From Retaliation to Realization
Zen@Work Case Study #1
Greetings everyone,
I hope you are all remaining grounded — in your body, nature, and close relations — amidst all the disillusion and dissolution. The turning of the Chinese New Year last week to the year of the Fire Horse, coinciding with the solar eclipse and some rare planetary alignments last seen in 1989, has offered a resonant archetypal signature for these days.
Structures and orders that have maintained some semblance of control (including the unipolar Pax Americana that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall) have decisively lost their stability and legitimacy.
This is the result not only of the fragility of those regimes, but of the fact they are now being seen through. The Epstein revelations are one massive tearing of the veil. The brazen cruelty and realpolitick of the current US administration is another. The power grab on the part of tech oligarchs is yet another.
Amidst this turmoil, we are all being called to re-align our allegiances with the communities of care that are supportive and in alignment for us. Our identities, our relationships and our work are all up for renewal.
Today’s post is an experiment. For the last year, I have been using a custom-trained AI (Anthropic/Claude is the foundational model) to analyze my coaching session transcripts and summarize my clients’ developments and insights. This is the type of thing that AI can be really good at.
The results have been superb. My clients eagerly await the summaries, and write me for them when I’m running behind.
(I’ll bring this example to the workshop I’m co-hosting tomorrow on Exploring Buddhist Perspectives on AI at the Shambhala Center in downtown Boulder. There are a few spots still open for locals.)
Now, I’ve begun running the AI on the collection of summaries to narrativize the progress over a multi-month period. I am again impressed with the results.
I’ll be offering these case studies through this newsletter over the next few months. If you ever see yourself in any of the situations and would like a consult on my integrative coaching, just grab a Discovery slot on my calendar.
My coaching is directly responsive to the disillusion/dissolution I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter. I help you find the deeper, more inspired and more trustable identity structure from which your relations and work can flow. You can see this especially in the sections “The Deeper Pattern and “The Transformation” in the Case Study below.
I have (and will continue to) deeply review and edit all of these Case Studies. I have found the AI can overstate some things, or spin them with certain “weights” that I want to re-balance. Each case study is for a single real person (not a composite), and the quotes are all actual.
I’ll serialize the case studies in the subtitles (“Case Study #1”) so you can find them easily in your Inbox or my archive if you are interested, and also skip them if you are not interested.
Finally, as I mentioned last week, I am gathering my first cohort of the Noble Path Group, which is a guided group for developing in Presence, Purpose and Impact following the training matrix of Zen Buddhism. I’ll have more information on this group in the days ahead, so you’ll be receiving this newsletter a bit more frequently over the next month, and possibly some emails through my other contact database. If you are already intrigued, grab a Discovery slot to chat.
I hope you enjoy,
Paul
The Presenting Challenge
When “Michael” first reached out, he was in the midst of what he described as the most challenging period of his 20-year career. A senior leader at a Fortune 500 company, he had just returned from a medical leave to find his world upended: his boss had stripped away his responsibilities, removed him from key projects, denied him credit for deals that closed during his absence, and publicly humiliated him in team meetings (”Welcome back from the penalty box”).
The retaliation was systematic and calculated. His compensation structure had been changed, his leadership role eliminated, his client relationships reassigned. When he asked why, his boss told him: “We got a chance to see how life would be like without you here, and many things worked better.”
Michael came to coaching angry, betrayed, and uncertain whether to fight or flee. But beneath the surface crisis, something deeper was stirring: a 20-year identity was dying, and he didn’t know who he would be on the other side.
The Initial Work: From Defensive to Offensive
Our first sessions focused on what I call “active dying”—the conscious process of letting an identity go while still navigating its final chapters. Michael was stuck between two impulses: the trauma response of freezing and withdrawing, and the competitive drive that had fueled his success for decades.
The breakthrough came when we reframed his situation. Instead of trying to “make it work” at the company—fixing the old, clogged pipe—we recognized he needed to open an entirely new pipe toward freedom. This wasn’t about restoration; it was about transformation.
(At this point, Michael found value in my adaptation of the Buddhist bardo teachings in “The Power of the In-Between: The Keys to Navigating Work Transition")
Here, we introduced the concept of righteous anger as a wisdom energy. For years, Michael had been told by spiritual teachers and Stoic philosophy that anger was destructive, something to transcend. Instead, I helped him see anger’s wisdom manifestations: diamond-like clarity about boundaries, discernment about justice, and motivating force for right action.
Armed with this reframe, Michael moved from a defensive crouch to an offensive stance. He retained legal counsel, meticulously documented everything, and submitted a comprehensive performance evaluation detailing both his accomplishments and the violations against him. Within days of sending it, his second-line boss called: everything would be restored—title, responsibilities, credit, compensation.
The Paradox: Victory Without Satisfaction
This is where the real work began.
Most people would expect Michael to feel vindicated, relieved, even triumphant. Instead, he felt empty. “I’ve gone through all this just to get back to where I was,” he said. “It feels so empty.”
This profound disappointment became the gateway to deeper truth. Michael wasn’t mourning what was—he was grieving the vision of the future he’d held. The dream wasn’t just about the past identity; it was about the trajectory he’d imagined from that place. And that dream was over.
We worked with this grief somatically. Michael described feeling heaviness in his solar plexus (the third chakra—the power center). Through guided heart breathing practice, we addressed the block: his need to control and protect was constricting his heart. The practice moved energy from the belly through the blocked power center to the heart, creating openness.
The teaching I offered: “When heavy, be heavy. Go into that heaviness. Feel that heaviness. It will open up from the inside and ultimately dissipate as you penetrate it.”
The Deeper Pattern: Vow-Based Living vs. Rule-Based Discipline
Throughout our work, Michael kept returning to Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen—the book that first awakened his spiritual interest decades earlier. “It’s still THE book,” he said, even after reading it ten times.
This loyalty to foundational teaching revealed something important: Michael had wandered in spiritual wilderness for years, accumulating tools and techniques, but without a clear path or guidance. He was trying to white-knuckle his way through with discipline alone.
We distinguished between discipline grounded in rules (metallic, inflexible, eventually depleting) and discipline grounded in vows (aligned with deep values, sustainable, generative). Michael had created personal vows and began reading them daily. They were “abstract enough but specific enough”—cutting through complexity without rigidity.
The shift was from “have the discipline to not drink wine” to “I want to make choices today aligned with my health and values that allow me to live my vows.” Same action, completely different internal experience.
The Transformation: From Self-Protection to Service
What emerged over our four months together was a man whose “professional trauma” work had finally “freed up CPU power”—bandwidth previously consumed by survival could now be directed toward service. Michael joined the board of a children’s advocacy nonprofit. He recognized his father’s example of community service that he’d been unable to access before.
“I didn’t have the space in my life to even become aware of it,” he said. “Now I can actually show up.”
This is the movement from the three afflictive poisons (greed, aversion, ignorance) to the three paths of practice:
Waking up (spiritual development)
Showing up (relational healing and heart work)
Stepping up (compassionate action in the world)
Michael had done enough professional trauma work to clear space. Now he needed guidance on the path forward.
The Arrival: Opening to Not-Knowing
By our final session, Michael had achieved something remarkable: he was at peace without necessarily being happy.
“I can be more rational and at peace because I see the truth in the moment,” he said. “But I am still unhappy at work.”
This is the distinction between spiritual bypassing (using practice to feel good) and genuine realization (being in reality, even when reality is difficult). Michael could hold the paradox: his position was restored AND the dream was over. He was grateful for the work AND felt out of alignment about the costs.
Most importantly, he had freedom of choice: he could stay or go.
One key insight I offered him was: “Working with uncertainty is working with reality.”
Unlike the Catholic surrender of his upbringing (which can bypass agency), the Buddhist path asks us to be “a lamp unto yourself”—to have faith ultimately in one’s own validated experience, while not believing every idea that arises.
Michael had struggled with uncertainty and change his whole life. Now he was opening to it: “Being okay with the potential for change... letting go of the tight grip of whatever you currently have... being open to other things that might feel scary.”
What Michael Received
Immediate Outcomes:
Position and reputation fully restored at his company
Legal protection and documentation in place
Clear boundaries with toxic leadership
Daily meditation practice (20-30 minutes of heart breathing)
Physical health improvements through somatic work
Deeper Transformations:
Shift from victim to empowered actor choosing his path
Understanding anger as wisdom energy (clarity, boundaries, justice)
Movement from rule-based discipline to vow-based living
Capacity freed from trauma work now available for service
Comfort with uncertainty and not-knowing mind
A committed spiritual practice path with a teacher
What He Said: “You’ve changed my life. When I look back over the last several months... the ability to see the big picture, that ascendancy viewpoint... it’s grounding for me. With you, I can just talk. I don’t have to filter anything.”
The Methodology
This work integrated:
Buddhist psychology and Zen koans applied to modern life challenges
Somatic practices (heart breathing, sequencing and completing emotions)
Vow-based decision making vs. external rule-following
Reframing (opening new pipes vs. fixing old ones; anger as wisdom)
Practical action (legal strategy, documentation) alongside contemplative practice
The three paths (waking up, showing up, stepping up) as integrated framework
The key was meeting Michael’s sincerity and aspiration with practical wisdom grounded in deep practice. Not imposing a spiritual framework on his crisis, but revealing how the crisis itself was the practice—a series of koans inviting awakening.
Where He Goes From Here
Michael has joined a Zen center as a formal student and is exploring a cohort-based program integrating spiritual practice with work in the world. He may leave his company in six months. He may not.
What’s certain: he’s no longer wandering in the wilderness. He’s found guidance, a path, and most importantly, the wisdom to be “a lamp unto himself.”
As Joko Beck writes in that dog-eared copy he keeps returning to: “There’s no substitute for practice. We have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.”
Michael is ready to do exactly that.
this is such a beautiful illustration of a process I’ve been through more than once myself. Thank you for your leadership !