Zen & Investing

I have reframed my blog to "Zen Mind, Value Investing Mind" from "Economic Moats, Margin of Safety" to reflect a desire to integrate my investing journey as part of my spiritual practice.

Zen is a way of life, one that aims to learn to live authentically, instead of dwelling in our self-centred dreams and thoughts.  Moving from a self-centred life to a more life-centred one. 

This doesn't mean we don't take care of ourselves, as a life-centred approach includes taking care of one's own-self as well as one's family (including investing to provide steady stream of passive income after retirement).  The key is not to get lost in our narrow self-centred obsessions and learning to live with a more open mind and heart.  This means, to me, not a radical change in lifestyle, rather a gentle shift in our everyday living to becoming a kinder person.

Through mindful awareness, we begin to notice the ways we are unkind.  Then slowly releasing and letting go of the ways we are unkind, slowly we allow the intrinsic kindness in our heart to slowly surface, in a gradual gradual way (hardly noticeable probably).

Relating to investing, while I try to bring more mindful awareness into the whole process, I am still unsure how this integration with my spiritual practice will turn out.  At this point in time, there is just an intention to integrate with no clear ideas on how to doing it systematically or what the outcome will be like. 

One glimpse of the outcome is perhaps what I have discussed in some of my past posts, where I made commitments to donating investment earnings to meaningful causes.  As I slowly move along my investing journey, at the same time learning to open my awareness to suffering out there in our world, and learning to make commitments to sharing a growing portion of my wealth with those who could use a little help financially.  For example, the commitment to sponsoring a child, which not only enable us to assist the child and his/her family financially, but through writing letters, we can also hopefully bring some positive influence and hope to him/her.

I am taking a gradual approach
May everyone be well & happy =)