How Zen Helped Me
By Kouji Miki
Unemployment, I was ruled by the fear of “money”
After finishing my master’s degree at university, I was still in the doctoral program and continuing my research when I received an offer to join a venture company. It was a company that supported small and medium-sized manufacturing companies.
The research I was doing for my master’s and doctoral degrees was specifically about online matching between large and small companies and their management strategies. There were synergies between my research and the company’s business. The management of the company offered me a position after reading my paper that I had published on the web. The offer was to work together to develop a strategy for the venture.
At the time, as a management researcher, I saw other doctoral students easily publishing their papers in academic conferences, while my own paper submission was slow in coming. I struggled to finish my paper and finally submitted it, but it was rejected by many people. Although I had entered the doctoral program, I was beginning to feel that I had reached my limit. So, although I had some doubts, I decided to spend my days at the venture company that I was invited to.
Nine years have passed since then. The work was interesting and I worked excitedly from morning to night, and I became a board member of the venture. However, the wind changed. In 2008, right after I became a board member, the Lehman Shock (The global economic crisis of 2008) occurred. The venture company, which was aiming to go public, experienced a sharp drop in business performance due to the Lehman shock. Because of this, we were faced with the absurd situation of having to increase sales by several tens of percent for two consecutive years in order to go public.
My personal motivation was still high. However, the impact of the Lehman shock was huge, and the other businesses the company was involved in began to go wrong. The company’s business performance stagnated and the listing was abruptly halted. I will not go into the details of the twists and turns that followed. However, as a full-time IT executive, I was removed from the website design and development department that I had been involved in. I became the director in charge of a department that I was completely new to. The company dismissed the directors and took a drastic pay cut, starting with the highest paid. I was then told that I would have to decide for myself whether or not to stay with the company.
I had just gotten married and built a new house around the time I was appointed as a board member, so the financial uncertainty of not being able to earn the same level of income as before was unpredictable. Although the decision to stay with the company was ultimately left up to me, this treatment was effectively a restructuring. I felt so down that I couldn’t bring myself to go to work, and began to stay at home more and more.
Despite his condition, the company took good care of him as he had been with them since the beginning. I was given a six-month grace period before I left the company, and even after I left, the company took care of me in various ways and was very generous to me. I was truly bowled over.
I gave up my career as a management researcher and worked from early morning until late at night at a venture company. For a while, I thought I had achieved a certain level of success. So, to be honest, I was quite shocked. My pride was hurt. In addition to that, the first thing that struck me was a huge fear of money. As a board member, I was receiving a good salary, but how would I be able to pay back the mortgage on my house? Would I be able to pay off my life insurance? What should I say to my family?
A huge sense of fear covered my mind without end. Anxiety swirled around me, and I couldn’t do anything but think in circles with no clue to the solution. At home, there were many houseplants, a hobby of my wife. On the surface, she appeared to be calm, but in reality, she must have suffered a great deal of mental damage. As if the plants could understand my mind, they gradually lost their energy even though I watered them properly, and eventually they all withered.
Discovering Zazen on YouTube
There were many days when I felt a clenching sensation in my stomach. My equilibrium was numb, and there were days when I could not get out of bed in the morning. I was home alone and depressed. Eventually, I searched for a way to escape the fear.
How could I get rid of this uncontrollable fear? Grasping at straws, I entered keywords such as “calming methods” and “meditation” into a YouTube search. I knew that meditation was good for this kind of situation. Then I came across a video of Americans teaching how to do zazen in a rather funny Japanese way.
Of course, there are also videos of Japanese monks teaching on YouTube. I later found out that Zen Buddhism has a tradition of “Furitsu Monji,” in which the act of Zen itself is not described in language. Because of this, I decided to refer to the video of the young American in Japan rather than the video of the monk, since the monk’s video hardly talks about the details of how to do zazen. I tried to do zazen for the first time, just as I had seen him do.
The first time I actually tried zazen, it was much harder than I had imagined. I was very stiff and my legs hurt a lot. Even so, I gradually got used to it, starting with ten minutes and gradually increasing the amount of time I could sit: fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and finally one hour.
Zazen was a strange experience. When I first started to sit, my mind was filled with anxiety and worry caused by the fear of money. However, as I continued with zazen, I gradually stopped feeling those worries and anxieties. It was as if my anxiety was being expelled from my head along with my breath. I felt as if my anxiety was fading away. I began to devote myself selflessly to zazen in order to escape my anxiety, even if only for a little while.
As I got used to and accustomed to the numbness in my legs of zazen, various “fears” began to appear in my mind. It is thought that zazen is done with the aim of erasing miscellaneous thoughts, but in reality it is impossible to erase miscellaneous thoughts at all. In fact, it is impossible to eliminate miscellaneous thoughts. I decided to train myself to let them go without paying attention to each one that comes up.
The image is like this. A river is flowing in front of you. The river is flowing in front of me, and my thoughts are flowing one after another. In my case, the “fear” of money was flowing in front of me like a huge amount of sand flowing from upstream to downstream. I just let the mountain of fears flow past me. Fear, then another fear, then another fear. …… The more I savored the fears that flowed before me, the more I felt myself becoming desensitized to them.
Thorough dialogue with yourself = critical thinking
As I worked through my fears in this way, I was able to look at the “distractions” that arose in a very objective manner. Eventually, I realized that the thoughts that came up were actually a constant dialogue with myself.
This dialogue is invaluable. For example, in daily life, how many minutes can a person stay deeply focused on one thing while awake? We are constantly interacting with other people and the world around us is fast-paced. We are constantly being bombarded with information from social networking sites that send us notifications on vibrations.
We seem to be thinking a lot, but in today’s society where we are connected to smartphones and other information devices, it is difficult to “really concentrate” on one thing and “really think long and hard”. In fact, it seems that we can only concentrate for a few minutes at a time. In fact, it is difficult to see the true essence of things (although it is said to be the essence of things, it is often the case that it is not so close to the core that it really captures the essence) with such short concentration.
Zazen, on the other hand, is a world completely closed to oneself, a world of dialogue between “oneself” and “oneself” for 30 minutes to an hour. During that time, you are forced to think about one thing or another through dialogue with yourself. In a closed world, you can concentrate thoroughly on one thing and deepen your thoughts.
The habit of thinking thoroughly about a single thing can be called “critical thinking. Critical thinking is one of the techniques of structured thinking, but during zazen, the act of pondering over all possibilities and arriving at a result naturally leads to a pattern similar to structured thinking. You think through a problem (theme, problem) until it automatically leads you to the solution, “This is the only way. Then, the only option is to do it. As a result, your anxiety will be relieved.
As I became more and more accustomed to zazen, I found that the things that came to mind during zazen seemed to lead to various new business ideas. After a week, I had a notebook full of business ideas. After a week, he had a notebook full of business ideas, including a business plan to open a school to develop his own products.
As I began to come up with business ideas, I began to feel more positive and my anxiety began to fade away. Eventually, I got back on my feet and established enmono Inc. in 2009 with Shigeru Utsunomiya, a colleague at the venture company, to support the development of our own products. Since then, he has been helping companies develop their own products and services, in other words, helping them create innovation. In order to create any new business, whether it is a product or a service, it is essential to innovate in the true sense of the word, which is to create new value by combining various resources and ideas.
The business plan that I wrote in my zazen notebook when I was at the bottom of my career, to open a school to develop our own products, came to fruition a few years later as “zenschool” and has grown to become our main business.
Since then, my one-hour zazen session every morning has become my precious time to have a “dialogue” with myself.
Why the two of us at enmono are providing the dialogue
enmono has been run by two people since its establishment in 2009.
I’m often asked how a two-person operation can last so long without breaking up.
I have never been able to answer this question very well, but as I was writing this book, looking back on ourselves and researching dialogue, it became clear to me.
I think the people who asked us questions had the image of managers fighting each other in a heated debate. However, I realized that we were having a dialogue all along, not an argument.
Since the founding of the company, we had been providing an exciting business that was not profitable and that no one would try to copy, so there were no examples to refer to, and we were forced to solve the problem by ourselves.
Through dialogue, we were able to bring out things that we had noticed but had not been able to verbalize, things that were in each other’s mind but that we ourselves were not aware of.
I think we have been using the word “dialogue” in zenschool without really thinking about the fact that dialogue has such an effect. Once again, I am convinced that the reason why enmono has been able to survive until it enters its 10th year in business in June 2018 is because of the dialogue between the two managers.
I call it a “Zen-like” dialogue because it differs slightly from the nuance of the traditional word “dialogue”.
The conventional image of dialogue is that it is not a battle of opinions like a debate, but rather a search for common ground, where people express their true feelings to each other. This emphasis on coming up with new and different ideas can be called “Zen-like” dialogue.
In this book, we will also elaborate on the methods of innovation creation that we have continued to work on through zenschool and that have produced results. We want to systematize all the knowledge and know-how we have gained over the past eight years of zenschool practice and make it as open as possible. In the process of this book, I will use “mindfulness meditation” and “Zen dialogue” to explore the essence of things, and bring out the true sense of excitement that lies deep inside people. The book also discusses the case of zenschool, which has produced many innovations based on this method. Many people who read this book will realize what they really want to do, which will lead to innovation and start their own business. I would be very happy if this would bring us one step closer to our business philosophy, “Energize the world through exciting manufacturing.
This book is also an antithesis to the tendency to easily believe and adopt foreign theories and innovation processes just because they are popular, without properly examining and experiencing them. It is a warning against the possibility of destroying the inherent potential of Japanese organizations and companies.
By using a Zen-like thinking process that is firmly embedded in Japanese lifestyle, culture, and traditions, rather than the existing innovation methods developed in the West, we can create a new way of thinking that is not just a sham innovation that says to the outside world, “This is innovative, isn’t it? In other words, it is a true innovation in the sense that it is true to one’s intrinsic motivation, i.e., what one truly wants to do. — I would like to develop a new theory of innovation that overturns common sense.
Zen2.0 started as gratitude to Zen
After I started my business and managed to make a living, I started the International Conference on Zen and Mindfulness as a way of thanking Zen for helping me, and it has since become the largest of its kind in the world.
For me, it started simply as a way of thanking Zen for its help, but it has since grown to involve many people and is now in its fifth year.
This year’s theme is “A NEW EARTH~ Space to Flourish~” and it will be a global dialogue between Kamakura, Amsterdam and San Francisco on the question of what kind of new civilization we can create together by opening up our personal energy that has been trapped by the corona.
Tickets will go on sale soon, so if you’re interested please sign up for our newsletter here and we’ll keep you up to date.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. We would like to publish “True Innovation”, a book about Zen innovation theory written in Japanese. But we would like to translate in English and other languages. If you are a publisher and would like to help us, please contact us.
A book “True Innovation”
