 And the mental picture that I use is kind of inking water, you know, I come from China where you know calligraphy and painting etc that's sort of part of the culture. So when ink meets the water, right, the pattern as in sort of nature the fractals is different every time just like our life, but the two quickly become completely inseparable, right. And so our practice, our spiritual practice in this example is the ink and everything else we do our work, our family, our relationships is the water. And so the spiritual life makes everything more rich. That was my experience is it took on a different quality. I became different. I showed up different. Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are on site at Consciousness Hacking's Awaken Future Summit. We are now going to be speaking to Ying Zhao, Lou. Hello. Hi. Hi Alan. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Very excited to talk to you. Ying is a designer strategist at Converge, also a lecturer at Stanford designing for well-being. Very excited to talk about this. So who are you? What do you represent? I'm an educator. I'm a facilitator. I'm a designer. I bring sort of the creative integrative approach to everything that I do. And I sort of happened upon that fairly accidentally, but you know, there's no real accidents in life, right? But what I do now is sort of to teach students that particular mindset. It's been a very fulfilling journey. How did you accidentally? Yeah. So I, like so many people, I've gone to some Dharma talks in my early 30s. I've also done a lot of traveling, but I never saw myself as a serious spiritual seeker that seemed to be reserved, you know, to certain folks that don't necessarily have like a full on career. But then when I sort of came back to the Bay Area from Seattle for a job at LinkedIn, I was reluctant to come back to the Bay Area and I decided I should look for a place to meditate in order to sort of keep myself sane. Because there's just a lot of hecticness in the Bay Area that sort of runs counter to how I'm wired. And then I found this place called Jikogi, which means Compassion Light Temple in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And I, it's sort of set in nature and have a particular feel of calmness and sort of a energy, like a calm spiritual energy about it. So I kept going back, even though I didn't really step my feet into the Zendo until sort of several visits later. But then the people there started saying, why don't you live here? You seem like a really good fit. You seem really at home here. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. It's too far to my workplace. I have no more time for additional things like meditation or the responsibility of running a Zen Center. But they kept saying it. So I thought, huh, like I take these sort of signals seriously, right? When other people have invitations, and I thought, okay, maybe I should try it because there's a month long trial period anyway. And then when I tried it, something is instantaneously felt that time took on a more spacious quality itself. You know, I did have this free time in the evenings, especially because of the meditation and the longer commute. But it felt much more nourishing and much more rich. And so, so then I kept doing that. And I basically commuted to LinkedIn where I was working via the mountain roads, especially on a motorcycle for a few years from the Zen Center daily. And my life sort of changed from there. And I wouldn't have known that without actually experiencing it without putting myself in that situation where it was just the situation. So that's the accident. But I'm very grateful because it really changed my life on the inside out. Okay, wow. So you felt like a lot of what you are was running counter to what the Bay Area get it done mentality was. And then you took that invitation. And you said, Well, you know, why is it here? Let me explore it a little bit more. And it was a little further commute to work. But you ended up learning a lot and enough to change the trajectory of your life completely. Okay, so yeah, keep teaching us about this. Sure. I started to feel more present. I mean, these are words that I can describe later, not in the not at the time, but I could feel just sort of when my baseline being a little bit more calm. And I was more present with my team, my work, I started to say things differently. You know, now I can describe it as a little bit more vulnerability, a little bit more experimentation, putting myself out there. But at the time, I just was experimenting, you know, I started to use Buddhist language, things like basic goodness. And initially, very tentatively, but it was clear that my team really resonated with it right away. And I started to use more and more of it. I started to teach my team mindfulness skills, you know, the basics, and but also interpersonal communication of the sort of deeper connection, right? That, you know, people never sort of learn right in their education or in the beginning of yourself being professional. But it's such a core skill set, right, for being successful. Um, so that gave me kind of a particular niche at work and the kind of brand that people started to know me by that and started to come to me. And and then, you know, one thing led to another. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how it sort of happened. So people started knowing you as as someone that was maybe tapped in deeper into a sense of vulnerability, compassion. Just you you you actually end up, could it be that you drive more productivity by having these traits? And you so it was a was a lot of what you learn then through the practice of the meditation that you were learning in this Santa Cruz Center, Zen Center. It's called Gikoji Zen Center. Gikoji Zen Center. Okay. Okay. And then so then you were embodying these and presenting them at at LinkedIn when you're working there. Right. Okay, cool. And then from there, then keep us on the journey to converge and to Stanford, how did it end up all working out like that? Absolutely. One of the other important connections I want to bring about is my practice in Native American spirituality. And one of the main sort of signs that I should live at Gikoji was actually there's a sweat lodge on site at the Zen Center, which is highly, highly unusual. These coming together of spiritual traditions. But the founder of that particular Zen Center was very welcoming of sort of the spirit of the land. And, you know, for three decades or something had the sweat lodge on site. It's somewhat controversial there as well. You know, they're purists of the Zen tradition, who doesn't feel like these things should mix. But in any case, I've had a separate Native American practice for maybe eight years or so prior to going to that particular Zen Center. And I learned about the sweat lodge and wanted to participate. And I've been playing phone tag with someone who sort of holds ceremony there. And one New Year's Eve sort of I did a self-retreat. And then the next morning, New Year's Day, I walk outside of the room I was staying in and I see this guy and I instantaneously knew he was a person I was playing phone tag with, even though I had no idea what he looked like. I just knew. And then so moments later, I was able to step from the Zendo into the sweat lodge, borrowing other people's clothes to sweat in. So that was the important sign for me that sort of the different worlds that I participated in actually belong together, kind of like integration, rather than worlds colliding, which is something I used to have a fear about. So those two different practices continue to inform my life a great deal. You know, the Zen being more sort of the intrapersonal, right? The meditation. And then the ceremonies, the Native American spirit ceremonies, more about the interpersonal and also communication with the divine. So I started to basically have different mindsets that I could see how things played out. Instead of going with sort of the more typical like rational and Silicon Valley mindset of being rational and like trying to decide compromises and the best approach forward, I started to have a different mentality, which is basically the contrast between balance or compromise and integration. And I'll describe it a little bit. Yes, please. So balance is, you know, we can see the picture of a balance and it's essentially kind of a zero sum game. If you want more of something, there has to be a list of something else, right? So it's a particular mental model that it's actually a game that we could never win, especially in a world that changes so fast. Even when people have achieved some sort of balance, immediately like it's gone out the window because something has shifted, right? Their work life has shifted, their family life has shifted, they need to move, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't actually potentially, if we have a child or whatever the additional adding thing is to the equation, we do have to take time away from other things. That's right. That's right. That's right. And so it's a particular goal that is actually kind of a fallacy that people talk about all the time, right? Work-life balance. But it's actually like kind of a mental model that is people are set up for failure. So if you love what you do every single day, there is no balance. Correct. Exactly. Exactly. Whereas integration is exactly that. It's like everything we love infuses everything else and give it a kind of a richness and wholeness, right? So then there is no longer this like, I'm not doing enough of something. There is actually everything I do, everything that I touch has meaning and works together, right? Yeah. And the mental picture that I use is kind of inking water. I come from China where calligraphy and painting, et cetera, that's sort of part of the culture. So when ink meets the water, right? The pattern, as in sort of nature, the factos is different every time, just like our life. But the two quickly become completely inseparable, right? And so our practice, our spiritual practice in this example is the ink and everything else we do, our work, our family, our relationships is the water. And so the spiritual life makes everything more rich. That was my experience is it took on a different quality. I became different. I showed up different. Yes. Okay, so it was the training of the ink, the training of the spirituality that makes everything that you touch in life have meaning versus the balance and versus all of the other mental maps that we have of the way that we engage with the world. Interesting. And then what are some of the best, are you then teaching some of the best practices to develop the spirituality in the ink right now? Is that kind of what you're okay? Okay. Yeah. All right, so walk us down that. Sure, sure. Yeah, so I teach these kind of different mindsets, right? And actually students get it like really, really quickly because they understand like this is the only, this is not the only tool, right? And it has a lot of limitations when we try to rationally solve situations. It often, it generally doesn't work, right? Or it can work for a short amount of time, but it's not really how things work out. Nothing works in life by like logically really, like things are emergent, right? So I teach people basically sort of the creative emergent ways of thinking, which actually luckily design thinking is very much about that. So my profession and my spiritual practice comes together to sort of inform my view that I can share with students. Yeah, and I take them through sort of the creative process, right? Just using design thinking to bring about changes they want to see in the world. Offense through prototyping an idea could be a technology product, could be something else. But the idea is that they can connect deeply with their own pain and suffering. And the things that they want to bring about in the world is something that the world actually needs very much. And we're not alone in feeling that and we don't have to solve the problem, right? But actually this is material. This is material for how we are in the world and the things that we create. It's a non-linear process, but it's meaningful. So it normalizes it and gives it kind of a positive, right, understanding of the difficulty in students' lives. Okay, all right. So then we apply design thinking strategies to something that we're feeling within our maybe what we want to update the code of civilization with. We want to change something. That's right. And then you say, okay, we're going to apply a design thinking, first principles perspective to this of how we can have a human-centric way of changing the world for the better. And then they either build their idea through technology or whatever it may be. And then that practice itself kind of builds the ink, the spirituality. Absolutely. And it's healing. Yes. This process, like most creative people know this, right? Like the act of creating it from their pain and from their deep connectedness is self-healing. It needs to happen. Our pain is real and it's a part of why we're here. Wow. And there could potentially be when we decide to follow that path of, okay, I have this pain I want to create with it, that we find so much meaning from that, whereas sometimes we have the pain and we try and numb it. Exactly. Or try to partition it, you know? Yeah, it doesn't work. It has to be integrated. It has to be accepted. And creating helps from that. Exactly. Everything is soil. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. So then where do you now find the most part of creating spirituality, creating ink within the students that you work with? Is Converge also doing work outside of students, like with organizations as well as training leadership? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so teach us about that. Sure. Converge is super fascinating. It's an organization that I joined fairly recently, but I think they're doing the coolest work around. Basically, the idea is that in today's complex world, and there are different kinds of problems, right? Organizations and leaders can no longer, with their own efforts, solve these very complicated and complex problems. People have to work across boundaries. They have to work in ecosystems rather than single organisms. So Converge uses facilitation and deep connection and various tools to create those networks that transcend single organizations, but where people aligned the deeper challenges of our time to bring about the emergent possibilities that we want to bring about. So I'm very happy to sort of be coming back into the social impact world, which is something I obviously deeply care about. I think most people on the spiritual journey are, and to use all the tools that I have to bear for people who sort of have the inclination that they can do something, yet they don't feel like they can tackle these huge challenges. But we are all doing it. We're all change makers. And that's something that gives me deep optimism, is that are these skills and these mindsets are so easily teachable. And then what are the boundaries that we're overcoming? Is this like geopolitically how to work together? Sure. And just simply the idea that organizations have their own sort of identity or have their own charters and their bottom lines. So like our paychecks, who are we loyal to? So the idea that we are whole people, we have loyalty or obligations and responsibility to the organizations that we're a part of. But we also have deep responsibility as an engaged human being. To earth, to the ecosystem, to the ecology, to our communities. Exactly. And now we're all leaders in doing that. So it almost as though the corporation has kind of, and the bottom line has kind of taken more of a top priority over. Oh, completely. And that's sort of the linear thinking that we're seeing has very limited use and actually created a lot of problems in the past century. Yeah. Okay. So then Converge is helping with the training of the leadership at organizations to recognize these things. They create networks and facilitate those networks and sort of give people the capability of continuing with these networks for action. You know, they work in New York City on a homelessness problem. They work in the Santa Cruz Mountains on the stewardship of the land, working across lumber companies and preservation organizations, so very conflicting values. Yet it can work. And that's sort of the amazing thing about it is that when you get people in a room and get them to connect to each other in a deep way as human beings through stories, through their journeys, people work together. People are realizing that beyond those sort of bottom lines that make conflict, right, those financial bottom lines, they have deep alignment. So we could potentially get some of the executives at like the oil companies and really, yeah, and they would forfeit some of the company's bottom lines that they're working at. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because we're all, we're not, there are no single metric, right, that determines our success. You know, we are actually all wanting multiple bottom lines, right? Like you said, the community, the ecology, and not just a financial bottom line. That's right. Yeah. And so then the, these processes of kind of slowing down with some of the executives, this is just, there's such a funny thought experiment for me in my head is, you know, because we've been for such a long time trying to envision what it would be like if the, you know, if the UN General Assembly was to just, you know, have some more thoughts of, yeah, that unity and that unbounded love and compassion. Like, what would it, yeah, how would we do that? How would it change, right, if the oil companies were to be like, it's okay, our bottom line can take a hit. We're going to transition to, you know, this type of stuff. It's like, it's almost funny, but it's such so needed. Oh, yeah. So to make it actually happen, you can step in and engage on a, absolutely on a personal sort of human level. Yeah. I think like any kind of tide change, we're going to see things like that sooner than we may think, right? We will see UN assemblies and like the heads of corporations having these conversations. You know, there are people doing work on that front. Some of my colleagues at Converge and there are others leadership, you know, facilitators and one of them that I'm a fan of is someone called Mark Lesser. He used to be the CEO of a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. And he writes about, you know, he was a part of a, he was invited to facilitate at a board meeting that was very much gone awry. People were trying to get to the agenda and the strategic vision very quickly, right? Because obviously that's what people's times are precious. But he got in, he had people like meditate for 15 minutes, which is a really long time for people who've never done that. And then he asked people the questions of, you know, why are you here on this earth? Yes. And what are you doing to sort of bring about your values into the world? And to have people tell stories without interruption for five minutes about that with the others listening on, simply holding the space. And he said like in, you know, 20 minutes the space was completely transformed. The atmosphere was transformed. So the experience of being listened to on a human level. Yeah. Yeah, this, just the idea that, listen, we only have 15 minutes. We need to get to the heart of the conversation. We need to go so fast. But how do you, you know, Exactly. You have to, we have to go slow to go fast. Yeah. Yeah. That's, there's like, there's like so many ideas. There's not enough time sometimes to execute all of them, right? And so, and so it's like also important to like be vigilant with our time. Yeah. Oh yeah. To, to find that way of, of engaging with people on the level that is that meditative, let's slow down. I love you. You love me. Let's have our story time. Let's enjoy that. At the same time, what are our values? Why are we here on this earth, right? To start a board meeting with something like that's great. At the same time, because it can catalyze great results. At the same time, it's important to be vigilant with time and be intentional, be intentional. Sure. Sure. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm, I'm following. Okay. So, so even just dropping in for the short bit at the beginning can be transformational for that. It's necessary. It's necessary. I have that problem as well with time. I have a young child actually under two. So like there's no, I have very little time where I is that is my own basically, which is a very new part of my life and challenge. So I have, you know, part of my challenge right now is like, how do I use the time that I do have? How do I use my limited energy? So, one of the practices that I'm trying to do is to let go of the things I have done, but let also let go of the things I haven't done that I haven't gotten to and simply trust that whatever I do, do with my time is fine. Yeah. Because it's not possible to be like so calculated, right? And so intentional, effective with every minute. And so part of it is just giving us a break as well. We have the problem of abundance. That's very much here in Silicon Valley now, right? Like, you know, we have too many good things to pursue. Opportunity abundance. Yes, that's right, which has opportunity cost, right? Which is a very difficult thing for the mind to grok. Yeah. And it's a it can be a crazy making to try to like weigh all those things. But that's a balanced mindset, right? It's like we cannot logically weigh everything that we could do and what opportunity it might take and what cost it might have, etc. Oh my gosh. So we can only like, yeah. So one of the things I tried to do is like over time, I actually realized I can trust my actions and not spend too much cycles, like trying to weigh things. And I just whatever I do, whatever I vote for with my feet, is fine. There's wisdom in my actions. Yeah. Yeah. So all the variables of all the ideas that we could allocate time to all the people of the and running the opportunity cost calculations and measurements and all this stuff. Yeah. It's also just having some sort of a future authoring like some something that we want to achieve in this long term and knowing our short term stuff. But also being cool with where we move ourselves moment to moment getting there. So there's so many possible ways to get. Okay. Yeah. And hold hold whatever this brain tool holds lightly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to I want to understand. Is that then the the process for designing for well being is this process? I would say yeah. We're overly obsessed with the calculating opportunity costs. Yeah. I mean, we put students into teams. So the idea of their original visions may very well change with the influence of other people, right? And the prototyping process and feedback and so on. So we really try to teach the students to understand the emergence and to embrace that. Right. Yeah. Because future is highly emergent. Yeah. One of the other one of the things I like to say is what could happen is much bigger and much more magical than what you think you want. Whoa. The future is much more bigger and magical than what we think we want. If we look back in our own lives, I have that experience, right? What had happened is actually much bigger and more magical than what I thought I wanted. Like my life now is way more expensive and magical than what I could have thought 10 or 20 years ago, right? So I'm casing point of that emergent possibility. And I think for today's young people is even more so because the future is coming very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. In a very rich way. Okay. So Millennial and Gen Z, huge part of the exponential technology era pushing forth the rapid changes that are happening in our world. And so the sort of it's sort of the the the phenomena, the phenomenons that we may experience of stress or anxiety or overwhelming feeling of all the different opportunities of social and ideas to pursue and all that stuff to kind of become one with all of that and just be guided in this kind of surrender to the direction that our divine path will end up taking. For sure. I love that. And at the same time I realized that like, is it really like surrendering to me wanting to watch Game of Thrones or or is it surrendering to me wanting to not do that and edit the footage instead, right? You know what I mean? What do you do with that thoughts like that? Hmm. The first thought that comes is I think people do need the pleasure in their lives. It might be Game of Thrones. It might be video games. You know, it might be dating. And that's a natural part of human desire that is actually really important because it nourishes all of us. And we if we feel like the sort of the avoid or emptiness, we would always want to fill it with something. But when we have deep pleasure, then that cup is filled. And then the rest of the decision making process become much easier because you're not from acting from a place of deficit. Interesting. So so it could be that the cup could be filled though with either the Game of Thrones or a video game or dating or it could be filled with doing something like absolutely producing content. Yeah. And so okay. So then maybe then one of the things is to kind of have a experience different items at the buffet to see what fills up the cup. Yes. That's right. That's right. And allowing oneself to make mistakes in there because we'll know. We'll know when something's not fulfilling. Interesting. So we taste something at the buffet. Absolutely. You say that wasn't as fulfilling for my cup as when I do this. Exactly. And if we're, if we have some level of awareness, then I think actually we're all very sensitive to how something can be like hollow pressure, pleasure, and when something is real pleasure. Oh, hollow pleasure versus real pleasure. I like that. Yeah. Right. Because there's, you know, there's a lot of stress in life and we want to escape. Like that's human nature. But I think, you know, like FOMO and sort of the strategies to, you know, act on that. So, you know, like basically comparison with other people can take up a lot of time, but it can quickly feel not really satisfying. Like it may like give you a little bit of a hit, right? But I think, I think, you know, like people eventually have enough experiences when things is like too quick of a hit, right? With no longer sustained feeling. Wow. And but, you know, it takes honesty and hopefully good friends around you to like not give you the sort of negative reinforcement, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's almost as though we have the best innate ability to parse the buffet of options to find what is most fulfilling for us. Occasionally we can be consuming something that is hollowly fulfilling and we need to write environment of parents, community, friends, and seizure to be like, you know, try this, see what you think of this. And then maybe you find more fulfillment than that. I feel like one of the things that's coming up more frequently is that the whole movement towards social, emotional, mental, physical, spiritual well-being, right? Because you are designing for well-being. So the whole movement in that direction is fascinating and I think it's really providing some nutrition for people of fulfillment. Simultaneously, I find myself at times potentially finding a lot of fulfillment and just being alone as well. And I have so many ideas. I just want to like be able to try and synthesize, right? Package it up into multimedia goodness. And so yeah. It's wonderful. Yeah. So then there's these like, there's this, sometimes someone will say like, you shouldn't be such a recluse, you should, you know, or whatever. And so it's almost as though do we, how well do we know ourselves? Know thyself. That being most important. Knowing where we get fulfillment. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And aloneness is really a necessary practice, I think for everybody, even for the more social, socially oriented people. I think someone said that solitude is only as good as the compassion it creates. And I have the experience in myself and I can see it in other people also that when they spend time alone, they actually feel more connected afterwards because we have become more connected to ourselves. And in that process become more generous or loving. So give yourself that. I love that. The such the rapid pace of just attaching ourselves to this whenever we feel the time of boredom or aloneness, aloneness is bad in so many ways because we don't tap deeper in and then be able to tap deeper to the communities. And this has been such an interesting conversation with you. You're doing some powerful conversations with me and inspiration hopefully for others and to work at Converge and at Stanford is good work. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show and talking to us. A pleasure. I really appreciate it. Quick question I want to ask you, do you think we're in a simulation? I would say the main answer is no. This is real. Our bodies are real. And how we experience our reality, however, is completely up to our internal states, up to these processes and sort of the metaphysical, you know, combinations of housings are, which are kind of hard to describe. But no, I think we're real and I'm grateful for that. And then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? I want to say right now, since I have a little one, it's sort of the love of young children. Their love is so completely pure and it's heartbreaking. But we are all that, right? We're all young children. We haven't left that. And if we can bring about that, you know, we'll all be much closer to this, closer to our hearts. Where can people find you on the internet? What's Converge's URL? Converge.net. Converge.net is the URL. The link is in the bio for that. Also is LinkedIn. Yeah. LinkedIn is a good place. Okay. Yeah. And Ying Zhao, lose on LinkedIn as well. The link is below. And huge thank you everyone for tuning in. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Go and talk to more people, your friends, your family, people on social media, your co-workers, about what it's like to piece together these next conversations for well-being and designing for well-being around our world. And also check out the links below to Consciousness Hacking and to Simulation Sport, the organizations, the entrepreneurs, and the artists around the world that you believe in. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you soon. Thank you.