This year, I'm reading The Path of Individual Liberation with my sangha. It's a 600-page tome by Chögyam Trungpa on the Hinayana, the foundation of the Buddhist path.
We're moving through it one chapter each week, and right now we're deep into shamatha, the practice of taming the mind through meditative discipline.
Last week I came across a passage I’m still processing:
"By working with the technique of suddenly bringing yourself back, combined with the practice of awareness, your mind becomes like a well-trained horse that is suitable to ride. Such a horse is both punished and treated very well, so it begins to trust its trainer. The horse doesn't mind having a saddle on its back, and it doesn't care whether it is whipped or fed with sugar cubes."
For thirty years, the only way I knew how to motivate myself was the whip. The small town I was raised in rewarded it, and it worked. Discipline and hustle carried me onto the varsity football team, to the top of my class in college, into VC in my 20s, and through the early years of building my coaching practice while running a small angel fund. The whip even showed up in my meditation practice, and the tight grip kept me vigilant. The harder I pushed, the less my mind and body settled.
When I finally began to clean up and wake up, I swung hard in the other direction, toward the sugar cube. Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, and metta taught me self-compassion. I began to honor all the parts of myself, including the ones I spent thirty years whipping, and to speak kindly to myself when doing hard things.
That work changed my life, and it still shapes how I coach and how I live.
But the pattern didn't end there. Whenever my projects and pursuits required discipline, it resurfaced as the whip: relentless pushing and striving until I burned out, withdrew, and eventually quit. Then I'd collapse back into self-care and start the cycle again. I got the whip or the sugar cube, one at a time, but never both.
This week, after Eliza and the kids were asleep, I opened my Kindle and returned to the highlighted passage. This time I finally noticed it: the hand that whips the horse has to be the same hand that feeds it sugar cubes. In my life, that hand is mine.
That’s what I’ve been missing. I’m starting to realize that trust in myself grows the same way it does in the horse: from knowing one hand will bring whatever the moment calls for. Some days that means a kind word to myself for doing the uncomfortable thing. Other days it means a firm tug on the reins.
I’m watching this play out in real time as I build a new venture this summer, appreciating the discipline and hard work required to bring something new into the world, and the encouragement it takes to keep going. The pendulum swings both ways in a single day, sometimes within an hour, and I let it.
Equanimity, I’m learning, is the fruit of trust. In a season this full, the old urges to push or retreat still return almost daily, but they no longer run the show. I can stay, meet each moment as it comes, and feel the ground I’m standing on.