A physician
who learned
to be still.
Charles Lee was, for a long time, only a doctor. The book and the podcast were not the plan. They came after — after the illness, after the years of practice, after the slow discovery that attention is itself a form of repair.
A small, ordinary beginning.
I trained as an emergency physician in Singapore in 1995, then worked through the SARS years in two hospitals that did not believe, at the time, in what they were seeing. I left medicine briefly in 2007 — quietly, without telling many people — and went to live in a small house outside Ipoh that did not have hot water.
It was there, in that house, that I read the desert fathers for the first time. I had been raised in the church but had never read them. They wrote with great seriousness about a small set of practices — attention, breath, the refusal of speed — that I recognized, suddenly and embarrassingly, as the practices my body had been begging me for.
I returned to clinical work eight months later. The work was the same and I was not. Over the next decade I built, slowly and a little reluctantly, what I now call MindFlow Ergonomics — seven movements of attention that I teach in retreats, in the book, and on the podcast.
I am not particularly fond of the word "mindfulness". It has been worn flat. I use it because I have not found a better one, and because the practice it points to has, in fact, kept me alive.
Attention is the most ordinary practice. It is also the one we have all forgotten how to do.
Thirty-one years, slowly.
A short, unembellished record. Most of it took longer than it appears here.
The C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E. zones.
Each zone is a small practice — five minutes, ten, sometimes thirty. They do not need to be done in order, although most people, eventually, do them in order.
Contemplation
Sitting without aim. The hardest of the seven, and the one Charles teaches first.
Reception
The discipline of letting something in without immediately doing anything with it.
Embodiment
A returning to the body. Often slow, often surprising, sometimes painful.
Attention
The central practice. The other six exist to make this one easier.
Trust
Not certainty. The slow construction of the muscle that learns to wait.
Integration
The point at which the practice and the day cease to be different things.
Vocation & Encounter
The seventh zone is, properly, two. The first names what you are made for. The second names the people who will, eventually, recognize it in you.
Begin where you are.