Back in college, Tennessee Williams was my patron saint. Early in his career, after clocking out a full day of drudgery at the shoe factory, he would come home and fix himself a pot of black coffee for a graveyard shift of writing. Often, his alarm clock would ring at dawn and he’d find himself waking up from an hour’s sleep at his bedroom desk, still in the clothes he’d worn to work the day before, manual typewriter keys embossed on the side of his face. When he was a little kinder to himself, he would take a break and steal out on to the fire escape for an after-midnight smoke. There, he would gaze at the St. Louis sky and wonder if the stars would ever align to ensure his future as an artist.

Out of college, I perseverated on the same thing, but found that, though I tried my best to follow Williams’ regimen to the letter, my discipline and resolve just weren’t Spartan enough. (Today, I’m glad they weren’t. Williams’ monomania brought him endless cachet but no end of unhappiness. His life is now a cautionary tale.) At 23, I was laid off from a paper-pushing job. I told myself I didn’t care. My real job was writing. It soon became clear, however, that I didn’t have it in me to write from sunup to sundown, let alone from sundown to sunup. I’d also ended a serious relationship and was living alone in a slum on the south side of Chicago. Faced with empty days of purposelessness, my mind became a chamber of horrors. It was from there that I traded in romantic suffering and Existential heroism (a la Sartre’s Nausea and Williams’ Orpheus Descending) for trips to the Eastern Religions section at Barnes & Noble, which eventually led me to sitting in meditation groups.

Now, ten years later, I’m in my early thirties. I don’t have plays on Broadway or novels in print. In April 2007, I also, once again, found myself out of work after a long-term freelance assignment came to a sudden end. And I was suffering from a miserable case of writers block. But, lucky for me, the grails of fame and distinction have steadily lost their sheen (largely thanks to people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears). My need for structure and purpose have remained paramount as ever, though.

So, I set a semi-monastic meditation schedule for myself and planned for the next edition of Sentient City. I decided its theme would be Right Livelihood/Right Intention, a subject which has monopolized many ID Project discussions. Then, I started casting around for a dharma teacher to interview on the subject.

Nancy O’Hara was the first to come to mind. Many a morning, I flipped through her books Find a Quiet Corner and Just Listen for inspiration on the subway to work. She is a Zen teacher, bent on making the case that, if we’d only take the time to sit through the haze of our social conditioning, each of us would see that we’re far more than our jobs, far more than our social selves—and that, paradoxically, a true recognition of this alone would make us more effective in our jobs and in society. Her message was as refreshing as rain to a drought when I’d have to walk into workplaces where people had lost all trace of humanity in jockeying for advancement. (As an artist with other ambitions, I’ve never had a stake in those careerist ploys but have taken plenty of hits from those who do.) Plus, Nancy O’Hara is a teacher who took many detours before surrendering to Zen, and, if there’s one thing I like, it’s a prodigal son or daughter (outside of a western religious context, of course). Not only that, but she’s also an example of someone who had thrown caution to the wind and dropped out of the corporate world to focus on what she loved—namely, writing, teaching, and studying Zen. And her writing is as simple and potent as tonic as demonstrated in lines like: “You will become flexible in your life by being inflexible in your practice. By not compromising, by being adamant about reserving some time each day for sitting still and breathing, you will gain a flexible mind beyond compare (Just Listen, 198).”

So, in May 2007, I met with Nancy O’Hara at her Harlem apartment, which was spotless as a Zendo, complete with lotuses floating in a glass bowl and an office, stacked with zafus and zutons, where she writes full-time and conducts life-coaching sessions and small meditation groups.

BEGINNING ZEN

Even though Nancy O’Hara and I both have great investment in the silence of Buddhist meditation, we’re also Irish, so we had no problem launching straight into story. It was quite a scene, the two of us, sitting across from each other on black zafus and zutons, sipping seltzer water but carrying on like we were settled in over pints at a Limerick pub:

KTS: How did you come to your Zen practice?

Nancy O’Hara: Desperation is what really got me to the cushion. In 1985, my father died. My Zen practice would begin about three years later, but 1985 was when I had my first spiritual awakening, if you will. I was really close with my Dad. He died and my life was a mess, I was a mess. I was drinking too much and using [drugs], looking outside of me, as so many people do, for fulfillment and identity…It all came to a head when Dad died in his Sixties.

KTS: His sixties? That’s young.

Nancy O’Hara: Yeah, well, he died of lung cancer. He was a smoker. I was a smoker. So, all at once, I stopped using all intoxicants.

KTS: And stopped smoking?

Nancy O’Hara: Stopped smoking, oh yeah. That was the hardest to give up. A few years later, I lost a relationship…Prior to that, I’d been married, I’d been divorced; nothing was working and I was in yet another relationship and I was devastated when it ended. I saw a flier for a retreat at a Zen monastery, Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-Ji, in the Catskills, so I went in 1988 – desperate, lonely, feeling unloved and unlovable, and searching for an answer, as I was doing with all those other horrible things.

KTS: What was it like when you went?

Nancy O’Hara: It’s a Rinzai Zen monastery, so it’s pretty strict. Eido Shimano Roshi is the Abbot there. And I met another monk up there named Donge, who became my first spiritual guide.

KTS: What did they put you through on your first weekend up there?

Nancy O’Hara: It was excruciating! They made us sit for 45 minutes at a time. And I wanted to get up, and I wanted to scream, and I wanted to run away. I wanted to do all those things, but I was so involved in the physical pain that a lot of the stuff that I went up there with in my head – by the time I stood up, a lot of it was gone. So, even though I hated sitting, as soon as I got up, I wanted to do it again. I knew there was something for me on the cushion. So, I started practicing at home and I started going up to Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-Ji whenever I could.

She talked about her first toddling steps into daily practice.

Nancy O’Hara: I didn’t buy Zafus or anything. I thought, if I buy those things, I’m not going to use them. So, I would just use the cushions from my couch or I’d sit on the floor, just to see if I could sustain a daily practice. Then I started going to New York Zendo Shobo-Ji on East 67th Street. I started doing sesshins (intensive weekend or weeklong meditation retreats) there and in the Catskills.

But sesshins in the monastery did not mark a fairy-tale ending for Nancy O’Hara. Life still had to strip away some more safeguards to heighten the character development in her story. Just when she thought she’d found true love, for example, another relationship went south. Then, in 1992, she bought her apartment in Harlem, only to get fired from the job she cherished. How would she get through her days now? Scotch on her Raisin Bran? Look up the number of that dealer from back in the day? Or could Zen carry her through?

Nancy decided to go up to the Catskills to talk it over with Donge. “All those times I would go up there,” she explained, “I would see people living up there and I’d wonder how they were able to do it without working. Then, another spiritual advisor ran up to me and cheered, ‘Congratulations! You got fired from your job!’ And I thought she was being so insensitive.” She laughs, “But I looked around at the people who lived there. I talked to Donge. I said, ‘Alright, this seems to be what the Universe wants me to do,’ so I made my arrangements and went up to stay in the monastery for six months.” Life threw yet another curve, though, just before she began her six month stay, when Donge, her beloved teacher of three years, died. The six months in the monastery would be a crash course in acceptance and transformation.

KTS: So, was this the kind of thing where they’d have you wake up at 4 am for meditation and keep you at it all day?

Nancy O’Hara: Oh, yeah. And, with one-week sesshins once a month, where you sit 14 hours a day and there’s chanting and dharma talks. Really rigorous.

Looking back on those months, she observes, “That’s when my life changed. When I just surrendered, which is what this practice is all about.” That same year, Nancy took the ten precepts of Zen in a formal Jukei ceremony, where Eido Shimano Roshi gave her the name Myochi, which means, “Wondrous Wisdom.”

FIND A QUIET CORNER

In 2005, Nancy published Find A Quiet Corner: A Simple Guide to Self-Peace, an inspirational book to help us find “the reservoir of strength and calmness hidden within all of us.”

KTS: I like how the book’s subtitle uses the term Self-Peace as almost a verb. How did you come to write Find a Quiet Corner?

Nancy O’Hara: Over the six months that I was in the monastery, a huge shift took place inside me. And I had always wanted to write, but I was so afraid to say that out loud! I wanted to put what I’d learned in the monastery into words, though. A lot of people I knew just dismissed Zen and said, ‘That just isn’t what I need.’ But there are so many things in that practice that anybody can use and live by.

After she came back from the monastery, she got another job in publishing. It was a good job, paid the bills, but she quickly got caught back up in the Type A maelstrom. Still, memories of her recent monastic life persisted. She took a vacation to New Mexico to further integrate what she’d learned in those six months.

Nancy O’Hara: I thought, ‘How can I bring what I learned in the monastery into my daily life? How can I bring that to other people?’ So, I was sitting outside in a hot tub at a spa on a mountain in New Mexico and it started to snow and I had the idea for [Find a Quiet Corner]. It was so magnificent and beautiful on the mountain and I was so at peace…So, I started writing the book…the book wrote itself. It wrote itself. I know that sounds weird.

KTS: No, I’ve had that experience. By the time you know something through and through, it often flows from you effortlessly.

Nancy O’Hara: Yeah, and I wanted to simplify the Zen experience. Take all the esoteric stuff out of it. So, I got an agent, got a publisher, and it sold over 100,000 copies.

LATER BOOKS AND LIFE COACHING

A couple years after publishing Find a Quiet Corner, Nancy quit her big publishing job. She had started writing Just Listen, a book of meditations on how to adapt Zen principles to everyday life challenges. She wanted to go back to New Mexico to attend a three-week workshop with my grassroots hero, writer and Zen practitioner Natalie Goldberg. When her job wouldn’t give her the time off, she tendered her resignation.

Nancy O’Hara: When I quit my job, I was making a lot of money and it was hard. I had to give up a lucrative position. But I’d become devoted to going to the monastery and teaching and writing another book and my job was interfering. So, I took the risk.

From there, Nancy started turning out a series of books, including:

Zen by the Brush: A book on how to use the ink painting and poetry traditions of Zen monks to record one’s own insights and facilitate one’s own meditation practice.

Serenity in Motion: Inner Peace, Any Time, Anywhere: Contains post-meditation instructions on how to respond with mindfulness to things like traffic jams, slow-moving lines at the grocery store, deadlines, relationship difficulties, and even the world crises on the 6 O’clock news.

Work from the Inside Out: This book uses principles from Zen and the Tao Te Ching to help readers overcome job dissatisfaction and make the most of their work. It also takes a hard line on corporate greed: “If your company engages in questionable practices generally, the best move would be to seek employment in a more honorable company or profession. If you walk away, your bravery will inspire others to do the same. And if we all conduct our individual lives in an ethical and moral manner, then our behavior will ripple through society and effectively drown out dishonorable professions.”

KTS: How would one carry their practice into their work?

Nancy O’Hara: Mindfulness. Mindful breathing. Paying attention. In every action that we take. In everything that we say – in our speech, in our thoughts, everything…we take what we learn on the cushion into every area of our lives.

Nancy describes this current phase of her life as “seamless,” her work, her passions, her practice and her relationships harmonizing effortlessly. She also conducts life coaching practice and corporate seminars under the heading, “Samu Meditation,” where she reinforces how time on the cushion has everything to do with life off the cushion.

KTS: What is Samu?

Nancy O’Hara: Samu is Zazen in action. Samu is Zazen off the cushion. Harnessing what we have learned in Zen meditation to make vast improvements in our work and our life…I don’t know how people get through life without meditation. Well, actually, I do know, and they do it very painfully.

Asked how she managed to produce such a volume of work since beginning Zen practice, she says, “I’ll admit that all my books were written on the cushion.” At first, when she said that, I nodded. Then I did a double take. What is it like to have whole books write themselves within you while you’re on the cushion? Even though I have a meditation practice myself, I can’t tell you how many concussions I’ve given myself, banging my head on my desk during a writing project. Could Zazen be an alternative to head injuries in the writer’s life?

AFTER THE INTERVIEW

I am pleased to report that my most recent stint of unemployment only lasted 10 weeks. In that time, I meditated, journaled, wrote gratitude lists, took long walks in Prospect Park and hung out with my boyfriend. Then I landed another steady freelance assignment. After three months, knock wood, it seems a perfect fit while I work on developing my creative career. But as the saying goes, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” The prospect of building a creative career recently became an unhealthy obsession. When would I write books? I mean, hells bells, I’m in my early thirties!

I started trying to devise a plot and characters. I created a virtuous protagonist and gave him a life rife with rejection, shame, poverty, and oppression. The story was harrowing, no fun to write. I can’t imagine it’d be much fun to read. I even became wracked with guilt over what I was putting my main character through. I didn’t feel that the story was coming from my core self but rather from a need to prove that I’d written a novel. I ended up tossing it into the recycling bin like I have so many other works in progress.

I pondered the lives of writers like Baudelaire, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams – all masters, all addicted to suffering. Toni Morrison once said that, in order to write in sympathy with her characters, she has to live as a psychotic for years until she reaches the last draft of each book. Was that the kind of life I wanted for myself? And, if I didn’t pursue that life, what kind of life would I have? Would I just end my days as an anonymous office drone? I lost night after night of sleep over those questions.

That’s when I decided to sign up for Nancy O’Hara’s life coaching. I went back up to her apartment. I laid out my whole quandary for her, right down to how my complaining was starting to take a toll on my relationship with my partner. We discussed my meditation practice and I told her that, while I find it easy to sustain a meditation practice in the morning, I find it almost impossible at night. That’s when she assigned me 45 minutes of Zazen every evening, the theory being that, if I overcame my struggle on the cushion, it wouldn’t bear down on me so hard off the cushion. She told me to keep my eyes open and count my breaths, one to ten, after each exhale. She instructed me to focus on my hara, the region slightly below the navel, and to think from that gut level rather than from the rampages of the mind. Throughout our sessions, she would put her hands on her hara, cautioning, like a true Irishwoman, against becoming like James Joyce’s hapless character, Mr. Duffy, who “lived at a little distance from his body,” out of touch with his inner wisdom.

At first, I found Zazen unbearable. It wore me out every night after work. My legs and back throbbed in a concert of pain. But, just like Nancy had said at the interview, the mental anguish dissolved into the physical anguish. After each session, I could easily shake the aching off my limbs along with the mental and emotional unrest that had burned away on the cushion. I read in one of Nancy’s articles that, if she could bring one book with her to a desert island, it would be the Tao Te Ching. When I spoke to her about my writers block, she advised me to consider the following verse from Lao Tsu:

Do you have the patience to wait

Till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

Till the right action arises by itself?

Once again, she rested her hands on her hara, signaling that, when we become still enough, the inspiration will rise up within us. In due time, we’ll know it in our gut.

I can already say that, since I’ve started complaining less and practicing Zazen more, I’ve caused a lot less harm to myself and my relationship with my partner. While I haven’t begun a novel, in recent months, I have been steadily turning out a lot of creative nonfiction. Is that my true genre? I guess I’ll have to sit with that question until I find out. In November, I’ll be attending my first weekend sesshin at New York Zendo Shobo-Ji. Maybe I’ll know what to do by then. Maybe not. In any case, I’m willing to sit and wait.

To learn more about Nancy O’Hara, log on to www.samumeditation.com.