The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on July 11th, 2025.

Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.

 

Introduction

As I turn 40 years old this weekend, I’ve spent some time this past month contemplating the most important things I’ve learned in four decades of life.

I quickly reflected back to the moment that started my spiritual journey.  I was 19 and read a book by the Dalai Lama, where he presented a Buddhist vision for life rooted in contentment and compassion.  I immediately felt a deep clarity that this was to be my life path.

21 years later, it’s struck me that what feels like the most important lesson I’ve learned is how to actually live those two things & and how they go together in a deeply harmonious, uncontrived way.

Realizing that my top learning is borrowed from a 2,600 year old tradition feels refreshingly unoriginal and somewhat obvious — i.e. if you give half your life to a particular practice and life orientation, you’ll probably live your way into that reality.

Anyhow, today, I’ll be discussing this learning, which I describe as The Middle Way between Contentment & Compassion, or sometimes between Emptiness & Ethics, Wisdom & Love, Inner Freedom & Caring Action, or Unconditional Well-being & Stewardship.  It all means the same thing to me.

 

What Is The Middle Way?

After the Buddha’s enlightenment, his first formal teaching laid out the foundation of the path to liberation that he discovered.  What I’ve always found fascinating is that the very first thing he said was, “I have awakened to the Middle Way.”

In pop culture, the Middle Way usually means the middle point between two extremes, like instead of the “extremes” of having no ice cream or having a full pint of ice cream, one instead has a “moderate amount,” like one scoop!

To be fair, the Buddha does occasionally use The Middle Way to mean moderation, like describing how right effort in meditation means applying not too much or too little effort, but the middle amount.

However, the fuller meaning of the Middle Way is well-captured by a brief story of a Zen monk from ancient Japan, who in search of a simple summary of the Buddha’s entire teaching career, asks the Zen master, “what are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”

The Zen Master replies, “an appropriate response.”

The Middle Way is in essence the wise or appropriate response to life.

On a macro level, let’s say we are at a transition point in our relationships, career, or spiritual journey.  The Middle Way means not just following the “path of least resistance,” but pausing and reflecting deeply, “how shall I move forward?”

On a micro level, let’s say someone insults us in a hurtful way.  The Middle Way means not responding with our conditioned reaction to shut down, lash out, or get defensive, but rather to respond intentionally, kindly, and wisely.

However, beyond “responding instead of reacting,” in its fullest expression, the Buddha went so far as to say, “What I call the Middle Way is the Noble Eightfold Path.”

In other words, the Middle Way is fluidly embodying the foundational teachings of Buddhism, including ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom.

To simplify that, wisdom & meditation fuse together to produce contentment, while the essence of ethics is compassionate action.

 

The Middle Way between Contentment & Compassion Part 1

One of the main obstacles for newer practitioners is the seeming paradox of, “if I become really content and accepting, then will I just sit around and do nothing while all these real problems are going on?”  Other flavors of this fear include:

• If I’m meditating and my knees start hurting, if I’m too content, then won’t I just ignore the pain and damage my knees?”
• If I become really peaceful within, won’t I be indifferent to the societal suffering all around me?
• Who will I be or how will I function without being motivated by anger or fear, or if I’m not continually churning over the narrative in my brain about where I’m going and who I’m becoming?”

In response, the Middle Way essentially takes these two principles — a deep sense of inner freedom and a deep compassionate care — and asks the question, “how can I bring both of these to bear on the moment, at the same time?”

This question is not one that will be satisfied with a verbal response, but rather a life’s exploration!!

 

Unconditional Contentment

My sophomore year of college, on a below-zero February morning, I was amidst my mile-long walk to campus on the East Side of Milwaukee, less than a mile from windy Lake Michigan.

Boogers were frozen to my beard.  My teeth were chattering.  My feet slipped around the icy concrete.

As someone who hated being cold, I was mostly miserable each step of the way, tightening up physically and emotionally, essentially counting down the blocks until I arrived at class.

However, I had recently read a book about meditation, and at some point in during walk, an instruction from the book popped into the mind:

Just let go

In turn, I took a breath and completely let go of the physical clenching and the emotional resistance.  I gave the moment total permission to be as it was.

As if by magic, the suffering & stress completely disappeared.  I felt light, free and at peace. While I was still freezing, it was a completely different experience.  It was the most wonderful below-zero walk I had ever taken to that point in my life.

This was my first glimpse into unconditional contentment — that is, the deeply embodied understanding that my fundamental source of well-being has nothing to do with circumstances or conditions; that there is always some layer within that is completely still and at peace, regardless of what’s happening.

The rest of my 20s were devoted to exploring this more deeply, including a life-changing insight into emptiness at age 24, a four year spiritual journey, and a 21-month retreat with Vipassana master, Sayadaw U Tejaniya.

The simple summary of all those endeavors is that they taught me how to live from that place in a steady, intentional way, as opposed to it being random or left “up to chance.”

The short instruction of how to do it is wise awareness.  This is not a thinking process.  It’s not something that happens only on the meditation cushion or at some point in the future after we’ve done X, Y or Z.

Wise awareness is an innate ability, in any given moment, to see all phenomena as impersonal, natural processes that are not worth grasping or resisting.  Sounds are happening.  Thoughts are happening.  Anxiety is happening.  Not me, not mine.  Just nature.  Just empty phenomena rolling through.  Let it be.

Wise awareness is a capacity we train.  It doesn’t just happen because we “try to be mindful” in a haphazard way while living our chaotic life.

When we take on the training and spend more and more time in that capacity, it re-wires our baseline consciousness to be less reactive and stuck.  It likewise opens up more space for the bigger breakthroughs.

While I imagine it would be delightful to be fully enlightened and do this perfectly all the time, that is not my reality.  

Sometimes I notice defensiveness come out when attacked.  Sometimes I feel resistance to my chores.  Sometimes I feel frustrated or sad about societal oppression and the inability of leaders to co-operate.  Sometimes I notice an unhealthy / compulsive relationship to the internet.

Even more intimate, I had a particularly humbling period in my early 30s, where I crashed & burned in a 1.5 year romantic relationship, exposing some of my early life wounding around self-worth.  Amidst that experience, I arrived in a new location with no job, no community, no money, and no direction.  Especially in contrast with the peacefulness of monk life, it was a rather disorientating and unpleasant time.

Nonetheless, even though it’s been challenging at times, and even though reactivity still happens, for some long while now, there also seems to be a steady background knowing that says, “this is just conditions happening, just nature, none of this touches my basic well-being.”  And along with that, comes a real degree of peace.

Anyhow, while I still consider myself a student of this deep teaching with plenty of room to grow, the benefits are so clearly profoundly transformative.  I don’t think I could use enough superlatives to describe this.

In other words, we don’t need perfection to make a real difference.

 

Compassionate Stewardship

After graduating college, I moved to Southern Mexico to live in an activist collective and offer service.  I ended up working on microcredit projects with coffee communities.  As part of this work, I would often spend stretches of days deep in the mountains, staying with different families, sharing life, and helping out.

One afternoon, I was standing in the sprawling terrain of coffee country and watching some chickens squawk by, which were bought with microcredit money and used to sell eggs and feed the community.

A thought struck me, “I’m not actually happy here.  What I’m doing is good work.  It’s really helping.  And yet, what I want to do is help people be genuinely happy.  They could have all the chickens in the world and still be miserable.  I have so much to be grateful for myself, and yet I still feel a great sense of lack.  What I need to learn is how to be truly happy myself.”

Backtracking a couple of years, I was learning all about the suffering in the world.  The history of colonialism, racism, slavery, patriarchy, imperial meddling in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  I saw it hadn’t just disappeared.  Suffering was still alive and well, basically everywhere.

I felt compelled to do something about it, and what I came up with was to move to Southern Mexico and help out.

As I’ve reflected on why I felt that compulsion, I can’t really come up with anything other than compassion, which is the heartfelt wish for beings to be free from suffering.

Interestingly, in the Buddhist tradition, the proximate cause of compassion is said to be seeing the suffering of beings. This process requires that we see that we are also one of those suffering beings — in the same plight as everyone else, subject to aging, illness, death, loss, and existing in a mind prone to reactivity.

However, we live in a world that likes to avoid “seeing” the suffering around us or within us.  We use substances, media, work, sex and so on, distracting ourselves from suffering wherever possible.  And where we can’t avoid or bypass, we intellectualize, like the mainstream approach to climate change, saying “it’s not our problem, it’s a hoax, or it’s always been like this.”

Basically, when we turn towards suffering and genuinely meet it, similar to dominoes falling, compassion is the natural byproduct. 

In practical terms, we pause, take a breath, and really just take in the simple fact that suffering is happening.  Pain is here.  Stress is here.  On a level beneath words, we feel it.  We allow it.  And when we do this, an innate sense of human care is evoked.

Fast forward many years after that mountainside moment, even beyond my monastic period, and there was still a sense of apathy that followed me wherever I went. 

I could be aware of it and not sink into it, but it felt like a backdrop to my life.  I also noticed that along with it, there was a hiding of myself — not really showing up fully in relationships or in how I navigated the world.  I was mostly a lone-wolf.

On a month-long retreat in 2018, a deep psychological insight graced itself upon me.  I realized that embedded in the core programming of my mind was a belief that said, “I don’t matter,” and by extension, “nothing I do matters.”

Upon that seeing, I wept and wept, as if a great burden were being shed.  The whole program just dissolved, along with the accompanying apathy and relational hiding, and has yet to return.

There is a lot I could say about the aftermath of that moment, but to put it simply, I understood that the core Buddhist teaching on karma could poetically translate as, “what you do matters,” with no IF’s or qualifiers.

We live in a world that convinces us what we do matters only if we get results or we fix problems.

A big part of my unhappiness in Mexico was because, without realizing it, I believed on some level, everything I was doing was pointless unless I fixed global economic inequality and solved all the social problems of the world.

I lived in a world where the future held the key to my happiness.

That month-long retreat insight crystallized the most important lesson of my 40 years — that when we land in the present moment and find a sense of peace without qualifiers, we simultaneously open to the suffering all around without reactivity.  This elicits a natural human compassion.  We then help out, serve, caretake, and steward this life and this planet not in order to get a certain outcome, but because it’s what feels best — it’s the way of embodied, heartfelt wisdom.

When I share this, people often object and say, “but wait, outcomes are really important!”

Sure, but what if you could apply yourself to certain ends as well as anyone else, but without any fear, shame, anger, or despair, when in spite of your best efforts, the outcomes don’t happen, at least not on your timetable?  Why wouldn’t you choose that route?

If a part of you has resistance to letting go of outcomes — like solving your health situation, avoiding death, getting your finances in shape, healing your emotional or relational wounds, ending biodiversity collapse, social justice, etc. — get curious about this.

Really look deeply to see if it’s possible to apply yourself to those areas, but not make your fundamental well-being dependent on it going a certain way.

In any case, as half of the Middle Way, this compassionate stewardship has become the foundation of how I live my life.  It informs how I relate to others, to animals, to the planet, and to myself.  I’m not perfect by any means, make many mistakes, and spend plenty of time not doing anything particularly spiritual, productive or whatever other idealistic adjectives one might use.

And yet, as I said earlier, we don’t need perfection to make a real difference.  If we stay curious and keep sincerely practicing, we live our life more and more in alignment with this foundation.  The goodness of this way becomes the most obvious thing in the world.

 

The Middle Way Between Contentment & Compassion Part 2

I sometimes say that harmonizing contentment & compassion is sort of like looking at a plain white wall.  You can look at the wall and see that it’s white.  You can also look at the wall and see that it’s flat.  There is no conflict between color and shape.

Right now, take a look at a wall around you — can you simultaneously see that the wall has shape and color?  It’s possible, right?

Similarly, there is no conflict between inner ease & outer action.  Between contentment and compassion.  They operate on different plains.  However, for many of us, we need to train in both of these capacities, one at a time.

To walk the Middle Way, we need to learn how to be unconditionally contented — the speciality of insight meditation.  We also need to learn how to relate to our world with genuine compassion — the speciality of training in ethics.

When we have some capacity to do these two things on their own, like looking at the wall and seeing both shape and color, how to find “the appropriate response” to any given moment is obvious.  It exists a level beneath the thinking mind.

I sometimes phrase this Middle way or “appropriate response” as a two-part process.  Firstly, allowing the moment to be.  Secondly, inquiring if there is something useful or compassionate to do; if so, we do it, if not, we continue to peacefully allow.  Eventually, this process becomes very intuitive and automatic, without any words or prompts needed.

When we find we’re not doing this, maybe out of indifference, boredom, resistance, a hidden agenda, or whatever else, we just get curious, “what’s going on here?”

And sooner or later, we live our way into that reality.

 

Conclusion

I probably could have just written something like, “meditate a lot, be patient, stay humble, keep making an effort to be kind, and release the need to be perfect.” 

Or maybe, “take a deep breath, let your muscles relax, let your mind soften, and stay here.  Beware of the impatient part of your mind that tries to leave this contented presence and skip to fixing all the problems.  If you notice that, breathe, relax, soften.”

Anyhow, it’s my conviction that if anyone engages wholeheartedly with this path or any path, year after year, decade after decade, even when it feels boring, frustrating, confronting, or like it’s going nowhere, they’ll eventually live their way into the answers.

For me, the answer to life’s great riddle is the Middle Way.

How about you — what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in this life?

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Note 1: If you’re interested in resources on this subject, this is my favorite meditation manual, my favorite book on ethics, my favorite book uniting the two parts, and my favorite writing on the Middle Way (jargon warning!).

Note 2: If you would like to get a monthly’ish email with reflections like this one, along with some event updates, sign up here for the newsletter.