Lifestyle
Want to be fearless? Try this fierce Zen priest's belly button method
If there are many paths up the mountain that is spiritual self-discovery, writer, strategist and Zen priest Cristina Moon is on one with an especially steep incline. “I think the majority of paths have a lot of switchbacks, but some people want straight up the mountain,” she said. “That works for them, it worked for me.”
Shelf Help is a new wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.
In her new memoir “Three Years on the Great Mountain: A memoir of Zen and Fearlessness,” (Penguin Random House) Moon details a spiritual journey that led her from working as a human rights activist in Burma (now Myanmar), to running marketing for a corporate mindfulness training group in the Bay Area, to ultimately living at Daihonzan Chozen-ji, a Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Hawaii known for its monastic intensity.
She eventually became a Zen priest herself, and continues to live at the temple today, where she trains in a particularly rigorous form of Japanese swordsmanship called kendo. She also instructs students in martial arts, ceramics and other Japanese art forms to aid them in the discovery of what Japanese Zen Buddhists call the “true self” — a version of oneself that is happy, free and beyond fear and any self-imposed limitation.
Moon knows the arduous path she chose is not for everyone, but her hope is that by writing honestly and vulnerably about the challenges and growth she experienced in her first three years at Chozen-ji she will inspire others to seek teachers and communities that will best help them meet life’s obstacles with fearlessness.
“In training hard, it is possible to find your way home,” she writes in the book’s introduction.
Moon spoke to The Times about her transformative experience at Chozen-ji, what it means to face challenges with “your belly button facing forward” and how all of us can work towards living life with less fear.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the goals of the Zen Buddhism you practice is to cultivate fearlessness, which feels very relevant right now, given that, between war, climate change and political turmoil, there’s a lot to be afraid of in our world. What does fearlessness mean to you and how can we work to achieve it?
Cristina Moon (Michelle Mishina Kunz)
In a very practical sense fearlessness is simply: Can I figure out how to live my life without hesitation? If I see an opening, if I see an opportunity, can I just go for it 100% without being held back by fear? And, can I inspire or transmit that to other people as well?
Overcoming my fear at the beginning of my time at Chozen-ji was really straightforward stuff, like not ducking and getting small when someone was about to hit me over the head in [the Japanese martial art] kendo, or not being afraid of being uncomfortable and being in pain while sitting for long periods of meditation.
But for anyone doing any kind of physical training or exercise, it’s the same thing. When you push yourself through the moment of doubt, when you’re running up a hill, and you think, I’d love to give up now and walk up this hill, but I know I’m almost there. There’s something about doing it physically that allows you to do it in other parts of your life emotionally, mentally and interpersonally.
In your time at Chozen-ji you studied kendo — the way of the sword — and chado — the way of tea. Can you describe these disciplines and what they had to teach you?
“Do” is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word “tao,” which is sort of a universal energy, a universal truth. When you append that word to a discipline or an art, it basically says that you can take this martial or fine art and use it as a way of training that will shape who you are.
“Ken” means sword, and “do” means way, so kendo is the way of the sword. It’s a traditional Japanese martial art form that is pretty intense and aggressive. Back when samurai actually existed it was done with metal swords, but now we use bamboo or wooden swords. In our approach to kendo we don’t learn any defensive maneuvers. We train in how to go forward and cut straight.
The goal is that you are cutting more down the center, faster and with less hesitation then your opponent, so even in the face of attack, you’re the one landing the hit first. That particular kind of training cultivates fearlessness so that you don’t mind getting hit. You can face the hit and still move forward and do what you have to do.
“That particular kind of training cultivates fearlessness so that you don’t mind getting hit. You can face the hit and still move forward and do what you have to do.”
— Cristina Moon, on the Japanese martial art of kendo
Chado, or the way of tea, is very different. Chado is remarkable because it incorporates philosophy and all the art forms — cooking, calligraphy, aesthetics, the tea itself and the sweets, ceramics — it really is a whole integrated space when you are in the tearoom. What I didn’t realize before I started training is that male samurai were the original people who trained in tea ceremony. It was something that was done as a counterpoint to their lifestyle and livelihood — a brief moment of peace.
What they both have in common is the cultivation of what’s called “kiai,” or the vital energy. The ideal is that the separation between kendo opponents, between the person and the sword, between the tea host, the utensils and the guest — all those boundaries disappear. It is an opportunity to experience the interconnectedness and the oneness of everything.
Your book details how difficult training at Chozen-ji can be. In addition to the physical exertion of long meditation sittings and martial arts, your teachers were constantly correcting you. Did you have to build a tolerance to being told you’re doing something wrong?
(Courtesy of Shambhala Publications)
In Hawaii we call it scolding. You get scoldings for all sorts of things, and it’s one of the first things anyone who comes to train at Chozen-ji has to figure out how to deal with. Sometimes the feedback is very warm, but it’s jarring for people when it’s sharp. We’re always reminded that if the scoldings and feedback stop, that’s actually when you should get concerned because it means people have given up on you.
We don’t do anything because it’s precious or holy. So, how you hold your hands, how you walk, how you tie your hakama [traditional Japanese martial arts training clothes] — all of those things are meant to help you learn how to pay attention and also, heighten your senses.
I love this phrase in your book: “approaching life with your belly button facing forward.” What does that mean to you?
It means tackling the challenges and opportunities in life head-on rather than trying to find a sneaky or clever way away around things. It means honesty and integrity, and in particular when things are hard, to be willing to face it.
You titled one chapter in your book: “2-1=3.” Can you explain that?
That’s a formulation I have to credit to one of the teachers here, Kangen Roshi. It’s this idea that when you let go of something you can free up all this energy and space to have an understanding that is so much more transcendent than the everyday understanding we have about the world being zero sum and how things are supposed to work.
He also gave me a copy of “Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins. In the end of that book a couple of characters die and they are at this way station to figure out if they are going to go to heaven. The test is that you weigh your heart on a scale against a feather and only the hearts that are lighter than the feather go to heaven. The idea is that you have to have let go of all of your baggage. You have to let go of everything.
The book details the first time you did sesshin, an intense week of training where you only get four hours of sleep a night. One of your teachers said, “Stop feeling bad for yourself, and wasting all that energy.” Why was that a breakthrough moment for you?
Sesshin is an extreme situation where you have to figure out how to let go of your baggage and the things that are holding you back. The conditions make it so that you don’t have a choice.
On that first sesshin I was preoccupied with how tired I was. I had this monologue in my head that was like: “I’m so tired. I can’t do this. I don’t think I can make it.” For me, the most effective scolding was to be told: You are young, you are healthy, you’ve been doing this every day for six months. And look around you at all these people who are not in as good shape as you, who don’t know what they’re doing, who don’t have as much experience as you, and what impact are you having on these people by being so down.
TAKEAWAYS
From “Three Years on the Great Mountain”
After that, every time that voice started up that said, “I’m so tired,” I would just sort of say, “No!” and put more energy into whatever I was doing. Very quickly I realized that I had more energy.
The really painful and difficult realization coming out of that was that for my entire life I had been leaving something on the table.
Most people are probably not going to leave their jobs and homes to live and train at a dojo in Hawaii for three years. What are some things they can do in their everyday lives to challenge themselves, like you did?
My experience at Chozen-ji is really abnormal. Ninety-nine percent of the people who train here don’t live at Chozen-ji; they have jobs, they have families, they live on Oahu and they come here one or a couple days a week. But my advice to other folks is to find the dojos that exist in your communities. A great place to start is the martial arts dojo or the boxing gym. It’s something that is accessible for people who are ready to rethink how they want to approach their life.
I know that after an eight-hour workday and an hour commute it’s tempting to just drink a beer, eat dinner, watch four hours of Netflix and go to bed. But how is that preparing you for the things that are inevitable that you are going to face in your life — the best and the worst, the hardest moments?
A lot of people are experiencing fear and anxiety about the future. What have you learned that might help someone overcome those particular fears?
The real answers are not the rational ones we are seeking. Even beyond something like climate change, we can be certain that everyone we love is going to die and so are we, and there’s something that comes from embracing that in a certain way that can lead one to actually be free and happy and to cherish the life that we do have. The worst thing we can do is become depressed or nihilistic or give up, knowing that’s the outcome for all of us.
It’s actually a pretty amazing opportunity to be able to live, knowing that that’s coming. Maybe every moment matters. Maybe what I’m doing right now matters. How can I make it matter?
I’ve read a lot of Buddhist memoirs and self-help books over the years and I’m struck that yours is the first one I’ve read written by an Asian American woman. Have I missed others or have there not been others?
There are a few. Sharon Suh wrote “Occupy This Body: A Buddhist Memoir,” but I think that was a very small press. Chenxing Han published the memoir “One Long Listening” about her experience in Buddhist chaplaincy and also about losing her best friend to leukemia. Those are the two I know of that are very recent.
As much as my book is very much a Buddhist book, I did try hard to make it relatable and read more like a mainstream memoir. And that was for exactly this reason: Our stories aren’t out there. I think there is a greater movement toward representing the Asian American people in the Buddhist space generally, but we still have a long ways to go.
(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)
Shelf Help is a new wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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