Alex Mill

If your mind feels like a runaway train—constantly racing with emotions and thoughts—then meditation is exactly what you need.

The truth is, it’s not just your inner world that’s impacted. When you’re stressed, overwhelmed, or stuck in negative thinking, it affects everything around you: work, relationships, health, and happiness.

Do any of these sound familiar?

• Stress and overwhelm
• Constant distractions
• Depression and anger
• Negative self-talk
• Imposter syndrome
• Procrastination and fear

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then you’re not alone. And I can help.

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗭𝗲𝗻 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽

In my 71-minute on-demand video, you’ll learn exactly how to create a meditation practice that fits into your life—no matter how busy you are. You’ll also discover:

👉 Why meditation is critical to your well-being (and a powerful exercise to prove it).
👉 The top 3 reasons to meditate.
👉 How to finally stick with meditation (because it’s not about knowing how—it’s about doing it!).

𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗺 𝗜?

I’m Alex Mill, a former Zen Buddhist monk with nearly 14 years of Zen training. Now, as a Zen Life Coach and the author of “A Shift to Love,” I help people just like you ditch bad habits and create conscious, compassionate lives through the power of meditation.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗭𝗲𝗻 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽:

✅ A 71-minute on-demand video training
✅ PDF instructions you can download and keep
✅ My 176-page full-color ebook—”Meditation and Reinventing Yourself”
✅ Motivational Meditation Emails that support, inspire, and keep you on track
✅ Direct access to me if you have any questions

𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁?

The Zen Workshop is just $25. Click here to get started: http://workshop.zenlife.coach

I’m looking forward to seeing you on the inside!

In lovingkindness,
Alex

I was on the phone with a young man who would be teaching a three-month course on how to build a coaching business.

By some chance, he accepted the application I submitted a week prior, and we were now talking to see if I was a fit for his course.

One week before this call, I learned what coaching was and discovered that it was exactly like the work I was doing at the Zen monastery.

I thought, “I could do this.

If I begin coaching, it could make a difference in people’s lives.”

But rewind several months.

I had just left the monastery.

A middle-of-the-night insight woke me from my sleep and insisted I continue offering the teachings.

I was convinced.

It didn’t make sense to forego everything I’d learned in my Zen training to do what I had done before.

I had some amazing tools and powerful skills to offer the world, and I didn’t want to waste them.

On a Post-It note, I wrote, “I know how to turn on the enthusiasm switch inside of myself, and I know how to teach others to do that too.”

I stuck it to my mirror so I could see it every day to remind me of my commitment.

The following morning, I sat outside on the porch at my parents’ house and Googled “How to do what you love.”

My online search produced some resources to start helping me earn money doing what I loved to do.

I got on many mailing lists.

I discovered an online business training site that used blogging as a means to earn revenue.

So, I got involved in that community.

I built my first website, wrote my first book, and created my first online course with them.

Then, I got a newsletter in my inbox announcing that applications for an upcoming coach business training were coming up.

That’s how I ended up on the phone with this young man.

The stumbling block we hit in our conversation was my lack of funds to pay for his course.

We both wanted to make this work.

He wanted me in his course because I was a fit for it and because I thought this would help me make a living doing what I love.

When he told me how much his program cost, I could feel my energy drop.

That was more than I had to my name.

I knew because before the call, I wrote the sum total of all the money I had, and it was clearly a third short.

I told him my dilemma, but he was not shaken.

He joyfully replied, “This isn’t a ‘no.’ This is just part of the obstacle course!”

My attention perked up.

A change stirred inside of me.

I suddenly felt my energy rise.

Of course!

It’s an obstacle course!

There must be some way to make this happen!

We brainstormed options, and I left the call with him full of renewed vigor.

I was on my obstacle course!

Over the next few days, he followed along with me during my setbacks and triumphs, from bank conversations to credit card companies to borrowing requests to selling possibilities.

Ultimately, I managed to find a way to pay for his program.

The biggest triumph for me, and the one I’ll never forget, was not that I got into his program and had incredible results because I was so invested in it, but I had witnessed the power of coaching in action.

I experienced the power of words and how a simple conversation could shift everything and create miracles where once there had been none.

In lovingkindness,
Alex

In the teachings of the Buddha, there are astonishing assertions like “there is no self and other” and “everything is one.”

Years ago, I had the opportunity to see this lesson for myself at the Zen monastery. Tired from a day’s work, I would go home and face my uninsulated plywood hermitage in 20-degree weather. I did not have an ounce of energy left to start a fire in my wood stove.

The voices in my head would say, “It’s only for you, and you really don’t feel like it.”

Years later, I was blessed with the opportunity to care for a big, beautiful German Shepherd.

Now that I had him to care for, somehow, I discovered the miraculous willingness to start fires in my hermitage.

Of course, I enjoyed them too.

Somehow, I mustered up the energy to do this consistently—for HIM.

Alone, I didn’t matter.

But because of him, it was okay to make an effort.

This process sometimes showed up after leaving the monastery when I thought cooking something new for myself would be fun.

Since I would prepare food for myself, I'd hear the same voice say, “It’s only for you. Why go through all that work?”

It still takes a lot of mindfulness and self-mentoring to break through the self-hatred—to practice seeing myself as "a someone,” worthy of kindness and compassion—to take a stand against the dismissive voice and say, “Yes, in fact, I do matter!”

That's the lesson I have been learning, one that I hope you take to heart as well.

Only when you understand that you matter will you live as though what you DO matters.

So participate.

Even if you’re the only one who shows up.

In the end, you’re all you’ve really got.

You are counting on YOU.

In lovingkindness,
Alex

It would be wonderful if whenever we sat down to meditate everything was silent, we had insightful experiences, and the Universe co-operated.

But that doesn’t typically happen.

While we can do everything in our power to make conditions ideal for meditation—the blank white wall to sit in front of, the disturbance-free zone where no one bugs us, the loose-fitting clothes to feel comfortable—there comes the point when we have to admit we have no say about what ultimately happens.

Sometimes, it can be discouraging.

The cat discovers us and curls up in our lap.

The workers on the street begin jackhammering.

We find a song we haven't heard in years suddenly playing in our head.

We think the Universe is conspiring against us—hinting that we should quit meditation (at least for now) and move on to something else.

Yet, we sit through it.

Because we realize that the ideal isn’t the point of meditation or the practice.

Zen meditation trains us to be with “what is,” and what is can be less than ideal.

At the Zen monastery, we were encouraged to stay seated in the meditation hall no matter what.

The impulse would arise to move, scratch that itch, or leave because we feel nauseous.

But if we had to throw up, we were told to stay in the hall.

Just throw up.

There was a guide in the room to be sure all of us were safe to meditate.

Our surrender was an attitude of mind.

It was symbolic of us enduring the voices that would thwart us at every turn.

So we really do our best: We tell others around us not to disturb us, we move the cat bed to the other room away from where we meditate, and we create ideal circumstances, knowing that the results will be what they are.

It is one of the huge gifts of meditation practice: Understanding that we will be adequate to our life experiences.

Even if it’s challenging.

Even if it’s painful.

We’ll be fine.

We have no control.

We never have and never will.

And that’s okay.

In lovingkindness,
Alex

Albert Einstein was quoted to have said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

Why is it the most important decision we can make?

Because we have to determine who (inside of us) we are going to put in charge of our lives.

Will it be Center?

Or the victim?

Which worldview will we adopt?

“The most important decision…” Because all other decisions will be impacted from this starting point.

If I see the universe as friendly, at least I have a shot at creating something magnificent.

If hostile, then I will allow fear (and all its manifestations) to calculate every move I make.

But this view is not some fixed, permanent position.

There aren’t those who are naturally victims nor those who are inherently Centered.

It can be changed instantly from moment to moment.

That’s why people can have all the lights come on and see through enlightenment’s eyes and then suffer the rest of their lives because they can’t get back to that experience again.

Or people can suffer their whole lives and suddenly experience the brilliance of enlightenment in any moment.

The most powerful way to experience this shift is through misidentification.

Disidentification is removing the floor out from under the voices so another view can be presented.

It’s the enlightened view that’s there when we stop engaging with the voices—when we stop seeing the world through their limited eyes.

But enough theories and speculations.

Would you like to have an experience of this?

A little exercise...

Here’s how it goes: When you encounter your coffee, a tree, a breeze, or even the ground beneath your feet, say to it, “I love you. Do you love me?” And then wait for a response.

Play this game all day long.

Set alarms periodically to remind yourself that you’re playing this game (because it would be so easy to “forget”).

And let me know how it goes.

I'd love to hear.

In lovingkindness,
Alex

A seeker gets to the edge of a wall.

It’s the wall keeping him in suffering.

He climbs to the top, sees freedom on the other side, and gasps.

It’s beautiful!

He’s having a Wizard of Oz moment.

You know how the beginning of the movie starts in black-and-white, and the land over the rainbow is in full color just beyond the door?

Well, that’s what it’s like for him now.

Black-and-white where he was and in full color straight ahead.

He’s up there with his jaw dropped in full amazement.

Life was previously suffering, and now he sees the possibility of something else.

And while he’s at the top, several other seekers have climbed, gasped, and leaped over to Nirvana.

They’re rushing through the lush paradise below, yelling at him to come on down and join them.

How wonderful!

But what does he do?

He climbs back the same way he came and goes on to help others find the wall.

His work is to show them the way so they can also have this experience.

It’s too good not to share.

This man is a Bodhisattva.

Someone who doesn’t just wake up and retire alone to the mountains enlightened for himself.

He doesn’t stay silent in meditation under a tree.

His personal attainment isn’t the end goal.

His mission is to assist others.

He wants them to be enlightened as well.

He vows to tirelessly save all sentient beings.

He knows that much suffering results from people's thinking, seeing, and doing as they’ve always done—never changing that—while freedom is nothing more than having an alternative view and choosing something different.

However, the story I told didn’t include the enormous resistance to following this path.

Scaling the wall can be frightening.

So the Bodhisattva is down in the crowd, saying that freedom is over there on the other side of this wall.

It’s possible to climb it, and it’s possible to be free.

Most people listening are not joyful, but many have no problem getting what they’ve always gotten.

“Hey, it’s a black-and-white film over here, but at least it’s a film!” they say to the Bodhisattva.

“How are we to know there’s really anything good over there? At least we’re safe below. Maybe we’ll return to this wall later when we finish what we’ve been doing. When the time is right...”

It’s a really hard sell.

Some, however, perk up.

Those who are either the most downtrodden or the most optimistic realize that staying isn’t worth it.

“If this is all there is,” they say to themselves, “then I want to experience something else!”

They are the adventurous ones who see the vision the Bodhisattva is painting.

And they know that if they’re to have a different life experience, they’re going to have to choose something else.

What will you choose?

In lovingkindness,
Alex

P.S. Now that I am no longer a monk living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, I coach my clients privately worldwide via Zoom. We meet three times a month, focusing on cultivating conscious, compassionate health, relationships, livelihood, and purpose from the inside out.

If you’re looking for a trusted guide on your journey, I invite you to start with a FREE assessment on my website. This will give both you and me an idea of what is going on with you currently. We can't determine where you’re headed if we don’t know your starting point.

Curious about Zen Awareness Practice? Explore my book, “A Shift to Love,” where I share my Zen training experiences, coaching methods, and the transformative power of conscious, compassionate awareness through engaging stories and lessons.

If you’re inspired by what you read, I invite you to take the next step by registering for my Zen Workshop. This 71-minute, on-demand video training covers the basics of Zen practice, starting with meditation (Zazen). Along with the workshop, you’ll receive a 176-page full-color ebook, downloadable PDFs, and over a month of optional “Motivational Meditation Emails” to support and inspire you.

If you’ve read my book and completed the workshop and are ready to deepen your practice—to confront the inner voices and live more authentically—consider applying for my next 30-day signature coaching program. This intensive experience will challenge you to show up for yourself in powerful new ways, transforming how you perceive yourself, others, and life. Learn more about The Program and read some of the 60+ testimonials from grads on my website.

Thank you for your attention today—I look forward to the possibility of connecting with you soon!

While training at the Zen monastery, I had the good fortune of being gifted a program called Landmark Forum.

I met some really great people during the weekend seminar.

One was a young man my age who had done “The Forum” before and was volunteering to facilitate this one.

We were walking toward a restaurant he recommended during one of our breaks, and our conversation was about problems.

He said that in Landmark, they suggest you “pick problems worthy of your attention.”

That caught my attention, so I asked him to explain this a bit to me.

What did he mean?

He said, “So often in life, we pick problems that completely waste time and energy. They cause us stress and disappointment and leave us drained at the end of the day. These problems will cause us to focus on how we don’t like this person or feel stuck in that situation.”

He said, “Instead of choosing those easy, habitual problems handed over to us, choosing a problem worthy of our attention would be much better. A problem that is completely engrossing and robs us of our ability to have any of those lesser problems.”

He told me the “problem” he picked was getting married and starting a family, but he said it could be anything that created good in the world: volunteering at a shelter, starting a business to make an impact, committing to a non-profit, organizing an event, taking on world hunger...

“...you name it...as long as it gives you no attention left over for any of those lesser problems.”

No attention is left over for lesser problems.

Isn't that a perfect metaphor for practice, training our attention, and choosing a life of presence?

In lovingkindness,
Alex

P.S. Now that I am no longer a monk living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, I coach my clients privately worldwide via Zoom. We meet three times a month, focusing on cultivating conscious, compassionate health, relationships, livelihood, and purpose from the inside out.

If you’re looking for a trusted guide on your journey, I invite you to start with a FREE assessment on my website. This will give both you and me an idea of what is going on with you currently. We can't determine where you’re headed if we don’t know your starting point.

Curious about Zen Awareness Practice? Explore my book, “A Shift to Love,” where I share my Zen training experiences, coaching methods, and the transformative power of conscious, compassionate awareness through engaging stories and lessons.

If you’re inspired by what you read, I invite you to take the next step by registering for my Zen Workshop. This 71-minute, on-demand video training covers the basics of Zen practice, starting with meditation (Zazen). Along with the workshop, you’ll receive a 176-page full-color ebook, downloadable PDFs, and over a month of optional “Motivational Meditation Emails” to support and inspire you.

If you’ve read my book and completed the workshop and are ready to deepen your practice—to confront the inner voices and live more authentically—consider applying for my next 30-day signature coaching program. This intensive experience will challenge you to show up for yourself in powerful new ways, transforming how you perceive yourself, others, and life. Learn more about The Program and read some of the 60+ testimonials from grads on my website.

Thank you for your attention today—I look forward to the possibility of connecting with you soon!

I encounter many people who use meditation and spiritual practice as some sort of barricade between themselves and life.

They use it to feel better, create comfort, or protect themselves from negative thoughts.

They even use it to attract what they want, prefer, or feel they deserve.

I would like to invite you to another perspective.

The following passage was printed and hung in the dining hall at the Zen monastery where I trained. I share it with all my clients when we first begin working together.

My encouragement is to sit with it and absorb the magnitude of what it is pointing at.

* * * * * *

"Those who, being really on the Way, fall upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers refuge and comfort and encourages the old self to survive. Rather, they will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves, so that they may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a “raft that leads to the far shore.” Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within us. In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows us to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble us. On the contrary, practice should teach us to let ourselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered—that is to say, it should enable us to dare to let go our futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that we may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose us, that which awaits us beyond the world of opposites.

The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious—a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces. Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more we learn wholeheartedly to confront the world that threatens us with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of New Life and Becoming opened.

—Adapted from The Way of Transformation by Karlfried Graf Durckheim

* * * * * *

P.S. Now that I am no longer a monk living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, I coach my clients privately worldwide via Zoom. We meet three times a month, focusing on cultivating conscious, compassionate health, relationships, livelihood, and purpose from the inside out.

If you’re looking for a trusted guide on your journey, I invite you to start with a FREE assessment on my website. This will give both you and me an idea of what is going on with you currently. We can't determine where you’re headed if we don’t know your starting point.

Curious about Zen Awareness Practice? Explore my book, “A Shift to Love,” where I share my Zen training experiences, coaching methods, and the transformative power of conscious, compassionate awareness through engaging stories and lessons.

If you’re inspired by what you read, I invite you to take the next step by registering for my Zen Workshop. This 71-minute, on-demand video training covers the basics of Zen practice, starting with meditation (Zazen). Along with the workshop, you’ll receive a 176-page full-color ebook, downloadable PDFs, and over a month of optional “Motivational Meditation Emails” to support and inspire you.

If you’ve read my book and completed the workshop and are ready to deepen your practice—to confront the inner voices and live more authentically—consider applying for my next 30-day signature coaching program. This intensive experience will challenge you to show up for yourself in powerful new ways, transforming how you perceive yourself, others, and life. Learn more about The Program and read some of the 60+ testimonials from grads on my website.

Thank you for your attention today—I look forward to the possibility of connecting with you soon!

I always marvel at the imaginary lines we draw between “this” and “that.”

How we fail to see life as undivided.

Those who understand make claims like “mind and body are one,” which means the mind affects the body and vice versa.

So armed with this perspective, we can see the power we have to create a difference in our lives at the shift of our attention.

Instead of waiting to be happy to act, we can act to create happiness.

And in my experience, to act, we must first disidentify.

What is disidentification?

It can be like being invited to play a game.

I don’t know about you, but I often go into my head to consult with the voices to see if I really “feel” like playing first.

Even if it’s a fun game and I’ve never had a bad experience, I can still opt out of playing simply because a voice concluded, “Nah, you don’t ‘feel’ like it.”

But what happened when I said, “Yes?”

Well, then I played the game and had a great time.

I forgot all about my initial bout of resistance to the whole thing.

And it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve had an experience of having a great time; I will still consult this illusory authority in my head that will determine the course of my future.

Amazing!

So it’s no wonder there would be such resistance to smiling—especially if there’s a danger to the voices that we disidentify from and become joyful.

That's why practicing disidentifying, smiling, disentangling from the mental noodling, and breaking through to joy takes conscious effort.

If you’re reading this now, see if you can smile.

Will you smile?
Are you permitted to smile?
Will you allow joy in?

If not, that’s fine too.

Because now you see what you’re up against.

You see what is in control of your life and how things will go if you continue to give it your power.

In lovingkindness,
Alex

P.S. Now that I am no longer a monk living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, I coach my clients privately worldwide via Zoom. We meet three times a month, focusing on cultivating conscious, compassionate health, relationships, livelihood, and purpose from the inside out.

If you’re looking for a trusted guide on your journey, I invite you to start with a FREE assessment on my website. This will give both you and me an idea of what is going on with you currently. We can't determine where you’re headed if we don’t know your starting point.

Curious about Zen Awareness Practice? Explore my book, “A Shift to Love,” where I share my Zen training experiences, coaching methods, and the transformative power of conscious, compassionate awareness through engaging stories and lessons.

If you’re inspired by what you read, I invite you to take the next step by registering for my Zen Workshop. This 71-minute, on-demand video training covers the basics of Zen practice, starting with meditation (Zazen). Along with the workshop, you’ll receive a 176-page full-color ebook, downloadable PDFs, and over a month of optional “Motivational Meditation Emails” to support and inspire you.

If you’ve read my book and completed the workshop and are ready to deepen your practice—to confront the inner voices and live more authentically—consider applying for my next 30-day signature coaching program. This intensive experience will challenge you to show up for yourself in powerful new ways, transforming how you perceive yourself, others, and life. Learn more about The Program and read some of the 60+ testimonials from grads on my website.

Thank you for your attention today—I look forward to the possibility of connecting with you soon!

Once people realize that voices in their heads are causing them trouble and misery, their focus turns to “getting rid of them.”

At this point, I will respectfully remind them that this won’t work.

They won’t go away, and you can’t eliminate them.

They’re here to stay.

Now, the truth is the voices don't exist, and they only influence you if you give them your attention.

But this doesn’t help people because they still experience these voices as real.

Years of being fooled in a particular way or being made to feel bad for certain things is hard to ignore.

Emotions arise, and the whole system goes “tilt” as they try to walk through what appears to be a wall of fire.

So what can a person do?

I suggest you use the voices to your benefit.

The training I offer people is the ability to “spot the voices” so you can begin to hear them, identify them, and note the language they use.

When you have discovered and cataloged the voices you hear in your head, you can no longer be so easily fooled by them.

Now, the game becomes that every time I hear a particular voice, it will become a signal to do the opposite of what it suggests.

So if it says, “You have no creativity!” as I sit down to do a creative drawing, I can catch that voice and retort, “Nope!” and keep drawing.

If you practice this technique over time, you’ll begin to see that the voices gradually become your greatest allies.

Instead of them being noxious mental weeds you’re trying to get rid of, fighting them tooth-and-nail, you’re using them as a tool—a red flag—that helps you come to consciousness.

At some point in a workshop or retreat I’m facilitating, a student will inevitably ask me, “Why do we have voices?”

And I’ll typically respond, “I don’t know why we have voices. But if I had to venture a guess, I'd say they’re our greatest opportunity to remind ourselves to choose compassion instead.”

In lovingkindness,
Alex

P.S. Now that I am no longer a monk living in a Zen Buddhist monastery, I coach my clients privately worldwide via Zoom. We meet three times a month, focusing on cultivating conscious, compassionate health, relationships, livelihood, and purpose from the inside out.

If you’re looking for a trusted guide on your journey, I invite you to start with a FREE assessment on my website. This will give both you and me an idea of what is going on with you currently. We can't determine where you’re headed if we don’t know your starting point.

Curious about Zen Awareness Practice? Explore my book, “A Shift to Love,” where I share my Zen training experiences, coaching methods, and the transformative power of conscious, compassionate awareness through engaging stories and lessons.

If you’re inspired by what you read, I invite you to take the next step by registering for my Zen Workshop. This 71-minute, on-demand video training covers the basics of Zen practice, starting with meditation (Zazen). Along with the workshop, you’ll receive a 176-page full-color ebook, downloadable PDFs, and over a month of optional “Motivational Meditation Emails” to support and inspire you.

If you’ve read my book and completed the workshop and are ready to deepen your practice—to confront the inner voices and live more authentically—consider applying for my next 30-day signature coaching program. This intensive experience will challenge you to show up for yourself in powerful new ways, transforming how you perceive yourself, others, and life. Learn more about The Program and read some of the 60+ testimonials from grads on my website.

Thank you for your attention today—I look forward to the possibility of connecting with you soon!