by Kalika Yap

What a morning.

Brian and Laurie Shiers gathered our community for a session called The Power of Story, and the room held something rare. Stillness. Laughter. And a reminder of why our oldest traditions still know something modern life keeps trying to forget.

Brian opened by reading from Jonathan Haidt’s recent work on the digital generation. Haidt’s point landed hard. Ancient societies passed down moral and spiritual lessons through oral storytelling. That practice gave young people a shared sense of reality and a grounding in collective principles. Today, short videos from random strangers fill five to nine hours of a child’s day, training young brains to skim instead of reflect.

So Brian invited us to bring stories back. Back into our families. Back into our practices. Back into our heritage and faith traditions. He explained that the Sufis like to hide a teaching in plain sight, the Zen tradition teaches through contradiction, and Vajrayana Buddhism uses deep symbolism. Three traditions. Three different doors into the same room.

Story One: Awakening Darshan (Sufi tradition)

A master visits a village to give a teaching, and an old monk in the front row keeps falling asleep at the most important moment. The master pays a young boy a coin to poke the monk awake. It works for two days. On the third day, the boy sits still. When asked why, he explains that the monk paid him three coins to let him sleep.

The Lesson: the sleeping monk is the part of us that wants to nap through our own practice. The part that thinks it already knows. The part that goes through the motions without remembering the intention.

The three coins represent the three strongest habits that pull us off course. Aversion, the wanting to push away what we don’t like. Attraction, the wanting to grab onto good meditations, good feelings, good experiences. And the middle one, ignorance, the foggy state of just not noticing what is actually present.

Brian shared his own story. Years ago his teacher only taught from September to June and gave the summers off on purpose, so students could feel how hard it is to practice without structure or community. Brian promised himself he’d sit every single day. About four or five weeks in, he realized he hadn’t practiced in a week and hadn’t even noticed. A real wake up call.

This is just how the mind works. Not something to beat ourselves up over. The practice is to be clever. Find a buddy. Renew your motivation. Keep outsmarting your resistance with kindness.

Story Two: The Song of the Nightingale (Zen tradition)

A samurai father trains with his son, who is locked in tight on his sword. The father asks if he heard the nightingale singing while they practiced. The son didn’t. The father tells him real concentration is not a tight beam pointed at one spot. When the mind aims in a single direction, it becomes its own obstacle. He quotes the Zen master Takuan Soho:

“If you look at one leaf, you only see that. If you don’t look at any of them, the whole tree appears.”

Brian explained that most of our early training is dualistic. I’m the meditator. I’m focusing on the breath. When the mind wanders to pizza, I come back. When it wanders to the kid’s pickup, I come back. That’s the basis of training, and it matters.

But the swordmaster is pointing somewhere further. He’s pointing to letting go of any single anchor so we can take in the whole. Feel everything. Notice everything. Without being captured by any one thing.

Brian named the three habits the mind reaches for as a mammal looking for safety: pushing away what’s hard, grabbing what feels good, and zoning out on the rest. When we open into a wider field of awareness and let everything be, we get a rich field of experience, real connection, and real possibility.

Story Three: Longchenpa and the Wounded Dog (Vajrayana Buddhism)

The great practitioner Longchenpa retreats to a mountain and vows to meditate until the future Buddha Maitreya appears to him. He sits for weeks. Birds nest in his beard. Ants use his body as a bridge. But Maitreya never comes. Doubt creeps in. He gives up and starts walking down the mountain.

On the road, he sees a dying dog with a wound full of maggots. Without thinking, he kneels and begins to clean the wound with his mouth, careful not to harm even the maggots. As the last one is moved to safety, the dog reveals itself as Maitreya in red robes. The teaching arrives in the very moment Longchenpa stops chasing it.

The Lesson: when we try to embody the teachings, and stop looking for special states or special signs, and instead live what we understand of compassion, kindness, empathic joy, and equanimity in the actual moment in front of us, that is where we learn the most. All the training we do is to prime the mind to see the world differently, so that when the moment comes, we don’t even have to think. We just respond to relieve the suffering in front of us.

Then there’s the epilogue. Two shopkeepers nearby see only an old beggar fussing with a dead dog.

The Lesson: don’t expect other people to see your spiritual practice. Don’t expect anyone to see you differently because you’ve been sitting, or because you’ve had certain experiences. Just be yourself. People will see what they see. That part is none of our business.

Then Laurie Took Us Into Gratitude

Laurie picked up the thread and offered a practice rooted in research from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. The study is almost embarrassingly simple. For eight weeks, participants wrote down three specific things they were grateful for each evening, plus the why behind each one. No app. No tool. Pen, paper, and the requirement to actually search the day for what mattered.

The result was real rewiring. Stronger pathways between memory and emotional processing. Deeper feeling when they recalled positive moments. Their attention systems started filtering for the good instead of filtering it out. The brain learned to look for evidence that life contains good moments.

Laurie introduced the practice of savoring, from the French savourer, meaning to taste and appreciate. We slowed down. Closed our eyes. Asked ourselves what we were grateful for. Stayed with it long enough to feel why it mattered.

Then we wrote.

Laurie read us Three Gratitudes by Carrie Newcomer. The poem opens with Newcomer’s nightly ritual of saying three things out loud before sleep. What follows is a roll call of small, specific images. The ordinary things and the extraordinary things, side by side. A song that always makes her cry at the same part. The frost on a window. The quiet breathing of the person beside her. By the end, three has become thirty, and she’s wrapped in blankets, washed in wonder at the sweetness of it all.

You can also find the full poem in her book A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays or at carrienewcomer.com.

Then we each wrote our own list with all five senses turned on. Sight. Sound. Smell. Taste. Touch. Some shared aloud.

Voices from the Room

A few of our community members offered their own writing, and with their permission we’re sharing here. Read them slowly.

Michael & Jahna

Gratitude Trek — by Michael

Walking
Breathing
Smelling the trees
Footsteps echoing on the rocks
The breeze animates the leaves
They sing their whispered song of shaking off the dew
The warmth of the sun is the radiance of my smile
As I hike in the earth’s garden

A slice of life — by Monique

The smell of my garden roses.
Orange-red peaches just ripening on the tree we planted in our front yard on Earth Day last year. The fruit is bigger this year, and so very sweet.
Milan playing jazz guitar in the late afternoon, just before dinner, as chicken sizzles in a cast iron pan. The kitchen door is open and the sounds commingle.
Scott coming home from work with stories to tell from his conference in Nashville.
The soft light of our living room in our 100-year-old house, set high above the street and surrounded by a huge flowering garden we tend to most weekends.
The perfect colorful address tiles we bought from a small mom and pop called Colores de Mexico. They gave us a discount because they could see our appreciation for their work.
And the meal set out every night on a table with candles and flowers. Just like my own parents used to do, with many people gathered around an enormous table in a too-small dining room. It’s what I’ve always done since I was a small child, and now I realize it’s become tradition.

Three Small Practices to Take Home

1. Read a story out loud. Folktale, family story, faith story, whatever speaks. Let it sit at the dinner table without explanation. Stories work on us slowly.
2. Practice the wide view. When you notice yourself locked on one leaf, step back and let the whole tree appear.
3. Write three gratitudes before bed. Three specific things and the why for each. Try it for a week and notice what shifts.

This was my final session as Founding Chair of the Harvard-Westlake Mindfulness Club, and I can’t think of a softer landing than a morning of stories, gratitude, and a shared meal at our home in Studio City.

Thank you to Brian and Laurie and all our wonderful facilitators, Natalie Bell and Cherise Bangs.

Warm hugs to every one of you who showed up, brought a friend, sat in the circle, and made this club what it is.

The work goes on.

So does the practice.