"Give it room to breathe"
an interview with executive coach, podcast host, meditator, baker, musician, and writer, Ankur Shah Delight
Today, I’m excited to share an interview with executive coach, podcast host, meditator, baker, musician, and writer Ankur Shah Delight.✨
I heard of Ankur Shah Delight long before I met him in person. He went to college with my husband, Nico, and he held a kind of mythic role in those college stories that made me seriously doubt that he could live up to the hype. But every time I’ve interacted with Ankur over the past many years, he has proved to be a singularly curious, magnetic, funny, deep thinking, evolved-but-not-in-a-precious-way human being. Someone I admire deeply for who he is and the way he lives his life.
Two years ago, I traveled with my family to Sequim, WA, a city famous for its lavender farms, on the verdant Olympic peninsula where Ankur grew up and now lives with his family. Our visit started with us wandering around Ankur’s yard picking raspberries and wondering where he was only to learn that we were supposed to meet him down the road to go fishing. Minutes later, we were putting on life vests, eating quesadillas Ankur had just made over a fire, and heading out on Sequim bay to fish for Dungeness crabs with Ankur’s childhood friend. (I know, I know. This order of operations sounds made up, but it’s real, I swear, and I’ve gathered, typical of Ankur). During our visit, we visited Nash’s organic farm and got to know Nash and his animals and crops, hiked together in Olympic National Park, had long conversations with Ankur and his partner, Miriame Cherbib (a formidable thinker and creative force in her own right), while they made fresh bread and jasmine tea.
Ankur is one of the first people I thought of asking about his mindfulness and writing practices when I started this newsletter because both practices are central to the way he lives his life. I hope you gain as much as I did from Ankur’s interview and from learning more about his work. Read on, friends.
What are your mindfulness practices?
I had a daily meditation practice for over 15 years, since I sat my first 10-day Vipassana in 2005. I traveled a lot during those years and it was a very difficult practice to maintain and came with a lot of self-judgment and inner criticism.
We broke up (me and sitting meditation) last year. I really want to get back together but not in the same way... something fundamental has to shift in our dynamic.
In the meantime, my three main mindfulness practices are cooking, parenting, and playing music.
By cooking I mainly mean standing. I feel where my weight is on my feet during cooking, and tune in to the effect on my body. This usually means a strong pressing sensation in the heel. I then try to balance the weight between the heel and big toe until I have the sensation of total balance. This is a lot like sitting meditation in the sense that a few seconds later I have to do it again...
The meditation of parenting is probably obvious to any parent reading this and has mostly to do with developing awareness of subtle levels of anger and frustration before they grow large enough to affect my interactions.
Playing music is a meditation on focused attention vs. mailing it in. At every moment I can be giving my full attention to what I am singing or playing, or I can be listlessly replicating something from memory. The mindfulness consists of becoming aware of what I'm doing and then experimenting with pushing the slider towards focus.
What do you do when a mindfulness practice doesn't seem to be working?
My favorite thing is to do something else! Of the four techniques I've discussed, that works for half of them (sitting meditation and playing music). But with standing and parenting, we don't always have that liberty.
One of my most influential meditation teachers (Mukeshbahi) in India referred me to the three gunas. Basically, the mind has be in the right state ("satvic") for sitting meditation to "work.” If my mind was too accelerated ("rajaic" / caffeinated), he counseled reading about meditation instead of meditating. And if the mind was too sluggish ("tamasic"), he counseled sleep (if that's what the body needs) or exercise before attempting to sit again.
I've found that to be very solid advice.
Do you see your mindfulness practices as connected to other kinds of work you do? In what ways?
One of my mentors in the field of conflict resolution, Ken Cloke, told us that meditation is essential to anyone trying to mediate or resolve conflict. I think that extends to working with other humans in a variety of domains. If my job is to be present for people who are triggered, it's my duty to know when I myself am triggered (so I can recuse myself).
Do you have a writing practice currently? Any writing rituals?
I actually just recovered my writing practice six months ago, and I'm very excited! The key practice is this: Every time I have an idea, no matter how small or crazy or wild, I give it room to breathe. That usually means jotting it down or taking an audio note. And then, every day or two, I go over all those notes and turn them into outlines in my Master Document. Some end up as finished pieces, some never see the light of day. But everybody gets a shot.
What kind of writing are you working on? Are you working on specific projects or journaling or something else?
At the moment I'm working on two projects. One is a non-fiction book on finding Purpose for people with atheistic or otherwise post-religious inclinations. The other is about my daily practice of making and giving away sourdough bread for the past nine years, in the style of an illustrated children's book. It contains reflections on the relationship between the global economy and local community building efforts.
A prompt from Ankur:
I believe we humans have the potential to become a sacred race of love (as the song goes). In practice, that looks like each person playing their part in a symphony, enjoying the flow and knowing that their own pleasure is contributing to the greater whole.
What would that look like for you? What could you be doing with your time that sacrifices neither your own pleasure nor your sense of contribution to the species? What would living in that intersection look like, for you?
Ankur Shah Delight graduated from Stanford University in 2001 with a degree in Mathematical and Computational Science. Since then, he has dedicated himself to improvisational cooking, organic agriculture, earthen construction, meditation, pilgrimage, writing, social work, hospital chaplaincy, Indian classical music, and algorithm design. Most of all, he loves Togetherness. He sees the listening and connecting he does through his coaching and conflict resolution work as a natural extension of the parties he threw (every Thursday!) in college.
Ankur’s Weekly Newsletter on Building Global Community: https://tenthousandheroes.club
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankurdelight
Books
The Ten Thousand Heroes Podcast
Spotify:
*I highly recommend Ankur’s podcast on goals, linked here. I find his concept of “Night Vision” super compelling and helpful as I’m trying to change a few stubborn habits that have been keeping me stuck in my life.
Apple:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tenthousandheroes
I’d love your suggestions of other people I might feature here, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just reply to this newsletter. ✨
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. You can support this newsletter by liking, commenting & sharing it with other people. You can also find me on Instagram or Facebook or find more info at my website. Thank you for reading! ✨
Really enjoyed this, thank you