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Discovering Purpose in Mixed Heritage

Stephen discusses how multiracial individuals often grapple with their identity. Nevertheless, it is crucial for them to reconnect with their roots and explore their backgrounds.

Learning more about a part of one’s identity to become whole

Nick: As a father of a son who's half Australian and Japanese. And he's almost 20 now. He was also born in Japan and spent his first three years there. And a part of me hopes he returns to explore the culture more deeply, and maybe connect back to, and have some memories that might come to the surface when he goes back. So I hope he explores that.

Stephen: You know, there was something that I studied formally and academically, and as a research topic. I found that for some people, it's not that important, it becomes something that is somehow not a priority in their life, and other things assume more importance.

But for others, it becomes a very important part of finding some kind of sense of wholeness and meaning in their life. For me, I think, I wasn't extreme in the sense of feeling that it was almost like a calling for me to return to Japan.

I saw it almost in the sense of ikigai, or a purpose for my life. It really was transformative for me in that sense. I found that I looked for other people to talk, to interview about it. And there I gathered many stories by other people who, for them, it was also a part of their journey of becoming more whole.

By embracing or learning more about that part of themselves that was difficult to learn about in the environment in which they had been raised.

Nick: Thankfully, the world's a different place, I guess, and Australia's very multicultural. So I don't think my son's had any issues with his mixed-race or whatever we could call it. But yeah, I do hope he returns and explores and finds a part of himself that sort of doesn't exist here. And I hope that he does reconnect with Japanese culture. So I might not be going to push him, but I certainly encourage it.

Stephen: I guess I have two thoughts about that: one is that I never told my parents about things that were happening that were difficult because I thought, especially I never told my mother because I thought it would be a burden to her too. Because it was all about her.

The reason was because my mother was Japanese. And so I never told my parents. So I think that's always a possibility. But the other is that it has changed, the world has changed so much in the sense that Japan is viewed by so many people now as a very favorable.

When my kids came to the US, they had Pokemon cards and the other kids in the neighborhood gathered and my kids give them away. And now I work more at the higher level of college with college students, and many of them, you know, already have been exposed to Japanese anime and manga, and they feel like they they see a lot of very positive things in Japanese culture and want to go to Japan.

It seems these days, everybody would love to go to Japan, or have been to Japan and love it there and were able to see more of the beauty of the culture.

Having a Source of Life Energy

Ki is used in many Japanese expressions. It represents the idea of a universal source of energy and life, which exists both in the universe and within us. It flows through our bodies. With this thought, Stephen contemplates what can give us vitality.

How do we get in touch with a source of vitality

Nick: I thought I'd start with a question about a presentation you recently gave at the Zen 2.0 event that was held last month, both live and online. You gave a presentation on how can we live and die like water?

So I thought I would start there. At the beginning of your presentation, you ask the question, how do we connect to a source of life energy? So I'd like to ask what do you mean by a source of life energy?

Stephen: I was thinking of the word ki which is in so many Japanese expressions from Genki… Yet it seems to have lost its meaning, in a sense that people don't know what it means anymore. I think they just use it all the time.

But certainly it's something that others have gotten very interested in like when Star Wars was made, George Lucas was called ‘the force’ right? ‘May the force be with you.’ ‘Trust in the force.’ And in the later films even explain what is the force and it was very much, completely what ki is.

It's the whole sense that there is a source of energy and life that is in the universe and also in us. So it runs through our bodies and it can be blocked. So one of the things I was very interested in is Chinese medicine when I was younger, and I studied Chinese medicine in Japan for a year.

Part of the theory is that there is this ki that runs through our bodies and that ki can become blocked at certain places in our body or the whole philosophy and medicine about how to release that and let the energy flow is all very much a part of philosophy and medicine.

So the whole area of health and well-being which was part of the topic of that particular conference. I was really asking, how did we get in touch with a source of vitality, what can give us vitality? And I was also thinking of something that I've focused on a lot more in my life recently—awareness of death, which is something that is deep in Bushido and the samurai way of living.

To contemplate death every day, and to even begin your day with the awareness that you are alive, but you are dying, and you will die, and to use that as a way to live better, and to be more present in your life.

I've also have roots in Catholicism. When our family came from Japan to the United States, we met our Irish family, they were one generation removed from Ireland, and a condition for our acceptance was that we become Catholic.

So I grew up in a Catholic Church, in a Catholic school. And there's an expression from Catholicism, ‘memento mori.’ Memento means remember, and mori means die. This has become a game in Japan recently, of a group of young women. There are women who live in this way and defy fear and danger with this awareness that, remember that you’ll die.

This is to me a very cross-cultural thing, you see many different cultures, and I think the contemporary culture is the one that is getting the furthest away from this kind of awareness. And we've become really cultures of denial and trying to keep death away from us as much as possible by numbing ourselves with entertainment and different kinds of pleasures or drugs or ways of keeping ourselves away from that reality.

And I wanted to focus on source as a way of saying that if we can connect to the real sense of what keeps us alive, and what makes us want to live or what we're willing to live for, in the face of all the other things that may be happening in our lives that make life so difficult.

Whatever that is, we need to connect to that, and we need to find our own way to connect to that, and that has often been through religion, but that can be through, I think, many people find that in nature now.

So to see that the feeling connected to something in Japanese, I like the expression something beyond—you don't have to call it Kamisama, you don't have to call it God, but think beyond the human connecting to that.

And maybe just by experiencing the majesty and the wonder and the awe of nature. So that was the original idea of that. The people who made the conference, they developed the way of thinking about the way of water as force and then flow and alignment.

So I've made it a talk that was in line with that trying to connect to what does it mean to connect to a source? What does it mean to go with the flow of life? What does it mean to align ourselves with some kind of a purpose in life?

Discovering Meaning in Our Existence

The original word for spirit in Latin means breath. Stephen relates spiritual experience to mindfulness; he believes that mindfulness is simply bringing our attention to our breath.

The belief that we are all created for something special

Nick: You mentioned in the talk, that we could connect source to either being a religious or spiritual experience, and many people do say, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. Can you touch on the word spiritual, and it's Latin root, as you did in your presentation?

Stephen: The inability to talk about God, the inability to talk about what is really most important in life, the language doesn't seem to be there. Or the language is there but people don't use the language.

As you mentioned, the original word for spirit in Latin means breath. Then it's also if you look at the kanji, the top part is like the ‘ji’ self, and the bottom part is kokoro. So I think the two are very similar in a sense that they show the very deep connection of the heart and the spirit with the breath.

So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness to me is really simply bringing attention to our breath. We become mindful if we can somehow bring our attention inward and just to the reality of that, the breathing and how the breath is life itself, giving us life.

And I think that sense of spirit is lost when it becomes associated, particularly in Japanese, it's hard when you translate it into Katakana, it becomes kind of associated more with strange psychic type of powers and energies and kind of a world that for many people is beyond the realm of acceptable reality and scientific reality.

That's very different from what it means in English today. And I think I mentioned in the talk that at Stanford, the Office for Religious Life has had to change their name to the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

It's an acknowledgment that the expression you use, so many students are saying, ‘I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.’ The spiritual part, I think, means the search for meaning—the search for purpose, the belief that that's the best way to live—if we truly believe that there is some kind of reason, meaning, and purpose for our existence, and that there's a unique purpose for our existence that we are all created for something special. And that no one lives the life that we live, and no one is quite like us. So I think the word spiritual portrays that for many people today.

From Mindfulness to Heartfulness

Stephen thinks that the term mindfulness is being used in the West as a tool for success and achieving greater goals. To move away from that, he prefers to call it 'heartfulness' to emphasise that it is a way of experiencing life in an open-hearted way.

The heartfulness way of experiencing life

Nick: On the subject of mindfulness, there's a book, I think that could help our audience. And that's your book: From Mindfulness to Heartfulness: Transforming Self and Society with Compassion.

I was trying to get a figure on mindfulness has become this multi-million, or maybe even multi-billion dollar industry of medic books, courses, celebrity endorsements, and so on. But I'd like to go back to what you were touching on earlier on how we should understand mindfulness.

And yeah, eventually how you've tied that to heartfulness. How do you describe mindfulness when you're asked?

Stephen: It's always changing, I'm finding. I think one of the things that I am most grateful for is that I remain curious and alive about life. I want to be open to being affected by what's out there, what's comes to me and learning from my experiences, learning from other people.

I've been teaching this for a number of years now, and my understanding of it evolves along with that teaching, because I always want to teach in a way that I'm learning as well. That really live the, what I often say is that teaching and learning go best together, and that everybody who comes to me because they want to learn from me are also teachers, if I'm open.

I find that many of the so-called students and learners actually become my teachers, when I am open to that, and I'm not always open to it, because I'm often in the position of being the one who is designated as the teacher and the leader, the wise and more and more of the wise elder and so I'm supposed to have the knowledge and I sometimes give in to that ego tripping, and I feel like I need to give something to other people that they will then see as Oh, he's a great leader. And he's a great teacher.

Then I realized I'm just really an old fool. I love the expression O baka-sa. You know, baka is fool, before, and san sounds like a wonderful fool. So I feel like I'm just constantly being a fool. But a fool can also have the role of helping other people to be aware of how they are not really living with an openness and embracing life.

I feel like that my awareness of mindfulness has been really helped by a lot of students who have told me that my idea that mindfulness is almost the same as meditation, right? You get to mindfulness by going through meditation, and I've had many people assume that I'm Buddhist, and that even Buddhist monks have asked me where did I study Zen.

But I actually not studied Buddhism much. And I have practiced it to a certain degree, but I really don't know that much about it. And I've moved because so many students have told me that they find meditation difficult, or they try it and they find it's not for them.

And I have persisted in saying, well, you've got to practice more. You can't just you try it and say it doesn't work. And they said, but I've tried it for a long time. For many reasons like that I have moved to a much more flexible open position. Mindfulness is really just bringing your attention to the present moment, and it's bringing your whole self as much as possible to that moment.

That's why I like the kanji, which shows the, and I just happened to have my book with me. The Kanji shows on top, this is nen. The top shows that sense of ima (right now), and the bottom shows the kokoro.

And I feel like this is what mindfulness is in the sense that it's bringing yourself to the present moment, yourself as much as possible, not just the ego self, not just the mind self. But the self that is represented by the kokoro—a sense of the heartful part of you, the whole part of you.

However you do that, that's what mindfulness is. It could be through meditation, and it could be, that could be the greatest path to a deeper sense of mindfulness. But I also find that many practitioners of meditation don't seem to get at what I think of as more of the heartfulness way of experiencing life with an open hearted way.

That's something that I felt my grandmother embodied throughout her very long life of up to 111. And I thought that the term heartfulness captured that more than mindfulness, which I think has become, as you pointed out, something that has become very commercialized, very materialistic. And also, it's embedded in a kind of American. For me anyway, because I live here.

And I seen how it's evolved here. It seems very individualistic, in space in individualism, philosophy of individualism, and the places that I lived and worked in Silicon Valley, and Stanford University, I see it being used more as a tool, another tool to become successful.

So we use mindfulness so that you can be even more successful, achieve more. And so I wanted to also move us away from that. Also, that obsession with neuroscience and brain science and seeing everything through has to be taught and understood through what's going on in the brain, in order for us to believe it.

And I wanted us to move more away from that kind of mechanical way of seeing the human body and mind and spirit. And so I thought heartfulness might be a way of doing that. And it hasn't really caught on that much. But I still like it, and I still use it a lot.

Transforming Lives Through Your Best Self

Stephen shares how he prefers to live ikigai as much as possible. He believes that living in a way that feels right not only benefits himself but also for others. The impact he can have on others simply by making them feel seen and supported is significant.

You are responsible for your own life

Nick: Stephen, what about you when you think of ikigai? What does it feel like? Or what does it mean to you? And what are some examples of your personal ikigai?

Stephen: I'm probably in the category of those that you just said that don't really think about it. I don't remember my grandmother ever talking about it. What I like, I'm so drawn to about her life and her teachings is the feeling that she lived ikigai and didn't really talk about it.

That was embodied in her way of living, and that's why I wanted to tell stories about her because I feel like she showed ikigai and what it meant to her by the way she lived. So I liked that way of looking at it. I don't actually talk directly about it, and I think I want to live it as much as possible.

And I think I've described that I find just a sense that if I can live the way I feel is a good way to live, and that will by itself give something to other people. That's the way in my work, I conduct these workshops. And then I have this formal way of teaching courses in which I hope to embody the sense of humility and vulnerability and openness to experience and trust and faith in life.

And if I can somehow bring that to my connections with other people both formally, but also on a daily informal basis, so the very small interactions that I can have in my day, and I start with the person that I live with, how I interact with that person, how I show that person, don't take a relationship that I've had for 40 years for granted and assume that this person should do things for me, but have appreciation and show gratitude for what this person does for me.

And then every person I contact in my daily life who may not mean that much in the sense that somebody I just passed by on the street or passed on the way to work or somebody working in a shop, if I can somehow engage with those people in the same way with a sense of I see you, I am here for you, without using the words, often ‘ogenki desu ka?’

If I can just interact with people, that sense of gratitude and a sense of please look with kindness upon my life, and please see me, please remember me, and I will extend the same to you. I find that I'm looking for ikigai and in the ordinary. And looking for that in being content with what a day offers me, and the opportunities it offers me to do something.

The other word my grandmother liked a lot was responsibility, or sekinin. It felt that in a sense that she was saying, you are responsible for your own life, I can help you as much as I can but you are ultimately responsible to live the best life you can to do the best with what you've been given. And you've been given a lot. So you have to do a lot.

You've brought children into the world, you have a great responsibility to children, but there are also other children that you as a teacher you have responsibility for. And that's something that you need to take very seriously about. You're given the responsibility in this life, to take care of your own life and to take care of the lives of others.

So I find that that's what I strive for and in every day is to feel that as much as life is hard and full of suffering and sorrow that there's joy in life and it makes me summon the courage to go on each day and live the best I can.

For the full podcast conversation, go to:

Heartfulness: A New Perspective on Mindfulness - Part 1

Heartfulness: A New Perspective on Mindfulness - Part 2