen will say a few words of self-making and that the labyrinth walking at nightfall will bring me in the knowing of the walking mountain.