How Pema Chödrön Taught Me To Make Peace With The Suffering I Inflict On Others

Being a managing director at a tier-one private equity firm is, fundamentally, an exercise in spiritual endurance. The sheer weight of the capital we allocate, and the inescapable human friction that occurs when we optimize a legacy corporation for maximum shareholder extraction, takes a profound toll on the soul. For the first decade of my career, I found myself paralyzed by a persistent, low-level dread. When you are the one responsible for offshoring three thousand manufacturing jobs in a single fiscal quarter, the mind naturally rebels. You lie awake in your six-bedroom Tribeca loft, staring at the reclaimed wood ceiling, agonizing over the localized economic collapse you have just engineered in the American Midwest.

I tried everything to numb the psychic ache. I tried defensive philanthropy. I tried hiring the most aggressive crisis PR firms in Manhattan to assure me I was a job creator. I even tried a brief, humiliating stint with a corporate ethicist. But the anxiety remained. It was a tight, suffocating knot in my chest that flared up every time I had to sign a document terminating a union healthcare contract. I believed, as so many trapped in the delusion of late-stage capitalism do, that the anxiety was a sign I was doing something wrong.

Then, on a private flight to Davos, a colleague handed me a dog-eared copy of "When Things Fall Apart" by Pema Chödrön.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the teachings of this 89-year-old Buddhist nun fundamentally restructured my approach to hostile takeovers. Chödrön’s central thesis is as simple as it is terrifying: stop running from your anxiety. Do not try to push it away, and do not try to fix the external circumstances causing it. Instead, you must lean into the sharp points. You must agree with your anxiety. You must invite it in for tea.

This was a staggering paradigm shift. I realized that my suffering was not caused by the fact that I was actively stripping the assets of a beloved century-old family hardware chain and leaving its employees destitute. My suffering was caused by my resistance to that fact. The friction was the enemy. The moment I stopped trying to be a "good" person and simply accepted my role as an apex predator of capital, a profound and spacious peace washed over me.

The real test of this practice came during the acquisition of Holloway’s Logistics, a mid-sized freight company in Ohio. The restructuring plan called for the immediate termination of 4,000 workers, alongside the raiding of their deeply underfunded pension pool to finance our leveraged buyout. As I sat at the head of the boardroom table, preparing to call the vote, I felt the familiar panic rising in my throat. My palms began to sweat. The old me would have rushed through the meeting, barked at my subordinates, and drank three scotches on the way home to avoid the crushing reality of what I was doing.

Instead, I closed my eyes. I remembered Chödrön’s teachings. I located the feeling of intense, nauseating guilt in my solar plexus. I did not judge it. I did not try to rationalize the layoffs by telling myself the market demanded efficiency. I simply observed the guilt. I said to myself, "Ah, there is the feeling of destroying four thousand livelihoods." I felt the sharp bite of it. I breathed deeply into the dark, heavy center of the emotion, wrapping it in loving-kindness. And then, having fully acknowledged my truth, I opened my eyes, smiled warmly at the board, and voted to liquidate the company.

I cannot describe the lightness of my step as I walked to my waiting town car that afternoon. The employees were already gathering in the lobby, weeping and holding cardboard boxes, but I did not feel the need to look away. I looked at them with a deep, compassionate, non-judgmental awareness. Their impermanence was a beautiful, tragic part of the human experience. I was merely the weather that had washed their shelter away.

I was discussing this breakthrough recently over omakase with a prominent tech founder, a man who recently utilized a dynamic pricing algorithm to make essential asthma medication unaffordable for a quarter of the population. He, too, had struggled with the public backlash, feeling a desperate need to defend himself on social media. I told him what Chödrön taught me: the public’s outrage is merely their own struggle with groundlessness. They are attached to the illusion of affordable healthcare. By raising the price 400 percent, my friend was actually providing them with a powerful opportunity to practice non-attachment.

To deepen my practice, I recently attended a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat in Big Sur. It was there, somewhere between the organic oat milk station and the walking meditation path, that I finally mastered the Tibetan practice of Tonglen. In Tonglen, the practitioner breathes in the suffering of others, and breathes out peace and relief.

Sitting on my zafu cushion overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I visualized the millions of tenants currently facing eviction across the portfolio of residential properties my firm had recently acquired. I breathed in their panic, their fear, the crying of their children, the frantic calls to legal aid. I drew all of that dark, heavy energy into my heart center. And then, with a long, slow exhale, I breathed out pure, unadulterated luxury condominium development. I breathed out a 12 percent return on investment for our institutional backers. The synergy between ancient Eastern wisdom and real estate syndication is truly a marvel.

Of course, living this authentically requires sacrifices. It requires letting go of the ego’s desire to be liked by the people whose lives you are ruining. It requires setting boundaries with the Department of Justice antitrust division. It even required divorcing my third wife, a wonderful woman who simply lacked the vibrational frequency necessary to understand why I needed to lobby Congress to lower the legal working age in meatpacking plants.

But when things fall apart, as Chödrön so beautifully explains, we are given a chance to see what remains. What remains for me is a profound, unshakeable stillness. The world is a flowing river, chaotic and indifferent. We spend so much time fighting the current, trying to build dams of morality and ethics, when the universe does not deal in good or bad. It only deals in what is.

And what is, currently, is my $14 million year-end performance bonus. Sometimes, as I sit on the balcony of my penthouse, I look out over the smog-choked city below, knowing that thousands are scrambling to make rent because of the market forces I set into motion. I feel the anxiety try to rise. But I just smile, take a deep breath, and agree with it.