Shannon in the bardo

Leadership lessons I learned from the Buddha and yacht rock

“Hold on loosely
But don't let go
If you cling to tightly
You're gonna lose control”

This week will mark the last Gun Sense University — or GSU — I’ll attend as a Moms Demand Action leader. GSU, our annual volunteer gathering, started back in 2014 when just a few dozen volunteers gathered in Denver. Flash forward nine years and thousands of volunteer leaders will attend GSU this weekend in Chicago, including Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action volunteers and gun violence survivors.

Just as our organization has grown significantly over the years, so has GSU. Not just in size, but relevance. In fact, this year, Vice President Kamala Harris will attend GSU (you can livestream her address on August 11).

During each GSU, my annual speech has been focused on lifting up the wins of our volunteers in the cities and states where they live. But this year, I’ll use my time to hand the torch over to Angela Ferrell-Zabala, Moms Demand Action’s Executive Director and the woman who will help write the next chapter of Moms Demand Action.

I made the decision to step back last summer in the Rose Garden during a celebration of the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. As I listened to President Biden’s remarks, it struck me that when I started Moms Demand Action back in 2012, my goal was to help pass federal gun safety legislation. It had finally happened, and I knew that this new legislation was the logical bookend to my leadership.

Since that realization, I’ve been living in the bardo — a Tibetan term that means “intermediate state.” It’s the ungrounded but unavoidable feeling of having one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

I’d always imagined my Founder role to be finite. I asked myself every year for 10 years whether it was time to step back so that others could step forward. In part because I worried about having Founder’s Syndrome (when the ego of the person who starts a business or organization becomes so intertwined with its functioning that it eventually flounders), but also because I wanted to do other things in my life, which was impossible given the time commitment of leading an organization.

After I told my team about my decision in the fall and said I wanted to share the news publicly in the new year, I felt something I hadn’t had time to feel in over a decade: anxiety. Despite being a secular Buddhist who spends a good deal of time trying to see and avoid my ego’s shadow, there was — at least in the early days of my decision — a significant amount of suffering. Who was I if not the leader of Moms Demand Action?

The only way out is through — and that includes feeling the gamut of emotions that come with a major life change, including fear, grief and clinging. Buddhists believe that if you let go of the “clinging” of the mind, you become free of suffering. So a few months ago I set out to loosen my clinging through more meditation, exercise, getting outdoors, taking vacations, being with people who love me, putting down my phone as much as possible, and even taking a psychedelic journey.

I’m happy to say that in the nine months since my decision, my anxiety has subsided significantly, and every day I’m more certain I made the right call at the right time. I’m excited about the book I’m writing. I’m making more time to be with my husband and my kids and my friends. I’m planning trips and signing up for new classes. And, most important, I’m certain that my decision will enable the organization to evolve the way it talks about and tackles gun violence prevention, which is the only way for it to be successful.

Transitions are tough, but they’re inevitable, and life is full of them. In Buddhism, we call that anitya — the idea that everything, both physical and mental, is impermanent. It arises, changes and disappears. From birth to death, things in our lives are constantly changing, and how we handle those transitions determines the amount of suffering we (and others) experience.

The choice is ours to leave and burn everything down behind us, or to view change as an opportunity to step away and start something new.

“That,” said the Buddha, “is how to practice: not too tight and not too loose.”