83. That you make gifts and mix CDs and write notes and send letters to people just for the sake of making them smile.
84. How genuinely you see all people as equals.
85. That you stop apologizing for doing what you want with your body.
86. That you realize your mind’s capacity is limitless if you so choose to pursue it.
87. That you embrace releasing your mind from having an input on the things that inherently require your instinctual feelings.
88. That you have little things in your life that genuinely make you happy.
89. That you have the courage to go back and reconcile when you are at a standstill and someone needs to cave.
90. That you can rejoice in other people’s successes.
91. And not rejoice in other people’s failures.
92. That your body is capable of understanding when someone is giving you that very specific “I love you” look, and that you are so lucky
to ever have had it in the first place.
93. That you spend your life doing something greater than just making yourself happy in the moment.
94. That you realize that to help others, you must first help yourself.
95. That you understand how the last two points both contradict and necessitate one another.
96. That you give yourself enough sleep.
97. And enough vegetables (sorry to nag you, but that shit is important).
98. How you feel about your body.
99. That you forgive the people who are cruel to you over your body and realize that they are hurting somewhere too, and that people only ever lash out at what strikes a chord within them.
100. That you forgive yourself for being cruel to yourself over your body.
101. That you use it to write things like this and send the message on.
93
7 ZEN
PRINCIPLES
(and how to
apply them
to modern life)
Our biggest aversion to psychological guidance systems—religious or not—
tends to be skepticism bred out of (assumed) inapplicability.
We’ll trust lifestyle magazines and blog posts and cultural norms. This is simply because they make sense to us. They become self-evident “truth”
when we can easily apply them to our issues.
But we don’t often consider the source, or the intention, or the long-term significance of what it is we begin to believe in. When the extent of our personal philosophy is, essentially, to just do what we’re told without questioning, we end up serving consumerism, or ego, or misguided religious figures or someone else’s desire for control.
Despite being a derivative of Buddhist teaching, Zen is simply the art of self-awareness. It does not dictate what you should feel or believe in; how you should be or what you should do…only that you should be conscious of your experience, fully immersed in it.
It’s for this reason that Zen principles are universal—they can apply to any dogma or lifestyle, essentially. So here are eight ancient teachings of Zen and how to navigate them in the modern world.
01. Your experience is constructed by your mind.
The Yogācāra discourse essentially explains how our mind’s perceptions create our experiences. Therefore, we must realize that, even despite our disposition, we can create a different experience simply by shifting and choosing what to focus on. We are raised to believe that we cannot choose what we think about, when, in fact, we can. Not every fear feeling or negative thought is an invitation to explore it to a resolutive end.
02. Your concept of self is an illusion (and construct) as well.
“Who you are” is an essence. An energy. That’s it. That’s why it’s never “one thing” for too long or in any given context. That’s why it’s so difficult to understand yourself—you’re more than the limiting definitions and titles repetitive habits and jobs and roles provide.
However, most of us only understand ourselves as we imagine other people see us. (Writer, teacher, mom, student, basketball player, “good person,” etc.)
Most of our issues surround trying to manipulate the ego; trying to inflate or immortalize the self. Trying to shift and change how we think other people see us (therefore, how we believe we exist in reality, and so how we should see ourselves).
Mastering the idea of self is knowing that you can play out the illusion of who you are and what you do while not being so lost in it that it controls you.
