Beginner’s Mind—a tool for calibrating relevance in daily life

A high priority goal for 2018 was becoming more present through meditation and more purposeful in applying the powerful concept of Beginners Mind to my daily experiences. For work and life alike.

Maybe it’s just that time of life for me.

Or maybe just the overt need many of us experience, to continually adapt, reinvent ourselves and morph our understanding of where past learnings and future directions come together. With each of us, still in the center of the equation.

Being present has been a goal of mine for a number years as I dug into meditation, made it a daily habit, and became both more adept and more at ease in deciphering and navigating my inner space.

To me, a series of learnable maneuvers that once internalized, impacted my external poise and I could call on at will.

A centering breath before getting on stage or starting a board meeting.

That pause when you see a negotiations jiggling out of whack. That pull back to a center when things are unfamiliar and untethered. Even that moment, when skiing in the back bowls where I had a serious fall and needed composure to sort stuff out.

This year, I felt I needed more, a deeper stack of tools with a larger purpose.

A deliberate state I could conjure up, that could help find the balance between experience and vision, poise and openness. Something without, not within myself as mindfulness works for me.

Beginners Mind is what I happened upon.

It’s a common phrase obviously, stemming from an ageless Zen Buddhist concept.

Traditionally Beginner’s Mind lives inside the concept of ‘the wisdom of uncertainty’. The parable speaking to the truth that the more you are open and don’t layer on your preconceptions, the more receptive you are to a new approach. To newness and a freshness beyond the pale of how you map your experiences to your current self.

To me, the power of a blank slate, of an unhindered openness is obviously the ability to jump into a new void. To simply listen better and experience without hindrance.

The value of it is not in the struggle to be open, but in the interplay of friction between a lifetime of experience and learning, and situationally, something unanalogous to my past.

A weird new reframing and remixing of traditional conceptions of wisdom if you will. That unintuitive happenstance where our patterns are both our strength and our uniqueness, but also our worst enemy for conjuring up a different world view.

As we move through life, we are constantly being forced to reinvent ourselves, rethinking and reapplying lessons we lived through, morphing our understanding of ourselves to continually adapt.

To find relevance renewed, targeted inspiration and the poise to constantly learn with a fresh mind.

This is simply the nature of reality–at least mine.

Beginner’s Mind as I practice it, is a step beyond the demonstrable benefits of mediation and presence.

While inchoate, it is a language of positive friction that lives at the border of experience and the openness of a state of zero preconceptions.

It is a tool to harness that increases the odds that when confronted with something outside of your experience, beyond the trajectory of your thinking, you can understand, evaluate and appreciate in a new way.

With meditation, I have patterns I work within. With Beginner’s Mind, I take that self-control and consciously teeter on the pin head of a lifetime of preconceptions and their connections to the possibility of something completely brand new.

It’s been strangely hard to write about this, but surprisingly easy to embrace it as an approach.

It is one of the top conscious changes I’ve made this past year that have made a huge difference.

Give it some thought and some study.

It really works.

Learning to truly listen with an open mind is not overrated.