In August 2000, I completed a short retreat at the Eiheiji monastery. At the time, I was caught between two paths. One was to remain in Japan, where I’d been teaching English for five years, and follow a monastic route. The other was to return to the UK and fulfil a promise I had made to study law. I had come to practice partly in search of direction. Instead, I found more uncertainty. Around that time and completely by chance, I came across a quote by Hakuin Ekaku: “Contemplation within activity is a billion times better than contemplation within stillness.” It did not feel like advice. But it cut through something immediately. Until then, I had treated practice as something separate from life. Something that happened on a cushion, in a monastery, under certain conditions. There was an assumption that clarity would be found there first and then carried back into the rest of life. That quote reversed it.
It suggested that whatever I was looking for would not be found by stepping away from activity, but by testing practice in the middle of it. In conversation. In decisions. In pressure. Looking back, it made the decision for me. I returned to the UK.
At Eiheiji, all of the instruction was given in Japanese. My understanding was limited. I followed what I could, assuming that whatever I didn’t grasp would become clear later. I didn’t realise it would take as long as it did! Much of the last 25 years has been an attempt to make sense of what I was exposed to and experienced there. Reading, questioning, returning to the roots of the tradition. Spending time with the teachings attributed to Bodhidharma, trying to strip things back to something essential.
There is a slightly uncomfortable aspect to this. Zen does not particularly encourage this kind of effort. The more you try to grasp it conceptually, the further away it seems to move. But for me, partly due to my Western upbringing, conditioning and personal bloody-mindedness, that process has been unavoidable. If anything, it has made something clearer over time. Not in the sense of arriving at an answer, but in seeing the limits of that approach. There is a difference between understanding something and actually seeing it in the moment that it is happening.
For a long time, I continued to treat practice and the rest of my life as separate. Even while working, there was a sense that practice belonged somewhere else. Something I returned to when there was time. That separation lasted much longer than I expected. It only really shifted through a brief email exchange with Keizan Roshi just a few years back. There was nothing particularly dramatic in what was said, but something in it made it clear that the separation I had been holding onto wasn’t there. Not as an idea, but in a more immediate sense.
What I had been calling “practice” and what I had been calling “life” were not two different things to be balanced over time. They were already in the same field of experience. Looking back, that was the point at which something began to change: not in a complete or permanent way. The old habits don’t disappear that easily. But the assumption of separation no longer holds in quite the same way.
In a practical sense, that was where the idea for what I’m doing now, One Breath Leadership, came from. Not as something new, but as an attempt to stop treating practice as something outside of activity, and instead see what happens when it is not separated at all.
The years that followed were not particularly calm—studying law, moving into banking and working in environments where decisions had real consequences, extreme stress on a daily basis, burnout, and, of course, ‘Great Doubt’. For a long time, I thought I was making decisions. Looking back, I was mostly reacting. There was very little space in it. What gradually became more apparent was not that practice was absent, but that I was absent from it. The issue wasn’t the environment. It was the speed at which I was being pulled through it.
What feels important to me now about practice is not that it creates a different kind of experience. It is that it reveals, very directly, the state you are already in. In the middle of activity, that is harder to ignore. Over time, I found myself returning to something very simple. Not as a technique, but as a way of interrupting that momentum, even briefly.
Focusing attention on a single breath. Inhaling. Exhaling. Down and up into the belly. Zen 101. It had been there right from the start, literally right under my nose. Most of the time, I didn’t remember to do it, but occasionally, there would be a moment where I noticed the state I was in, and the breath was there. And the more I did it, the more I felt it. Not to calm anything down or to fix the situation, but just enough to see it.
What eventually became One Breath Leadership didn’t come from trying to build anything. It came from repeatedly returning to that moment, in environments where there was no obvious space for practice at all. A brief interruption. A gap. Most of the time, that gap is missed, but occasionally, there is just enough space to see what is happening, rather than immediately becoming it. That, for me, is where practice lives now, not in stillness, although stillness has its place, but in the middle of activity, where it is easiest to lose and hardest to hold onto.
The quote that I read all those years ago hasn’t changed. There’s still plenty of time, but I am still caught in the same patterns. But sometimes, there is a breath.
And in that breath, there is just enough space for something different to happen.
Edward Howard, based in Singapore, is the author of One Breath Leadership, which explores practice within the context of decision-making and everyday life. The eBook will be available for free on Amazon from 9–14 June. A small number of audiobook copies are also available on request.