Bart Weetjens, where does courage come from?

“What happens, when we act out of the feeling of fear?”, asks Bart Weetjens his workshop participants during our conference for Activism, New Work & Systemic Change in September. We invited the Zen Buddhist monk as an expert for self-leadership, as this is an essential skill for healthy activism. He asked the audience to think about the connection of courage and how the feeling of fear affects their behavior. “If we are in fear, we act in automatisms and aren’t able to respond consciously in a good way to the present moment'', he explains. "Courage is the ability to overcome fear in a responsible way. Therefore we have to 1.) realize that we act out of fear and 2.) face this fear.”

Bart Weetjens became famous for his idea to train so-called HeroRATs as sustainable detectors in response to the global landmine problem. When Mozambique announced itself free from landmines in 2015, he transitioned from social entrepreneur to focus on the practice of Zen. While continuing to explore the relationship between personal growth and social action, Bart now facilitates Zen workshops, executive leadership trainings and individual coaching trajectories.

In this interview we talk about the connection between mindfulness and wellbeing, why burn-out is one of the biggest dangers for social entrepreneurs and how to best spend time while waiting in the line at the cashier in the supermarket.

How does your daily practice as a Zen Buddhist monk look like?

The basis of my practice is called zazen, or sitting meditation. It consists of sitting quietly, while being attentive to the body posture and the rhythm of the breathing. When we focus only on the body posture and the breathing, our mind is continuously brought back to the living reality of the present moment, here and now. Here, that means in the body (we are always here) and now, that means in harmony with the breathing (we always breath in the ‘now’). When practicing this regularly, the mind starts functioning differently, like a mirror that reflects reality as it is, or like a glass of muddy water that is put on a shelf. With a bit of patience the mud sinks to the bottom and the water on top becomes crystal clear again. Continuously bringing back our attention to the present moment allows us to clearly observe the craze of our thought processes, without being completely carried away by these illusionary mental constructs.

In my daily routine I sit 20 to 40 minutes in the morning. It is more difficult when traveling. But luckily the practice is not limited to sitting meditation, and regularity is actually more important than length. So I practice in any given situation, albeit often for the length of just a few consecutive mindful breaths. We can practice standing, laying down, or walking. In almost any given circumstance it is possible to bring the awareness back to the sensations of the body and to stay tuned with the breathing. For instance in empty moments where we need to be patient, like waiting for a connecting train, or at the cashier in a supermarket, or while doing repetitive tasks, like brushing our teeth or even while sitting on the toilet. All such recurring situations are grateful opportunities to practice.

How would you describe the connection between mindfulness and wellbeing?

I would say mindfulness, as in embodied awareness practice, is a supporting resource to wellbeing. In the last 20 years there has been an exponentially growing body of scientific evidence about the positive influence of mindfulness practice on mental health, stress reduction, pain relief, increased focus, productivity, and so on. But wellbeing is so much more than mental health only. Wellbeing is hard to define, let alone measure. Most attempts to describe the nature of wellbeing have merely focused on dimensions of wellbeing (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual). What we can say about wellbeing is that it is subjective, and that it is always a dynamic balance between the challenging events of life, and the resources available, to help support one’s subjective wellbeing, like e.g. sufficient sleep, regular movement, healthy food, meaningful conversations, and awareness practices like mindfulness.

You also are involved in the international Wellbeing Project, which aims to catalyze a culture of inner wellbeing for all changemakers. What is your role there? How does the project enable positive change?

Surveys by social entrepreneurship networks like Ashoka, Schwab, and Skoll among their changemakers revealed the heavy toll social entrepreneurship had on these leader's wellbeing. Negative effects like over-identification with the work, unhealthy leadership styles and narratives of sacrifice and martyrdom, divorce, substance abuse, depression and burn-out were very common in these networks of social change leaders. I was part of these networks and my own life was no exception.

I transitioned from my executive leadership role in the organisation and started a healing journey. A difficult time, characterised by lots of tears, various therapies, and reconnection with the ground under my feet, literally! I did a permaculture course, started a vegetable garden and learned beekeeping. In that same period, I got acquainted with Aaron Pereira, another social change leader who had gone through a similar journey. He was then setting up The Wellbeing Project, a new initiative to support social entrepreneurs with their inner journey, based on the vision that doing sustainably well in society requires inner wellbeing. I went to see him in Paris, it was summer of 2015. His vision resonated on so many levels that I offered to contribute part of my time and energy to The Wellbeing Project. I joined his senior leadership team as Co-Lead Awareness.

How can we lead ourselves? Which competencies do we need to develop for good self-leadership?

Leading ourselves requires presence and self-compassion to enable us holding space for difficult emotions and transform perceived threats into new possibilities. Often social innovators act from an unhealed place of hurt about the injustice they address with their work. But when they, or better said "we" - because I am just the same, when we act from a place of anger and hurt, we risk to unconsciously transmit what we desperately try to defeat. By doing so, we simply keep the same underlying patterns going without solving the root causes. Then it is the collective, transgenerational trauma pattern that propels itself.

From a Buddhist point of view, the root causes of suffering are ignorance, greed and hatred, the so-called three poisons. At the basis there is ignorance, a lack of understanding that the “ego” isn’t something substantial, permanent, and separate from the cosmos. Because we see ourselves as separate and substantial, we dislike what stands in the way of that fixed idea of self, and yearn for what we think is missing. And therefore we experience reality as unsatisfactory. But in reality, nothing is missing. Nothing is too much.

Realising that allows us to move from “ego” to “eco”, to see ourselves as part of the cosmos, rather than on top of the cosmos. And that simple shift in consciousness about the nature of self and reality allows to develop qualities like courage, compassion, creativity, connectedness, curiosity and confidence.

How did you experience the conference? Is there a moment of your workshop or during the day that particularly stayed in your mind?

The conference was very inspiring. Unfortunately my level of German language is insufficient to understand every nuance of what was said. But that kind of “being lost in language” made me also more receptive to the subtle layers of what happened energetically in the room. I noticed an amazing openness and honesty in the community present. And that is very conducive of course, because those qualities are really needed to learn about courage.

My own workshop was an exploration of how we can lead ourselves beyond being a victim of crises, to become more courageous agents of change for all, starting by changing ourselves. At the beginning I challenged the participants, putting them ‘on the spot’ by asking them to speak up publicly: “where does courage come from?” For some participants it was easy to speak out loud, but others were confronted with their fears of speaking up in public. What stayed with me was that noticing this fear together, and holding space for it, became the source of transforming that fear.

“Where does courage come from?” was the leading question of the conference. What is your personal to this?

The root of the word courage comes from the Latin “cor” which means “heart", the beating engine of our being, this powerful, mysterious and perpetual life giving force. My personal answer would be that courage comes from an alignment with this bright and shiny core of our being. On an absolute level you could say that courage comes from an alignment with our soul’s desire, which is often in conflict with our personal desires in the relative context of life. When going beyond this duality however, when harmonizing the relative with the absolute, courage becomes a natural expression of true Self, it becomes a natural quality that allows us to move from “ego” to “eco”, which is so much needed to meaningfully address the urgent and complex threats our human family currently faces.

Is there anything else you would like to share about yourself or a current project?

These days most of my time goes to public speaking, disseminating zazen, and personal coaching. People book appointments and join my weekly online meditation group through the website www.bartweetjens.be.

This article was written as part of the Engagement, New Work & Systemic Change Conference on September 2, 2022. With more than 170 guests, we looked for answers to the leading question "Where does courage come from?".