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Marcia Chen was born in a rural village in the Jinggang Mountains, Jiangxi Province, as the third daughter in a family shaped by a strong preference for sons. Her mother chose to raise three daughters alone.
From the beginning, her life was connected to a question of visibility: what does it take for a person to be truly seen?
That question first led her into women’s leadership and inclusion. Over time, it has grown into a broader body of work: helping organizations build cultures where more people can feel deeply, think clearly, become capable, and stay connected in the age of AI.
Jinggang Mountains
DiDi
Google
Beijing
London
Women Alliance Group
Founder & CEO, Women Alliance GroupChina’s first cross-industry platform for women’s development, inclusion, and belonging
TEDxHongqiao Women Speaker“Softness Is the New Strength”
Former Lead, Google #IamRemarkable ChinaScaled the program across 100+ enterprises and 5,000+ participants
Co-Chair, BritCham Shanghai Women in Business Committee2024 to present
Speaker, UN Women Beijing+30 Business Leaders SummitOn moving people from invisible to seen
Leadership CoachSystems change · Organisation & Relationship Systems Coaching practitioner
Education & certifications
Imperial College London, MSc Strategic Marketing, 2016 · Georgetown University, Executive Program in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion · Google #IamRemarkable Certified Facilitator · Designing Your Life Certified Coach
Thought leadership
Host, Stones from Other Mountains podcast · Featured Advisor & Foreword Contributor, Rising Together · Chinese Translator, Remix
In the age of AI, Marcia’s work helps organizations build the human conditions for people to feel deeply, think clearly, become capable, and stay connected through change.
The Practice Behind the Work
Self-transformation workshop: unlock your mind for growth
Vipassana, Zen, nature-based wisdom, and the I Ching taught Marcia that change is also a discipline of attention.
As AI accelerates what we can build, she asks a quieter question: what are we becoming as we build?
Alongside the programs and the stages, Marcia has been writing her way through the questions.
From a café in Lhasa, a Zen temple on Qingyuan Mountain, and ten days of silence in Nepal, these essays trace the ground beneath her work: doubt turning into agency, silence into attention, service into a way home.
It has been a long time since I last wrote. After nearly a year as a digital nomad, I have reached the final stop of my wandering: Tibet. I am sitting in a quiet Tibetan café near the Jokhang Temple, writing this to record how I have grown, and changed, as a leader.
Two years ago: Why me?
Two years ago, in May, I was 26 when I walked into a coaching-leadership course. One session was called “Team Practice: Adding and Subtracting.” I had been working for only about two years and had little felt sense of teams or leadership. Most of my classmates were born in the 1970s and 1980s, HR directors or senior managers in their companies. The voice in my head said: you are the youngest, the least experienced, and you don’t know anyone here. Just play the invisible person well, listen quietly, and learn from the people who have done this longer.
Fate took a dramatic turn on the first evening. The course included a four-hour simulated war, designed to let each of us see our own patterns in a team, and break through them.
The first joke fate played on me: the general of my team, the Red Army, chose me as his lieutenant.
The second: about ten minutes into the war, the general was unexpectedly “killed,” and under the rules I automatically became general of the Red Army. In an instant I went from the invisible person to the most visible person in the room.
I clearly remember that when the war ended, my first reaction was to find my general and ask him: why me? There were so many accomplished, experienced people in the class, who knew each other and had years of management experience. Why did you choose me?
If that war was designed as a mirror to show each of us our pattern in a team, then mine was this: I did not believe I could be a leader.
Two years later, in May, I joined an entrepreneurship course, and the simulated war returned in another form. The organizers turned the community of more than 1,300 participants into a martial-arts world of eleven clans, each with over a hundred members. Every week the clans competed on how many assignments they submitted, and how well, applying what we were learning about management.
Looking across that world, I was still young and still light on management credentials. What had changed was that I now had inner confidence and strength, and I chose to believe in myself. I ran for clan leader. In my second week, I led our 109 members across ten sub-groups from eleventh place to third, the biggest single-week comeback in the nine cohorts the course had run. If you had asked me what my inner voice was saying then, it was: why not me?
Looking back at these two dramatically contrasting experiences, both of them simulations, both a way of practicing the real through the unreal, I could see real growth in my leadership. So I began to zoom in: what exactly had changed underneath?
I found four inner shifts:
Allowing myself to be strong: seeing and letting go of limiting beliefs
Upgrading my inner engine: committing to something bigger
A new belief about leadership: delivering results is the greatest responsibility to a team
Using the power of the organization: from one person to many
1. Allowing myself to be strong
Apart from sleep, almost every moment of every day we are in conversation with ourselves. That inner dialogue becomes our beliefs; our beliefs guide our choices; our choices have real consequences.
In the war two years earlier, my beliefs were: I am young, I am inexperienced, I am weak, I am not qualified to be a leader. They looked like facts. Looked at closely, I was using external “fact labels” as excuses for inner fear. With beliefs about not being good enough, I built myself a snail shell and hid inside, so I would never have to take a risk or pay the price of failing. I call these limiting beliefs.
I could have stayed in the shell of “young and inexperienced,” or found new shells along the way, led by my own fear. But I believe the miracle of life happens precisely when we see our limiting beliefs and begin to rewrite them. On that journey, a 22-year-old Indian woman and a poem moved me deeply.
The first turning point came in October 2019, when I travelled alone to India to support a women’s empowerment nonprofit. There I met Priya. At 22, she had founded a local nonprofit that each year mobilized more than 1,000 student volunteers and raised three million rupees for literacy among women living in poverty, protecting children from sexual abuse, menstrual products, and stray-dog adoption. In the seven days I spent with her, I did not see a trace of fear or insecurity about her age. She led her team with strength and certainty toward meaningful work. I was stunned. A 22-year-old university student in a small Indian city could be such a fearless leader. And me? Why, at 27, was I hiding in a snail shell?
The second came in January 2020, when I met a yogi on a street in Bali. He shared the poem “Our Deepest Fear” with me, and a few lines shook me: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Your playing small does not serve the world. I saw that one fear we humans share is the fear of being more powerful than we imagine. Our education teaches us more about how to shrink and stay within bounds than how to trust ourselves and expand our edges.
So I saw clearly: limiting beliefs are excuses I choose for my fear, my avoidance, my reluctance to become strong. They are not facts. After that, I set the snail shell down, and I no longer pick up new ones so easily.
Every one of us, at any moment, can find a snail shell for not being brave: age, education, seniority, gender, family of origin, relationships, past experiences. But we have a choice. We can see it, set it down, and move forward with courage.
2. Upgrading my inner engine: commit to something bigger
I often tell friends that since I committed to Women Alliance Group, my growth has felt ten times faster, as if my engine switched from a small motor to a high-powered one. With the new engine, I have far more drive to face the lessons I used to avoid: conflict avoidance, people-pleasing, fear of authority, reluctance to delegate. Every breakthrough hurts, because it means stepping out of my comfort zone, rewriting how I think, and changing how I act. But I have more energy to move through it, because I know my growth is no longer only for me as an individual. It serves a larger mission, with a community behind it that may one day reach tens of millions of people. As the founder of an organization, my own growth becomes, in some ways, the ceiling for the organization’s growth.
As an individual, I still feel fear. But when that fear meets a mission, it grows faint. In the TED talk “How to Speak Up for Yourself,” the speaker notes that when a chimpanzee becomes a mother, her power to protect far exceeds her strength as a lone individual. In other words, when we connect to a larger system and set down our personal fears, gains and losses, the energy available to us is beyond what we imagine.
In the television drama The Age of Awakening, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi and Lu Xun keep growing and breaking through during the New Culture Movement because they take the fate of their nation as their own responsibility. That kind of engine gives them certainty in the face of great questions, and makes them true leaders of a new culture. The American writer Norman Vincent Peale put it this way: “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.”
3. Delivering results is the greatest responsibility to a team
I used to be a very soft person, people-first, attentive to how everyone on the team felt and whether they were comfortable. At its core, what I cared about was whether people on the team liked me.
I sensed that this was not what a real leader does. A major turning point came this March, in a course on Kazuo Inamori’s Six Endeavors, when I realized that delivering results is what a leader is truly responsible for. That turning point also came from a simulated contest: more than 120 people in two teams, each needing to come together fast, find a strategy, and master a skill against the clock. I volunteered to be the women’s captain of Team A and, with the men’s captain, led our training. We set norms and improved our process, and every round beat our previous result. In the end we lost the final by 0.02 seconds.
By the rules, the losing captain had to do 180 push-ups. I cried through every one of them, not because the push-ups were hard, but because I was reflecting deeply on myself as a team leader. I had focused only on people’s feelings and comfort, and not on the goal and the result. When we lost, the whole team was disbanded. What did my so-called care for people mean then? In real competition, when a team no longer has the chance to exist, what is people-caring worth?
I saw that putting care for people first, without leading the team to a result, is in fact irresponsible to the team. And my so-called care was something I did inside my own comfort zone, to be liked. My attention was still on myself.
So I moved from being a soft person to being a leader who combines soft and firm: setting goals and leading the team to reach them wholeheartedly, while caring for the team’s growth along the way, growing people through the work. Something my teacher Cherry said struck me: great kindness can be great harm, and what looks harsh can be great kindness. Some things leaders do may look kind on the surface, earning approval and keeping people comfortable, while sacrificing the team’s interests over time. Other things may not be understood by the team in the moment, and yet serve it in the long run.
4. From one person to many
A mentor once told me: a leader is not the strongest person on the team, only the one willing to step forward and carry a little more. I feel this deeply. The first thing a leader must let go of is the attachment to being the individual champion, the lone hero, so that the team and the organization can do what they are capable of.
In the final showdown of that war two years ago, our side had a clear advantage; we could practically have won by waiting. But as general, I didn’t send my lieutenant or my guards. I went out to fight myself, out of personal heroism, and was killed. Our army, with far more people, lost to a single blind general on the other side. Looking back, I was fighting alone. I had a team, but I did not truly trust it or use its strength.
Two years later, I have learned to build a team, build a culture, and lead through the team. My role is more about seeing people, placing them well, and helping each person do what they are good at. The beauty of teamwork showed clearly in the Coach For Women project: a brand-new team formed in January, and within three months we selected and brought together 50 professional coaches, and our events reached more than 1,200 people. Every partner grew in their role. I went from a general charging alone to someone who can lead in front, lead beside, and lead behind.
In closing
Looking back, I am moved. In two years, my age and credentials have not changed much. Inner growth is not tightly bound to those outer variables. As Theory U reminds us, the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener. All outer growth is a reflection of inner growth and change.
A few beliefs have helped me grow:
We are already whole. Every life is born with limitless possibility.
We don’t need to be perfect. We only need the courage to act.
When we move toward a larger purpose, life generously gives us more energy.
May you, too, be brave and fearless, and ride the wind and the waves. Be humble to learn, bold to lead.
Marcia Lhasa, 14 June 2021
Inner practice · Written at the end of January 2020
Nepal Vipassana: Life Philosophy from a Ten-Day Silent Retreat
Seven lessons for living, carried home from the meditation hall.
This piece follows my earlier essay, Notes from a Ten-Day Meditation Retreat. Here I want to share the wisdom for living that I learned during the ten-day silent course. It has shaped me deeply, and I hope you find something in it too.
Because each of us arrives with a different history, students in the same hall will understand the same teaching differently. What follows is only my own understanding. For the real thing, you will need to experience it yourself.
Our ignorance of the inner world
The path must be walked yourself
The breath as a way into this present moment
Real difference begins in the mind
Suffering comes not from others, but from our own inner choices
To harm another, we first harm ourselves
The future begins now
It took me nearly two days to recall the ten days of the retreat, and to trace how I have applied them over the past six months. If you have found this, choose an unhurried moment, sit down, and read slowly.
1. Our ignorance of the inner world
We give the outer world a great deal of attention and are often almost entirely in the dark about the inner one. Most of the time we watch the world outside: events, nature, what others are doing, who rises and falls. Or we watch our outer selves: our image, whether we are successful, whether others approve.
We often neglect our inner selves. Are my organs overburdened? What emotion am I actually feeling right now? What deeper need lies behind this action? What fear is buried in my unconscious? This ignorance leads us to react and decide without knowing why, and to regret it later. It is like walking at night, not knowing where we are going. As Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Vipassana invites us to turn from seeking outside to exploring inside, to light up the inner world with awareness so that the self can truly be seen. From four in the morning to nine at night, more than ten hours a day, we observed our own bodies and minds as they really are, turning attention inward: the flow of thoughts, the changing sensations of the body, emotions rising and falling, the patterns behind our thinking and behavior. As this awareness took root, I began to watch myself like an observer: what state, emotion or need lies behind this thought or action? Awareness is like a lamp. With it I spend less time walking in the dark and more time making conscious choices.
Later, when I took Google’s popular course Search Inside Yourself, its two days revolved around this same inner awareness. The course, started at Google by engineer Chade-Meng Tan, brings together meditation, neuroscience, emotional intelligence and leadership. The philosophy of meditation does not stay on the cushion or in the meditation hall. It needs to live in every moment of work and life. The course is only a beginning; the real practice happens in daily life.
2. The path must be walked yourself
The course describes three levels of understanding: received wisdom, intellectual wisdom, and experiential wisdom.
Imagine you want to travel from village A to village B. You ask the village elder, who describes the route: which road to take, where it climbs, where to turn. That is received wisdom, passed on from someone else’s experience. Still unsure, you open a map, trace the route, and imagine the road conditions. That is intellectual wisdom, understanding at the level of thought. Both can point the way, but neither is true wisdom. You are still standing in village A.
Only when you actually set out, crossing hills, wading muddy paths, passing rice fields, climbing steep slopes, do you truly know the road. That is experiential wisdom, and only this wisdom leads to the path of liberation. As Hermann Hesse wrote in Siddhartha, “Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom.”
In the end, you have to walk the path yourself. Reading many books about meditation is not the same as sitting on the cushion each day. Thinking endlessly about the meaning of life is not the same as living it, starting today, with a beginner’s heart. Not only understanding with the mind, but living it with your whole life. Life itself is the best textbook.
I felt this deeply. Those ten days were the course with the least spoken teaching I have ever taken, and the one with the most lasting impact. Apart from an hour-long evening discourse and brief instructions, nearly all of my seventeen waking hours each day were spent using my own life as the textbook: observing, noticing, understanding. That direct experience left a lasting mark on how I understand myself and life.
Meditation is not an end in itself. Finding the wisdom to live freely is. So Vipassana does not encourage us to sit on the cushion forever, but to carry this philosophy back into the real world, test it there, and walk our own path. If you have ever wondered why you have heard so much good advice and still struggle to live well, set down the thinking mind and live it with your heart.
Steve Jobs, reflecting on his time in India, observed that Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned. In the villages of India, people never learned it. They learned something else: the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
3. The breath as a way into this present moment
The first three days of the course are Anapana, observing the breath, which I described in my earlier essay. You place your full attention on each breath in and out through the nose, and when the mind wanders, you bring it back. At first I was puzzled. Why spend so much time watching the breath? Could there be wisdom in something that is with me every moment?
Gradually I understood how important awareness of the breath is, in meditation and in life. Focusing on the breath gives me awareness of the here and now. Much of our suffering comes from being unaware of present reality. Most of the time our minds live in imagined worlds, replaying past joys or pains, or fearing and craving what has not yet happened. This craving and aversion take us away from the present moment.
Yet the present moment is what matters most. We cannot live in the past; it is gone. We cannot live in the future; it has not come. All we can do is live now. Attention to the breath pulls me back from the illusions of past and future into awareness of what is actually here. “Do not grieve over the past, do not crave the future; keep the mind in the present, and there you will find peace.”
Why does meditation choose the breath as the doorway to the present? First, because anyone, rich or poor, young or old, of any race or culture, can become aware through the breath, anytime and anywhere. Second, because the breath is the bridge between body and mind, between the conscious and the unconscious. It looks like a physical function, but it clearly mirrors our state of mind. When we are calm, the breath is light and steady. When anger, hatred, fear or desire arise, the breath becomes heavy and short. If we treat the breath as a barometer of our inner state, we can start receiving its signals, and respond with awareness rather than react out of pattern.
In daily life this is wise too. When a problem arises, first notice your breath, and use it as a clue to observe your inner state with balance. When the breath is calm and you are balanced, your decision is likely to be sound. When it isn’t, whatever you decide may just be a reaction. Through awareness of the breath, we can shift from negative reaction to positive response.
As the words often attributed to Viktor Frankl put it: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Through the breath, into the present moment. Through the present moment, into the freedom to choose.
4. Real difference begins in the mind
The course describes three kinds of action: physical, vocal, and mental. Most people pay most attention to physical action, then to speech, and least of all to the mind. Vipassana holds that speech and physical action are only the final expression of the mind, and that what truly matters is the mind at the source.
The same words, or the same act, can lead to very different outcomes depending on the intention behind them. With a pure intention, even rough-seeming words or actions can bring joy. With an impure intention, even beautiful-seeming words or actions can bring suffering. Intention is the seed.
I think of my own example. A few years ago I wanted to write publicly so that I would be heard and seen. That was my intention then, and I often got stuck, unable to write, because I kept asking what topics would attract readers rather than what I wanted to share. I was anxious and never really began. After this retreat, I started writing again, and this time my intention was simple: I had experienced this ancient and beautiful wisdom, and I wanted to share it so that more people could find inner peace. Writing from that simple, peaceful intention, I feel calm and joyful each time, untroubled by outside pressure.
The course also teaches that practice is not only on the cushion, but in holding right intention and doing the right thing in every moment of life. I wrestled with this for a long time. What counts as right intention? What counts as right action? By what standard, in a world where people stand on different sides and there is rarely absolute right and wrong? One idea from the course helped me: any action that harms others or disturbs their inner peace is unwholesome; any action that helps others and supports their inner peace is wholesome.
Back in daily life, I often use this standard when I am torn. Should I do this? Should I say that? I ask myself: what is my intention? Will this disturb or support someone else’s inner peace? After those two questions, a problem that was burning inside me usually melts like spring snow.
5. Suffering comes not from others, but from our own inner choices
In my earlier essay I mentioned that Vipassana teaches that the real source of suffering is not outside, but within. The same event can happen to two people and produce very different reactions. The event is objective; how we see and respond to it is subjective. Suffering comes not from the event, but from our choice. That choice happens in a single moment of mind, the mental action described above. The course breaks the arising of a reaction into four steps:
Consciousness
Perception
Sensation
Reaction
Say a breeze blows. First you are conscious of air moving past. Then, based on what you already know, you perceive it as wind, and you feel a change in bodily sensation. Up to this point everything is neutral. Then your reaction can be liking (“what a cool breeze”) or aversion (“what a chilly wind”). The wind on your skin is objective, neither positive nor negative. Your judgment, your acceptance or rejection, is what gives it the power to bring pain or pleasure. The final step, reaction, decides whether an event causes you suffering.
The course describes three patterns we fall into when we react, the deepest roots of human suffering:
Craving: clinging to pleasant sensations, and attachment to what we cannot have
Aversion: disgust with, and avoidance of, unpleasant sensations
Ignorance: being unaware of our own sensations, like walking in the dark
Our suffering doesn’t come from others or the outside world, but from impurities within. Events themselves are objective; it is these three patterns that keep us suffering. And the patterns often come from seeing things as static, forgetting nature’s law that everything changes: wanting good things to stay forever, or living on in past pain instead of moving with time. If we can observe things as they really are, and deeply understand impermanence, this suffering lessens.
In the first days of the retreat, my mind kept drifting back to painful events, replaying them again and again, with resentment rising. When I heard this teaching, it was like waking up. What happened has already happened; time keeps moving; the past is gone. If I keep living in flight from the past, it is not someone else but I myself who keeps creating my suffering, making myself a prisoner of the past. When I let go of resentment and attachment to past pain, I become free.
6. To harm another, we first harm ourselves
I had long heard the Chinese saying that to kill a thousand enemies you lose eight hundred of your own. But the idea that to harm others we first harm ourselves I first met in this course. Whenever we harm someone else, we are the first to be hurt.
Why? Before we speak cruelly to someone, or come to blows, there must first be a strong negative state in our own mind, and the first to suffer from it is us. Before you send that angry message, you may have rehearsed the emotion dozens of times in your head. With our anger, hatred or fear toward others, we ourselves suffer first. To release others is to release yourself; if you can release yourself, you can release others. Often our grip on other people comes from not first letting ourselves go.
And when someone suffers, they don’t keep the suffering to themselves; they pass it on. If you want to be happy, it is not enough to make yourself happy. It helps to help others be happy too, or their suffering will find its way back to you. My summary: to harm others is first to harm yourself; to bring yourself joy, bring joy to others as well.
When I learned this, I understood something else. When someone inflicts pain on you, imagine that they are going through a great deal of pain inside, perhaps far more, and may not even be aware of it, reacting in the dark, out of pattern. When someone’s anger or hurt lands on you, remember it is not only landing on you; they are suffering it too. If compassion can arise, you will see not only someone causing harm, but someone who is also hurting. If, in that moment, you can set down the opposition and help them see the source of their pain, the suffering on both sides can truly ease.
7. The future begins now
The course spoke about karma. Setting aside its religious meanings, in its simplest sense karma means action, the three kinds of action above: mind, speech and body. It describes a simple truth: you reap what you sow.
Every action is like a seed, planted in the soil the moment it happens. If you plant a bitter neem seed, you can’t expect a sweet mango at harvest. If you want mangoes, you must plant mango seeds. Yet so often we scatter bitter seeds without awareness, and then pray for an abundant mango harvest.
“How you live this minute will affect how you live the next minute, and how you live the rest of your life.” This was the last lesson I learned, and it is the one that shapes my days now.
I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, or more honestly, worrying about it: not knowing where it was, not knowing whether what I wanted would happen. Since returning, I focus more on the present, making the best decision I can within my present awareness, and then giving it everything. I believe that if I keep planting good seeds and give them time and enough love, sunlight, rain and nourishment, they will grow. All I have to do is plant good seeds in each present moment.
To be aware in the present, of my intentions, my words and my actions, and to be at peace with this moment, is to be at peace with the future.
In closing
Many people describe meditation with words like escape, reflection, self-purification or inner exploration, and see it as a retreat from the world. In some ways, meditation can serve those purposes. But meditation is not an escape from the world. It is a way to face the world, to understand the world, and to understand ourselves.
If you ever go to a Vipassana course, I hope you forget everything I have shared and bring your own questions to the cushion, to find your own experiential wisdom. What I have written is only my experience. Courses are free, and students who complete them may donate afterward; you can find them at dhamma.org.
Thank you for reading. If it has sparked something, share it with someone you care about. May the outbreak pass soon, and may these quieter days bring you deeper reflection on life.
Be happy. Marcia, January 2020
Service · 18 May 2020
Life Notes: Seven Days of Volunteering at a Zen Temple
Six small stories from a thousand-year-old temple on Qingyuan Mountain.
We came “home” after dark. The car wound slowly up Qingyuan Mountain, and it was eleven at night by the time we reached the temple. I rolled down the window. The smell of early-summer earth rushed in, tree shadows swayed in the night, and running water sounded like nature composing. My body suddenly relaxed, with a familiarity I had never felt before: I was home.
The bell and drum had sounded at nine. Amid the frogs and night birds, the thousand-year-old temple had already fallen into quiet sleep. We carried our luggage on tiptoe to check in with the guest master. It was my first time staying at a temple on my own. Key in hand, I stepped curiously into my room. Pale moonlight came through the curtains. Outside the window stood a 1,300-year-old tree, said to have been planted by Chan Master Xingsi, disciple of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng. For a moment, it felt like entering another world.
The seven days had a rhythm, and room within it. Rise at four for morning chanting. Breakfast at 5:50. Then, as volunteers, we washed dishes and swept and mopped the kitchen. When we finished, it felt as if the whole morning had passed, but it was only seven. Reading in my room. Lunch at 10:50, followed by the same work. After a rest, evening chanting at 3:20. The rest of the time was ours: working in the fields, keeping watch at the temple gate, fishing leaves out of the pond, climbing the mountain for sunrise, wandering in the hills.
I came with no expectations, only wanting to return to my home region, reconnect with my roots, and give something back. But life is like that: when you expect nothing, it gives you a weighty gift, and all you have to do is open your hands. If I had to name the two deepest lessons: first, go deep into the classics, and wisdom becomes vast as the sea; second, carrying water and chopping wood is itself the Way.
On the first, my practice is still too shallow to put its impact into words; I can only resolve to read more. For the second, I wrote down a few small stories of what I saw, thought and understood.
1. Moonlight and the mountain path
One night I walked a monk back to the rear of the mountain along a dark path. Instinctively, I took out my phone for light. He waved gently: no need, the moonlight is enough. I was delighted. After years in the city, I had forgotten that moonlight existed.
I looked up. A crescent moon hung in the sky; though it was only the seventh night of the lunar month, its light was enough to show the way. Looking closer, the sky was full of stars. As the poet Tao Yuanming wrote, long caged, I had returned to nature. I had been away from nature so long, so used to artificial light, that I had forgotten the moon. As a child, living in the mountains, the moon was in the sky every night, and in my heart.
Return to nature often. Don’t forget its generosity, and don’t get lost in man-made distractions.
2. Catching the turtle: every thought is known
Around the main hall is a pond. Visitors often release carp and turtles there, and it is full of life. Some, taken in by market sellers, released so-called “hundred-year turtles” when the monks weren’t looking. They turned out to be carnivorous sliders, and the pond began to see the sad sight of turtles eating fish. A monk asked my friend Panpan and me to try to catch them and move them to land, where they could be cared for.
We happily took a net. But the turtles were astonishingly quick. Before the net was even out, they had dived into the mud, swum off, and surfaced far away. We could only stare at the pond and sigh.
After dozens of attempts, nothing. A young monk happened by, and we couldn’t help complaining: “The turtles seem to sense us. Before the pole is even out, they’re gone. It’s as if our thoughts reach them before the net does.”
He said: “Catching turtles is good training for the mind. The moment a thought stirs, all things know it.”
We were stunned. It was true, and the body knew it: when the mind is settled, there are no ripples; when a thought moves, ripples rise. Once, later, I held my mind still and my breath quiet, and a turtle swam into the net. But my practice was still shallow, and in the end it struggled free.
3. Gathering leaves: not directly, but by a roundabout way
Our minds not yet steady enough for turtles, Panpan and I turned to gathering leaves.
The net’s pole was over two meters long, but the leaves in the middle of the pond were still out of reach. Panpan had an idea: about a meter away from the leaves, where the pole could reach, she stirred the water to make ripples, and let the ripples carry the leaves closer. After a few tries, it worked.
We reflected: stirring right at the edge of a problem does nothing. You have to step back and find the source.
So often, to get from A to B, we want to go straight; the shortest distance between two points is a line. But what looks shortest is not always the root of the problem. We don’t want detours, and then we find the detour was the right way.
4. The hollow camphor tree: a story of life force
On the path to the Seventh Patriarch’s pagoda stands a great camphor tree. The first time I saw it, its vitality stopped me. Its heart is hollow, yet high above, its branches are full of leaves. I wrote these lines beneath it:
Hollow camphor, it must have been hard for you. Losing your heart must have been long, and painful. And yet you are so alive, living on through your bark. Where your heart is gone I see deep grooves, like the lines on an elder’s brow who has weathered much. You have been through hardship and still you stand. Hollow camphor, I think you are the most meaningful being in this whole forest. Because of you, the word vitality has a shape, and strength. I give you a big embrace. May you, after all the changes of the world, keep your heart for growing, and pass that strength to the whole forest.
5. At the table: the bowl begins empty
In the temple, meals are taken in silence. Bowls and chopsticks are set at the front of the table, and the kitchen monks come one by one to serve rice, vegetables and steamed buns, then a second round. At the end, hot water rinses the bowl, and you finish every last grain.
My own reflection: to sit quietly and be served is a humbling thing. The bowl in front of each of us begins empty. Only through exchange between people, by being given and served, is there food.
From tilling to harvest to cooking, all of it is the fruit of nature and of the people who labor behind it. Even when the bowl is already full, don’t forget the road it traveled. Remember always: what we receive from others, we give back to others.
6. The abbot and the young monk: wisdom and compassion
One morning at 6:45, after washing the dishes, we were told we would meet the abbot, Venerable Miao’an of Jingju Temple, a disciple of Venerable Tiguang, who was himself a disciple of Chan Master Xuyun.
In the abbot’s room, a plainly dressed, slender monk was making tea and warmly invited us to sit. At first I didn’t see his face and assumed he was an attendant. It was the abbot himself. There was none of the distance I had imagined; he was warm, like family, and began talking with us calmly. In just half an hour, his humility, compassion, closeness and wisdom left a deep impression on us both.
For the first time, I felt so clearly: the state of being is itself a kind of power.
Another young monk, Master Qingfu, probably younger than me, had wisdom like the sea. In a few words, he could turn a worry into insight.
I once asked him: why is a seven-day Chan retreat described as “striking” the seven days?
He said: strike away the small self, strike away yourself, and you are free.
I asked again: how do we hold our smallness in the universe together with the power we can radiate?
He said: act without clinging to form, and move with conditions. Without clinging to form: don’t dwell on past, present or future; when you do something, do it well. Don’t compare yourself with others, measuring differences. Just do your own work well. Move with conditions: when something comes, don’t refuse it; when nothing comes, don’t go looking for trouble; when trouble comes, don’t fear it. And do each thing very well.
What people casually call a “Buddha-like,” let-it-be attitude, he said, is a common misunderstanding.
Be happy. Marcia, May 2020
Reflection · 3 January 2022
My 2021 Reflection: When the River Turns, Still Water Runs Deep
A year of turning inward: return, settling, and the quiet depth that forms through change.
At our New Year workshop, “Return and Break Ground,” as I made a jar to hold what 2021 had left in me, I reflected that life has rhythms like everything in nature: harvest in autumn, storing in winter, a season of return and settling in which nourishment gathers and waits for spring. The winter solstice has passed, and the light has begun to return. Beneath the soil, life is already gathering strength, waiting for one spring rain to break through.
If nature is my teacher, then my own life should also have its seasons of return and settling before breaking ground and sprouting again. Hence this look back.
If my 2021 were a film or a poem, I would call it When the River Turns, Still Water Runs Deep.
Chapter 1. The river turns: three years of streams become a new current
If my life is a rushing river, I once thought it would follow the mainstream, or copy a template: a good school, a good job, marry a good man, live a stable life. But a few years ago, running along that course, my river met a deep pool. It circled there a long time, and my vitality sank. Then, a little over three years ago, I let go of a life lived by template, and began, as an independent being, to truly ask:
Who am I?
What is the meaning of my life?
Why have I come into this world?
If I don’t live by the template, what life do I truly want to live?
After hitting bottom in 2018, life felt completely reset, and in 2019 I began slowly to climb. Outside work, I began to explore, and in the process welcomed a new self: taking and leading Life Design courses; Vipassana meditation in Nepal; supporting a women’s nonprofit in India; co-founding Buffet Girls, a community that supports girls to explore bravely; building #IamRemarkable in China from zero to one; starting a meditation community at Google China; two years of professional coaching study and practice; founding Women Alliance Group; a year of wandering through rural China. Along the way it became ever clearer that what gave me passion and lasting energy was not the work I was used to, doing things at the level of tasks. It was bringing positive change, large or small, to the people around me.
Like small streams, these forces gathered for three years into a new current. #IamRemarkable grew from a small seed that broke ground and branched out: from one facilitator in China to more than a hundred; from inside Google to more than fifty companies and organizations; from a handful of participants to thousands each year; and a core team volunteering 20% of their time grew from two people to twelve. Along the way, connecting with the leaders of women’s communities in different companies, I co-founded Women Alliance Group, a cross-company community for women’s empowerment, to gather greater strength for positive change.
The river turning means that this new current becomes the new course of my life. After three years of exploring and practicing, in 2021 I confirmed my life’s mission and chose to commit fully to Women Alliance Group: to help women’s vitality flourish, to help more soft power return to the world, and to move business toward good.
Chapter 2. Still water runs deep: rooting down, integrating within, learning from nature
As the river turned, I also sensed how I had changed. I wanted to set aside results at the level of doing, and look at how I had grown at the level of being, and let it settle.
After reviewing my year in the sunshine, I wrote three changes on paper:
From a rushing torrent to still, deep water
From leaning yin to integrating yin and yang
From city habit to learning from nature
From a rushing torrent to still, deep water
In the first half of the year, I often found myself extremely busy, in what I call “crazy doing” mode. Deep down I knew it wasn’t good. It kept me running, with no time to breathe, no time to be still, settle and take in nourishment. To tick items off my to-do list and study list, my calendar was always full.
Three things in 2021 slowly brought me out of that mode, from noise to settling, from restlessness to stillness.
The first was a conversation with my coach, Philip. In it, I saw that I kept falling into crazy doing because of a deep belief: I need to keep doing things to prove my worth; my existence in itself has no value. When I saw this belief, I was shocked. Without knowing it, my operating system had been running on it. In the months that followed, I kept re-examining this belief, this assumption, and found it wasn’t entirely true. I began choosing what to do with awareness, instead of equating how much I did, and whether it succeeded, with my worth.
The second was a visit to friends in Qingshan Village, where an elder who has lived quietly in the village for seventeen years said something that stayed with me. We were celebrating his birthday, and he told me: “Don’t do things for money. Money is fickle; it comes fast and goes fast. When you do something, look at it from the level of life itself: does it deepen and enrich your life?”
His words made me realize that if my life is a tree, I no longer want to strain to spread its branches and leaves. I want to go back to the source and nourish the roots. Root deeply, and growing upward happens naturally, by the force of nature rather than by mechanical force. We come into this world, after all, to grow ourselves through our work, to find what is real through what is passing. Yet we are often swept away by the flood of tasks and forget the real purpose. It was like waking from a dream.
The third, where change truly happened, was meeting another wise elder, who later became my teacher. His home holds 47,000 books, and that is only a fraction of what he has read. Vast classical collections running to hundreds of millions of characters he has read several times over; he has even lost his sight twice from reading, and regained it.
I realized that real change happens when you see a life lived with real vitality. I saw how thin my education had been in the face of many of humanity’s important questions, and felt a new reverence for the ancients, who poured their whole lives into their fields, climbing peak after peak and leaving markers for those who follow. So in my free time I studied at the academy on my teacher’s mountain. Back in Shanghai, I moved from the city center to a quieter outer district. Instead of rushing between appointments, I spend my spare time studying, practicing calligraphy, sitting in stillness, growing quietly.
My river, having flowed this far, seems to be turning from a shallow stream into a deep current. It looks slower, but deeper down it is storing more strength. Stillness gives rise to insight; steadiness gives rise to wisdom.
From leaning yin to integrating yin and yang
Before my low point, I was a thoroughly tough woman. My English name, Marcia, comes from ancient Rome and is linked to Mars, the god of war.
Yang, the firm kind of strength, meant power, stability, competition, goals, action and results, and all of these came easily to me. Yin, the soft kind of strength, meant empathy, inclusion, holding, nurturing and connection, and these felt unfamiliar. In the language of the I Ching, I was not just lesser yang but close to greater yang.
In the three years of climbing out of the valley, I seemed to deliberately set aside the yang strength I was used to and good at, and began connecting with and nurturing the yin strength that had always been in me. When coaching, leading workshops or supporting people around me, I did all I could to see and hold others and help their needs be met. Even in improvised dance, I habitually became the base, holding my partner as they moved. In the language of the I Ching, I had moved close to greater yin.
But in the second half of 2021, I realized that I didn’t want to live only as the one who holds. I have yang strength moving within me too. My life had reached a stage to welcome healthy yang back, integrate yin and yang, and become a total person.
In that process, I noticed some concrete changes:
I notice others’ needs, but I no longer easily compromise on what I believe in for the sake of surface harmony.
I avoid conflict less.
I care less about being likable, and speak and act more on the basis of facts.
I no longer automatically become the one who holds everyone, but I can hold and support others steadily when it is needed.
Growth seems to be a spiral. Sometimes it takes a roundabout path, yet it keeps leading us toward a more whole self, from separation toward oneness.
I think the opposition between genders we so often see in society is, within each individual, also a struggle between inner yin and yang. I believe that when each person can nourish and integrate both their firm and their soft strength, humanity too can move from division toward wholeness.
This is the deeper drive behind my work with Women Alliance Group: to help a world that has been driven by firm, yang energy since the Industrial Revolution welcome the return of more soft power, so that more people can become whole, business can become sustainable, and humanity can move toward oneness.
From city habit to learning from nature
From August 2020, I spent a year wandering in nature while working: Qingshan Village near Hangzhou, Yinqiao at the foot of the Cangshan Mountains in Dali, Baisha beneath Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Weizhou Island, Yongning near Lugu Lake, and Nyingchi and Mêdog in Tibet. They all had one thing in common: they were in nature.
Before setting out, I had few expectations. I am simply curious and restless, and wanted to wander. What I didn’t expect was that the journey would change many of my deepest beliefs, more even than my earlier travels through dozens of countries. Even the courage to leave Google and commit to Women Alliance Group came from connecting, on that journey, with a deeper longing in my life.
Faced with a change so quiet and yet so profound, my words feel pale. So I will borrow a passage from the Chinese edition of Holmes Rolston III’s Philosophy Gone Wild:
Going into the wild is not going into wasteland, still less into emptiness. It is a return to freedom and to life itself. We go into the wild to return more fully to ourselves, to find ourselves again. In the forest we wear no masks, so every step we take into the remote wild is a step back to ourselves.
Nature itself is the home where we meet life. And in the growth of all things there is endless wisdom. If for my first twenty-some years I tried hard to put down roots in the city, the self I am becoming hopes to return more fully to nature.
2021 ends. 2022 begins.
At the New Year workshop, each of us made a vision board for 2022. On mine, alongside the images, I wrote a few words: Women Alliance Group, home, Zen, beauty, books, relationships.
What film or poem will 2022 be? Unknown, and so, beautiful.
As a friend of mine says, “This year is the best year of my life.” Every year, we can create the best year of our lives so far.
May you, too, in 2022, sow, break ground, grow, and let your life force bloom.
With love, Marcia, New Year’s Day 2022
Vipassana · 9 October 2019
Nepal Vipassana: Notes from a Ten-Day Meditation Retreat
What Vipassana is, and what ten days of silence in the Himalayan foothills are like.
In early July I travelled alone to Nepal to begin a journey inward. When I came back, I realized how deeply it had affected me, so I want to write down what I felt and learned, in the hope that it may help your own inner exploration.
What is Vipassana?
Vipassana is a Pali word from ancient India meaning “seeing deeply,” or insight into the true nature of reality. It is not simply looking inward; it means observing things as they really are. It is one of India’s oldest meditation techniques, taught for some 2,500 years, and belongs to no religious sect.
Mindfulness meditation aims to bring us into the present. Vipassana goes a step further. It is a way of purifying the mind, so that we can meet the tensions, difficulties and problems of life with calm and balance, break the long-standing patterns at the root of our suffering, live peacefully, and bring more peace and harmony to others.
The course, in brief
Length: ten days
Schedule: 4 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Silence: no talking, gestures, eye contact or any other communication with fellow meditators
No distractions: no music, reading, writing, phones or computers
Separation: men and women are kept apart, and there is no physical contact
Meals: two vegetarian meals a day, nothing after noon, with milk and fruit in the evening for new students
Cost: free. Only students who complete the ten days may donate. There are 341 locations worldwide, 201 of them dedicated centers; places fill quickly, so book one to six months ahead.
What are ten days of silence like?
Days 1–3. Anapana: taming a runaway elephant
Anapana, observation of the breath, prepares you for Vipassana. The aim is to calm the mind until it is sensitive enough to notice subtle sensations in the body.
On the first day, though my body sat still, my thoughts ran like a wild horse. One second I was remembering moving house when I was six; the next I was planning work after the retreat; the next I was celebrating a small goal I had set three months before. My thoughts changed from moment to moment with almost no order, like a wild elephant running everywhere and leaving wreckage behind. The mind went to two places, the past and the future. The one place it never was, was the present. At first I felt frustrated, and even fell into self-blame for not being able to focus. But the more I blamed myself, the tighter I became, and the harder it was to focus. I understood deeply: your mind is not as much in control as you realize.
The turning point came on the second day. As I focused on each breath in and out, my mind began to stay in the present. It still wandered, but I no longer scolded myself. I simply noticed, with a smile, that it had wandered again, and brought it back. Again and again. The wandering grew less frequent, and my focus lengthened from five minutes to half an hour.
A wild elephant has great strength and can be destructive; once tamed, its strength remains, and can serve everyone’s good. As my focus deepened, my mind grew sharper, and I could notice finer and deeper sensations, preparing the ground for Vipassana.
Days 4–9. Vipassana: as the mind clears, inner suffering fades
From day four we practised Vipassana itself: observing bodily sensations objectively, as they really are, to understand nature’s law that everything changes, and so to purify the deeper layers of the mind and find inner peace.
Vipassana holds that the real source of suffering is not outside, but within. The same event can happen to two people and produce very different reactions. When we react, we tend to fall into three patterns, the deepest roots of human suffering:
Craving: clinging to pleasant sensations, and attachment to what we cannot have
Aversion: disgust with, and avoidance of, unpleasant sensations
Ignorance: being unaware of our own sensations, like walking in the dark
It is these patterns, not the world itself, that keep us suffering.
At first I was full of doubt. Everything changes: why come all this way to learn something so familiar? The answer began to emerge after day four. I could understand it intellectually, but understanding it through the body, at the actual level, was something else entirely. From four in the morning to nine at night, the only thing I did was observe the changing sensations in my body. I came to know that sensations change every moment, and through that awareness I became more sensitive to change in everything around me.
Seen through the lens of change, every second is a new world. The air moves, the light shifts, the molecules in the body keep turning, leaves put out new buds, grass pushes up through the soil, clouds drift, and current flows behind every lamp. It was like a sudden awakening. So much suffering comes from seeing things as still, while the world is always changing. Behind the still view is attachment: to what is pleasant, to pain, to not knowing.
As one technology CEO said after his own retreat, Vipassana’s aim is to reach the deepest layer of the mind and retrain it, so that it no longer reacts automatically to pleasant and unpleasant sensations, but observes every sensation consciously, knowing that all of them arise, and all of them pass away.
Day 10. Metta: pouring the heart’s love into all beings
On the last day we learned Metta meditation. Metta means loving-kindness and compassion. It goes a step beyond Vipassana: not only purifying one’s own mind, but extending that love and compassion to others.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be harmonious.
During the course itself I didn’t feel much. After returning and continuing to practice, I began to feel how powerful Metta is. It lets me set down my ego to understand and wish others well, whether family and friends, a stranger I meet by chance, or even someone with whom I have had a painful experience. A spaciousness arises, no longer confined to the small self.
A small story. In August I visited New York and emailed a colleague who had practised loving-kindness meditation for ten years. We had never met, yet he readily agreed to talk, generously shared everything he knew over an hour-long lunch, and afterward summarized all the resources into a three-page guide for me. A brief connection between strangers, full of warmth, and the highlight of my trip.
Three discoveries beyond the practice
The power of returning to nature
Living in cities for a long time, we are confined by man-made rules and forget sunrise and sunset, flowers blooming and falling, the most basic rhythms of nature. Most things around us are still and lifeless: concrete towers, traffic lights, lamps that shine day and night, air conditioning that keeps one temperature all year. We even resist nature’s changes. When it rains, our first thought is that the good weather is gone, and it will be hard to find a taxi. We forget that rain and sun simply take turns.
Nature’s law is constant change, yet city life makes us long for permanence: a fixed home, a fixed job, a fixed and beautiful relationship. When things change, we resent it. When something good disappears, we ask why it couldn’t stay. When something bad happens, we complain that things were fine before. We are too far from nature to remember that everything is always changing, the good and the bad alike.
When we are lost in our own thoughts, nature is the best teacher. In just ten days, walking in the courtyard of a meditation center in the Himalayan foothills, I watched flowers bloom and fall, new buds open while old leaves dropped, moss slowly spread, and rain nourish everything. Returning to nature, to our small and humble place in it, we return to a truer state.
In silence, the other senses sharpen
Ten days of silence drew my attention back from others to myself, and I noticed three strong changes.
Tasting what I had never tasted. On the fifth evening, dinner was a glass of milk and a banana, something I would normally finish in a minute. I spent a full fifteen minutes on it, absorbed in the creamy fragrance of each sip, the sticky sweetness of each bite. It felt like the most delicious meal of my life. The flavor came not from the food, but from giving it my full attention. As Zen puts it: when eating, eat; when sleeping, sleep.
Seeing what I had never seen. When I arrived, I only noticed that the place was green. As practice deepened and silence focused my attention, one day I discovered a great cluster of white flowers blooming beside the path I walked every day; leaves with patches of red and green; and one night a single firefly drifting through the flowers, then two, then three. The world was suddenly so rich, and before, I could not see it at all. I remembered the old lines: “Spring has its hundred flowers, autumn its moon, summer its cool breeze, winter its snow. If no idle worries weigh on your mind, every season is a good season.”
Feeling what my body had long ignored. I have always had strong willpower and poor awareness of my body. I rarely noticed I was thirsty, could go a whole day without water, and was teased as a cactus. I rarely noticed I was tired, always thinking I could push through. After the retreat, having spent every day observing my body, I became sensitive to every inch of skin, and now I notice clearly when I am thirsty, hungry or tired.
My own insight: the more we talk, the less we notice. If you truly want to sense a situation, or another person’s feelings, stop speaking, even stop wanting to speak, and listen closely with every sense but the mouth. You will hear much more.
What we share across nations and faiths
We tend to divide people with simple labels: gender, age, nationality, religion, profession. In a sense, dividing is opposing, and it can keep us from seeing each person as an equal.
Among my nearly 150 fellow meditators were people from many countries and faiths, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and more, aged from twenty to ninety: yoga teachers, travellers, a documentary filmmaker, a product designer, people working in nonprofits. Yet despite all these differences, they carried the same struggles I do: the longing to have, the fear of losing, the wish to be respected, the wish to be heard. When we set down the labels and see each person as a person rather than a collection of labels, a beautiful resonance arises on its own.
