About Your Personal Coach
Hi. I'm Bennett Barouch. Welcome to Zen-ish Space, A Zen-ish Center for Reducing Stress & Anxiety.
My background bridges psychology, education, technology, spiritual exploration, mentoring, and coaching. My professional experience spans residential, community-based, and private counseling, as well as roles in elementary education, as a college instructor, and as an assistant dean of students. I have also served as a licensed psychiatric nurse, certified massage therapist, multiply-certified yoga teacher, certified meditation teacher, multiply-certified personal coach, and as a lay minister. From an early age, I immersed myself in the study of Western and Eastern religion, philosophy, psychology, and biology, cultivating a lifelong passion for understanding the human experience.
In the world of technology, I have held positions ranging from software developer to vice president of engineering, as well as serving as a private advisor to executives. I patented a system for securing custom integrated circuits against international espionage in U.S. space program satellites, and the work product of one of my teams has a place in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology.
I am honored that family, friends, and clients have entrusted me with hearing them out, and sharing my observations and understandings in a way that helps them develop theirs. I hope to be of similar assistance to you, either through personal coaching, or through my book, Eat The Strawberries. Eat The Strawberries expresses the foundation of my personal coaching practice, and readers have found it useful in its own right, whether or not they opt for live coaching.
If you want to talk, set up a video call so we can see if we are a fit.
About The Logo & Mission
The blue oval represents a pond, which itself represents one's life. The lotus flower is one of the main symbols of Zen, or more generally of the peace of mind Buddhist teachings are collectively aimed at helping us achieve, right in the midst of a real life.
People admire the lotus for its ability to thrive in challenging environments. Like you, its seeds can survive for many years even in harsh conditions. The lotus germinates and grows in murky water yet emerges from the mud below to produce clean and beautiful flowers. Thus for many people the lotus symbolizes purity, hope, perseverance, strength, and resilience.
The expression "no mud, no lotus" paraphrases the Buddhist teaching that there is no life that is free of suffering. If you are going to be alive, there is going to be some suffering. People want the lotus but not the mud, but the lotus does not exist in a mud-free world, and neither do we. Like the lotus, for us to bloom we must escape being mired within the mud, yet we also must not sever our connection to it.
A lotus cut free from its mud soon dies. Our flowering beauty also turns lifeless and ugly if we lose connection with our mud (understanding our own good and bad history, development, and dependencies), or if we lose compassion for the mud in other people's lives, or the ability to see their beauty. Rising above our personal mud doesn't mean denying it or pretending it is merely something in the past. Like the lotus again, it literally requires making the most of whatever value we can extract from the mud that can nurture us, and anchor us. No mud, no lotus. Also, when there is mud, there can be a lotus.
The red swoosh on the left suggests a heart. Heart, love, compassion – among life's most important forms of beauty, and a great treasure for us to nurture and protect, especially because of all the mud it will help us slog through.
The figure of a person is in the yoga pose known as "Warrior II". It is also nearly identical to an often-depicted posture from Kung Fu, a martial art created by Zen monks in the Henan province of China around the beginning of the 6th century. We must sometimes be strong and courageous to vigorously develop, defend, and share life's treasures, and not fall back into the mud by being passive or defeated.
You're going to have struggles. Life ensures this. Why not get really good at handling them? You are going to have joys and accomplishments too, but these do not spontaneously arise as frequently as struggles do. We must get better at generating these positive experiences, and learn to both share them and internalize them more fully.