カテゴリー: Zen & Meditation

Gate After Gate, and Still No Other Side

On Obon, I walked through real gates all day in Kyoto — the one in my head, after decades of Zen, I still can’t say I’ve crossed

A note before we begin: English is not my first language, and I use AI as a language tool to help me write it. The thinking is mine.

This week is Obon, or by its full name, Urabon’e（盂蘭盆会. In the older Buddhist understanding, these are the summer days when the dead come back for a while to visit the living. Every year I go to Kyoto to stand at my parents’ grave, at a temple called Konkai Kōmyō-ji. Every year, before I head home, I walk the fifteen minutes from there to Nanzen-ji, the Zen temple I used to go to when I was young.

The road between the two runs through a quiet stretch of houses. Almost no tourists come this way. In August there’s little to take in but the heat and the cicadas, which is a kind of relief. Then Nanzen-ji’s great gate, its Sanmon, rises at the end of the approach, and every year, standing under it, I think a version of the same thing.

It’s this. Zen（禅）has been near me for most of my life, in temple rooms in Kyoto, in the long silences of teachers who met a question with what didn’t look like an answer. And I still don’t understand it.

Maybe I simply haven’t studied enough. Twenty years, thirty. I’ve come to think that’s far too short a span to have earned the word understand, or even studied. A hundred might not be enough. So I won’t begin as someone who knows. I’ll begin where I actually am, which this week is a literal place: under a gate in the Kyoto heat, unsure whether I’ve walked through it or am only standing at its edge.

My teachers never gave me clean answers. That was the point. In the tradition of mondō（問答）, the question-and-answer exchange at the spine of Zen training, the reply is built not to satisfy but to unsettle. You ask what the Buddha is, and the teacher says: three pounds of flax. You leave more confused than you arrived. You come back. You ask again, differently. You leave confused again.

This went on for years. It went on for years for me.

At some point (I can’t tell you when) something shifted. Not understanding, exactly. Something in how I held the questions loosened. A kind of settling. I thought maybe that was it. Maybe that is what Zen feels like from the inside.

Then people began to ask me about it, and something I didn’t expect happened.

When young people ask me what I actually mean, when foreign friends press me to explain, the settled thing comes loose again. Catherine, a graduate student at Osaka University, once asked me why Zen teaching seems designed to confuse rather than clarify. Nicholas, an American friend I’ve known for years, asked me, with real exasperation, whether any of this is useful, or just beautiful-sounding nonsense.

I couldn’t answer either of them cleanly.

Nicholas runs a company. Professionally, he lives inside what can be counted: revenue, targets, the quarterly line that rises or falls and tells him whether the year was good. When he asks whether Zen is useful, he’s asking the only honest question his world knows how to ask: what does it produce, and how would I see it?

It’s a fair question, and I’ve never had a clean answer. So one evening I tried to walk around it with him.

Almost everything we call growth, we can feel. A company’s, you read on a chart. But even the quiet kinds report back. A musician practices and hears herself getting better. A painter watches his own hand grow surer. I practiced kendo（剣道）for years as a boy, and I can tell you: train hard enough and the strength arrives in your body, and you know it’s there.

The soul sends back no signal at all. No chart, no ear, no muscle reporting that anything has changed. And here is the part I keep circling: if it did, if you could feel your soul growing, that feeling would be proof it hadn’t.

Take me. I was an even-tempered boy, and I’m calmer now than I was then, quieter, less easily moved. It would be easy to call that growth. But the changes I can actually measure tell a plainer story. My body is weaker than it was ten years ago; there’s no arguing with that. My mind may be going the same way, a little slower each year, though that’s harder to catch from the inside.

So when every part of me I can measure is on its way down, on what authority do I announce that the one part I can’t measure, the soul, is the exception, the single thing still climbing? I have no instrument fine enough to tell settling from decay. One thing does increase, and measurably: what I know. Whether knowledge is growth, though, I couldn’t tell you. And the years we’re given feel far too short to find out.

That was the answer I gave Nicholas: no answer at all, only a longer set of questions. And that is exactly when it happens. Each time I fail to hand someone what they came for, a new texture surfaces in what I thought I’d already understood. Their questions keep opening rooms. Was what I knew only the entrance? Maybe I had only ever crossed the gate. Maybe there is no other side.

Much later, I learned the not-knowing already had a name, eight centuries old, from a Chinese collection of kōans（公案）: daidō mumon（大道無門）, the great Way has no gate. I think of that phrase under the Sanmon, of all places. The name of the gate means the three barriers you’re supposed to pass through on the way to waking up, and there I stand beneath it, holding a line that says there was never a gate to pass. For decades I’d searched for a door I had, it turns out, already walked through. Or that was never there.

I was born in 1965. My teachers, at the age I am now, were answering a young student named Takeshi. I wonder if they felt what I feel: this braid of settled and unsettled, knowing and not-knowing. Whether they were performing wisdom or living honestly in its absence. I suspect the latter. I think that’s what made their non-answers feel like something real.

A culture built on kōan and mondō does something quiet to the people raised inside it. Across generations, it trains you not to resolve. You learn to hold a question open and unclosed, to live beside it without demanding that it clear. I didn’t choose this. I absorbed it before I could name it, and somewhere along the line it stopped being philosophy and became, simply, the air.

But I don’t think the question is ours. If Zen were a tool that grew the soul, then everyone who never met it, everyone raised outside Japan, would be stunted, and that’s plainly false. Zen didn’t invent the not-knowing. It only built it a room and gave it a name. Under other names, in other rooms, people everywhere sit with the same unanswerable thing. Nicholas has no word for it and no practice; his exasperation is the question. He was already living it when he asked.

Which is why I can’t hand it to you in sentences. I can describe its shape. I can circle it. But the thing itself doesn’t travel in words. There’s a frustration I’ve watched land more than once: someone follows a careful explanation, nods, and says, I think I get it. And I think: you’ve understood what it points to. You haven’t stood where it points.

And then I think: neither have I. Not completely. Not finally.

I don’t know if any of this reaches you. Most days I suspect it doesn’t. But when I think of my teachers, patient, unhurried, circling the same questions for decades, I think the point was never to arrive.

Obon ends, the way it does. I turn from the Sanmon and walk back the way I came, past the same quiet houses, the cicadas still at it, and somewhere along that road I stop thinking about gates and start wondering what to eat. Nothing has been settled. No far side has shown itself. Nicholas would want a port on the map and a distance crossed off; I have a heading toward the rising sun and a horizon that sits exactly as far off as it did this morning. I’m hungry. The road is hot. I keep walking.

The earth is round. There’s no starting line. There’s no finish line. There’s just the heading you hold, and the walking.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

Why Trying to Relax Makes You Tense

What I learned about panic from a bamboo sword, and why “just let go” is the worst advice ever given

I was fourteen, and my mind went white.

Kendo has a team format. Five fighters a side, sent out in fixed order — vanguard, second, middle, vice-captain, and last, the taishō (大将), the captain. Three wins takes the match. I was the captain. Fourteen and the captain, which sounds like an honour and is in fact a particular kind of exposure: when the score reaches two-all, the whole thing lands on you. Your teammates are finished. They are kneeling at the edge of the floor, watching. Whatever happens now is what happened to all of them.

That is roughly how the semi-finals always went, because by the semi-finals the teams are evenly matched and it comes down to the captains.

And standing there — Kobe city championships, the prefectural tournament, it hardly mattered which — I would begin to think things that had never once entered my head in ten years of practice.

What if I lose.

I have to score first.

That was all it took. Two sentences, then a rising static, then nothing. No plan. No body. A white room where a fourteen-year-old used to be. And a boy from another school, who was not thinking anything at all, would step in and hit me.

The word for what was happening

There is a term for this. Itsuki (居着き). It means, roughly, to settle in — to stick, to take up residence. It names the moment the mind fastens onto something — the opponent’s blade, a point just lost, an outcome badly wanted — and the body, obedient, stops. The feet die. Weight sinks into the floor. You become, for a fraction of a second, a statue with a plan.

In kendo this is not treated as nerves, or as a bad day. It is one of the three classical openings, the moments a trained opponent is taught to strike into. And what makes it so hard to escape is its shape:

The bracing is the vulnerability. They are not two things.

I did not freeze despite wanting to win. I froze because I wanted to win. The wanting was the mechanism. My determination not to lose was the precise instrument by which I lost.

You know this feeling. You have simply never had a word for it, and the absence of the word has made it feel like a personal defect rather than a mechanism.

The same trap, in your bedroom

Let me be careful, because I am about to sound like I am against something I am not against.

If you burn incense and something in your shoulders drops — good. If an app has given you twenty minutes a day that belong to nobody else, that is real, and I would not take it from you. Clean sheets are a pleasure. Nobody should surrender a pleasure on my account.

My worry is narrower. It is about what preparation does.

Preparation creates a goal. A goal creates an obligation. And obligation is a form of tension — which means the apparatus you built to relax you is, structurally, made of the thing you were escaping.

Watch how ordinary sleep is. You have done it every night since infancy, without instruction, without equipment. Then one night you have a flight at six, and you think: I have to sleep now. And sleep, which has never once required your cooperation, stands up and leaves the room.

Nothing changed. It simply became a task.

We do this to meditation constantly, and almost nobody notices. We take an ordinary human capacity — sitting still, letting the mind settle — and build an appointment around it. A cushion, a timer, a slot in the calendar. And having built the appointment, we have quietly converted stillness into a performance with a standard, and hired a small auditor at the back of the skull whose only job is to ask: is it working yet? am I doing this right?

The auditor is the tension. The auditor was hired by the preparation.

The laboratory agrees with the dojo

I am not a psychologist. But psychology arrived here too, from the opposite direction.

In the late 1980s an American social psychologist, Daniel Wegner, began studying what happens when people try to control their own minds — work that became known as ironic process theory, or the “white bear problem,” after the experiment in which subjects told not to think of a white bear could think of very little else.

His explanation is itsuki rewritten as cognitive science. Try to suppress a thought or produce a state, and you start two processes. One is effortful, and looks for distractions. The other runs automatically underneath, checking whether the unwanted thing is happening — and to check, it must keep the unwanted thing loaded and ready. Under stress or fatigue, the monitor wins.

His lab followed the logic exactly where you’d expect. People who tried to relax under cognitive load showed higher physiological arousal than people who didn’t try. People instructed to fall asleep quickly took longer.

Trying to relax is a measurable way of not relaxing.

A patrolman in Kobe with a bamboo sword, and a psychologist with a skin-conductance meter, describing the same trap.

What kendo refuses to tell you

Here is where the real cultural difference lies, and it is not where people usually put it.

Kendo has an old and precise account of the mind under pressure: the shikai (四戒), the four afflictions — surprise, fear, doubt, confusion (驚・懼・疑・惑). Let any of them in and you stall. A skilled opponent will deliberately induce them in you, because a mind with a hook in it is a body standing still. The tradition is not naive about interior states. It has been mapping them for centuries.

But notice what it never does.

It never tells you to feel calm.

Nowhere in that vocabulary is there an instruction that says be at peace, or stay present, or let it go. It tells you where to put your feet. Where to look. How to breathe, where to keep your weight, how to hold the sword. It tells you, endlessly, to repeat the form. And about how you ought to feel while doing it, it maintains a complete silence.

For years I took this for gruffness — an old, emotionally illiterate way of teaching. I have come to think it is the most sophisticated thing about it.

Because an instruction about your inner state is an instruction that cannot be obeyed. Be calm installs a target, a monitor and a failure condition in a single breath. It is the shikai handed to you disguised as help. Whereas keep your left heel light is simply a thing you can do, or fail to do — checkable from outside, requiring no auditor at all.

The silence was not indifference to your mind. It was an understanding that the fastest way to ruin a state is to require it.

And nearly every wellness product on earth breaks this rule — be present, be mindful, release your tension, arrive in this moment — issuing commands about interiority as though interiority took commands.

It doesn’t. It never has.

“Just let go” is the same trap wearing a disguise

Now the obvious next move, the one you can feel coming, the one I very nearly made: so stop trying. Let go of your attachment to winning. Give up the desire to be calm.

I want to be blunt. That advice is worthless.

Not because it is false. Because it is another instruction about your inner state, standing one floor up, wearing a robe. Let go of the outcome is not something a fourteen-year-old with two-all on the scoreboard can do. It is not available at 1 a.m., and it is not available in the corridor while, on the other side of the door, people wait for you to speak. Saying it takes a second. Doing it is not on the menu.

Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been the captain.

So what actually worked?

Nothing I did. Something I noticed.

Across dozens of those matches, a pattern appeared that made no sense to me at the time. If I scored the first point, the panic lifted — naturally, I was ahead. But if I lost the first point, the panic also lifted. Nothing left to protect. Nothing to do but fight.

Which meant the panic had never been about what I stood to lose. That was identical either way. What froze me was the undecided — hovering over an open question, guarding something not yet gone. Settle the question, even badly, and my body came back.

And that gave me something I could actually use: the tension had always dissolved on its own. Every time. Without my help, without technique, without my surrendering anything. I had watched it happen so often that eventually I could not not believe it.

That is the whole thing. Not a state — a belief.

You cannot order yourself to be calm. But you can hold the thought: I am tense now, and it will loosen, because it always does.

Read those twice and feel the difference. The first is a command to a nervous system that takes no orders. The second is a sentence, and sentences you can simply say.

It asks nothing of your body. It does not require you to relax, or release, or surrender, or breathe correctly. It asks you to remember something you already have evidence for.

Where the calm was standing

You have had this, even if you’ve never called it anything.

You were so absorbed in the presentation that at some point you noticed you had stopped being afraid — and could not say when. Or the speech began, and as it began some part of you understood there was no way out but forward, and the terror that had loomed thirty seconds earlier was simply not in the room any more. Not defeated. Just gone.

Look at what happened there. The calm arrived while you were facing the other way. It did not come because you called it. It came because you stopped calling.

And look at where it had been. Not far. Never far. It had been standing directly beside you the entire time — and that vast distance you felt, between the tense self and the calm self, was manufactured wholly by the reaching.

The distance was the reaching. There was no distance.

This is the law of the thing, and it has one more application — the one I actually live by.

The doorway is already beside you

The kettle hasn’t boiled. You are standing in the kitchen with three unclaimed minutes. You did not schedule this. Stay there. Don’t call it anything.

You come round a corner and the trees have turned, and the light is doing something to them. You had somewhere to be. Stay a moment past the moment.

The river is moving under the bridge on your way home and you notice you have been watching it. You could keep watching it.

None of these were planned, and that is not incidental — it is the entire reason they work. No preparation, so no goal, so no obligation, so no auditor. Nobody checking whether it was working. Which is precisely why something loosened.

Stillness, like calm, cannot be walked toward. It can only be arrived beside.

And it already is beside you. It has been standing next to the kettle this whole time, waiting for you to stop insisting on the door you built.

Not a habit. A tic.

People will tell you to make this a habit. I have said it myself, and I would like to take it back.

A habit is something you build. It has a schedule and a streak and a small tyrannical sense of falling behind. It is preparation wearing a longer time horizon — and preparation, as we have established, is how the auditor gets hired.

What happened to me was not a habit. It was closer to a tic.

I did not construct it. I do not remember acquiring it. At some point I simply became a man who stops — who has, more than once, surfaced at the kitchen counter beside a cold kettle with no idea how long he had been standing there. It is not always convenient. I could not undo it now if I wanted to, and I stopped wanting to.

Ask me what it has done for me and I have nothing for you. No metric, no before-and-after. It became ordinary, and ordinary things do not report their effects; you would have to remove them to find out, and I cannot.

That is the honest end of this, and I would rather leave you there than somewhere more satisfying.

Do not build anything. Do not schedule anything. Do not try, tonight, to relax.

Just — next time you catch yourself already stopped, somewhere you did not plan to be: do not start moving again quite so quickly.

That is all. That is the whole practice.

Whatever it does, it will do without telling you.

This essay belongs to The By-Product Essays. Read all three here.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

The Zen of the Quiet Day Off: Why “Doing Nothing” is the Wrong Goal

The problem was never how we spend our free time — it’s that we can’t stop trying to spend it well.

Twice a year I visit a temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto — Konkai-Kōmyō-ji (金戒光明寺), though everyone here calls it Kurodani (黒谷)— where my mother and father are buried.

From my station it is about ninety minutes. The efficient way is to ride to Jingū-Marutamachi and walk a few minutes uphill. But over the years I have taken to getting off two stops early, at Gion-Shijō, and walking the last hour along the Shirakawa: a narrow old canal lined with houses that have not changed in a lifetime.

The purpose of the trip is plain. I go to visit my parents’ grave. And yet, somewhere along that hour, the purpose loosens its grip. This year the green of the trees over the water was unusually deep, and I slowed without meaning to, just to look at it. On the way back I chose a different street for no reason at all. There is a sweet Kyoto is known for, nama-yatsuhashi, which you can buy at any station kiosk — but I decided that since I had come all this way, I would walk to the original shop and buy it there instead. By evening I could not honestly have told you what I had gone to Kyoto to do.

I did go to the grave. But the grave was no longer quite the point.

We call it rest, and come home tired

I think of this because of the way most of us spend a day off.

When I look at my friends here, their free days are full. They go to a crowded department store, or to Universal Studios packed shoulder to shoulder with tourists, or out to a barbecue. I have no wish to criticize any of it — I am often right there beside them, in the same queue, under the same sun. And at the end of it we say the same thing to ourselves: I feel refreshed.

But I have come to suspect that many of us finish these days more tired than we started, and that we quietly refuse to notice. We reach the evening and hand ourselves a verdict — that was a good use of the day — because the alternative is unbearable: the thought that a day might have been wasted.

The trap hidden inside “doing nothing”

The obvious remedy would be to do nothing. The West has even imported words for it — the Dutch niksen, the Italian dolce far niente — and, as tends to happen, turned them into products: books, apps, and retreats that will teach you, for a fee, the art of doing nothing.

Here is the trouble.

The moment you make emptiness a goal, it stops being empty.

I feel the same unease watching what has become of zazen（座禅）, seated Zen meditation, in the wellness market — sold as a device for focus, productivity, better sleep, as though sitting still were a machine you feed your time into and collect a result from. Anyone who has actually tried to sit knows the first trap by heart. You are told to empty your mind. So you try to empty it, and the trying fills it. The effort to reach stillness is the very thing making the noise.

A day off behaves the same way. Decide today I will do nothing, and you spend the whole day supervising your own emptiness, glancing at it to see whether it is working yet.

Just sitting

I am not a priest or a scholar. I studied Zen and Buddhist thought at temples in Kyoto from my university years, and what I say here is only how I have come to understand it through practice, not from any authority.

But there is a form of Zen called shikantaza（只管打坐）, usually rendered as “just sitting.” Not sitting in order to arrive at calm, or insight, or anything else. Just sitting. When it goes as it should, the question what am I sitting for? quietly dissolves. You forget you came with a purpose at all.

That, I have come to think, is the real thing — and it is exactly what happened on the walk to my parents’ grave. An errand carried me out the door. Somewhere along the way the errand stopped mattering, and only the walking remained: the green water, the unfamiliar street, the shop at the far end of town.

The purpose brought me there, and then let go of me.

There is a strange loop in this. The duty — the grave — brings the empty hour, the walk. But the empty hour is so good that, before long, I half go to the grave for the sake of the walk. Which is the means now, and which the end? I can no longer say. And I have stopped needing to.

A place kept in order

I lean heavily on Shinto, and I have done so since I was a child without ever deciding to. I go to Hirota Shrine, in Nishinomiya, because I always have. I also go often to Miyakojima Shrine in Osaka, near the Ōkawa river — in the middle of a dense city, and yet very quiet.

I do not go because it is a “power spot,” or because I am certain that a god resides there. Whether or not something is literally present does not, for me, come into it. What I notice is only this: the priests and the people of the neighborhood keep the grounds swept and clean, always. The place has the feeling of something set in order — in Japanese, totonotte-iru. Many people treat it with respect, and when you stand in a place that many have treated with respect, your own mind seems to fall into order alongside it.

To put it in the language of the moment: visiting a shrine, with no purpose whatsoever, has quietly become a kind of mindfulness for me — though I would never have thought to call it that.

I think this says something about how a culture shapes the people inside it. Shinto has never much cared what you believe. It asks that you do — bow, rinse your hands, keep the grounds clean — and it leaves the belief behind the gesture an open question. Over centuries, that trains a particular habit of being: you can arrive at a settled heart through the act itself, without first arranging your convictions. You do not have to feel reverent to be steadied by a reverent place.

Not everyone has a shrine. If you are reading this far from Japan, you may be wondering where such a place is supposed to be for you — and I would gently steer you away from that question, because it turns quickly into a search for the perfect quiet spot, which is one more errand. What matters about the shrine is not that I found it by looking for stillness. It is that I was already going there. You have places like that too: a library you pass, a park on the way home, the kitchen before anyone else is awake, a path you walk for the dog and not for yourself. The invitation is not to go somewhere new. It is to visit a place you already visit, and quietly leave one of its purposes at the door.

The quiet day, not the empty one

Now let me bring this down to an ordinary day off, and confess something.

Some Sundays I mean to do the laundry. While the machine runs, I pick up a book I bought months ago and never opened, and it turns out to be far better than I expected — and I look up to find the laundry long finished and the light gone amber. If I had errands to run, I let them go. Never mind. Next weekend.

Notice what that day actually was. It was not “doing nothing.” There was laundry, a book, an errand left undone. But nothing was grasped. I was not standing over myself, checking whether I had relaxed yet.

Coffee is the smallest version of the same thing. I make it in the morning in order to drink it. But some mornings, watching the steam lift and catching the smell of it, the drinking quietly stops being the point, and the few minutes of warmth and scent become the whole of it.

The cup was the errand. The pause was the day.

This is what I mean by a quiet day off, as opposed to an empty one.

The difference is not in what you do, but in whether you are reaching for a result while you do it.

It is closer to a quality of attention than to a schedule.

And I want to be honest about how hard this is, because it is genuinely hard. In a well-known set of studies published in Science in 2014, the psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues left people alone in a bare room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. Most did not enjoy it. In one version, participants could press a button and give themselves a mild electric shock — the same people who had said, earlier, that they would pay money to avoid that shock. Among them, sixty-seven percent of the men and twenty-five percent of the women pressed it at least once rather than sit quietly with their own minds. One man pressed it a hundred and ninety times.

I do not read this as proof that our minds are unbearable. I read it as permission. If sitting with truly nothing is more than most people can stand — and it seems it is — then forcing yourself into pure emptiness on your one free day is not wisdom. It is one more demand. So let there be laundry. Let there be a book, a walk, an unhurried cup. Only don’t reach.

You did not waste the day

The real problem was never the department store or the crowded theme park. It is the verdict we hand down at the end of the day: I did nothing, I wasted it.

But look again. If you truly did nothing worth regretting, then there is nothing to regret. And if, without your noticing, your mind fell quietly into order somewhere along the way — as it does on a swept shrine path, or an hour beside a canal — then the day was not wasted at all. You might, if you like, simply call it that: the heart was set in order. I offer this only as a way of seeing. I would not press it on anyone.

And if you are someone who has typed, late on a Sunday night, some version of why can’t I relax on my day off — perhaps the beginning of an answer is here. You may be reaching for rest the way a beginner reaches to empty the mind: reaching so hard that the reaching is the very thing holding it away. You cannot schedule the loosening. But you can stop standing guard against the wasted day, run your small errands without hurry, and leave a door open for the hour when the purpose quietly forgets itself.

If you want somewhere smaller to begin, the errands you already have will do. On a day off, make the coffee more slowly than usual, and notice how it differs from the cup you throw back on a Tuesday. If you must go to the shops, take a road you have never taken to get there. These are not techniques, and I would not want them read as a list to complete — the same slow coffee, drunk with now I am relaxing held tight in your mind, becomes one more thing to get right. The point is only that an ordinary errand, done a little more slowly and reached by a slightly longer way, leaves more room than usual for the purpose to slip loose on its own. That is all. Whether it does is not up to you, and not up to me.

Nothing is promised. I have never once been able to promise myself that the door will open on a given afternoon. But I know that it exists — because I have walked through it, beside a green canal, with somewhere to be and all the time in the world.

This essay belongs to The By-Product Essays. Read all three here.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

Thirty Years of Zen, and I Still Can’t Tell You If It Works

Everyone from Tom Hanks to the app on your phone now promises meditation will change you in five minutes. After thirty years near Zen, here is the honest version — including what I can’t promise.

A little while ago I came across some advice from Arianna Huffington: don’t wait until you can sit for twenty or thirty minutes. Start with five. Even a few minutes, she says, is enough to crack a door open.

I read it and felt two things at once, and they did not cancel each other out.

The first was agreement. She’s right that people wait for the perfect version — the empty schedule, the cushion, the silent room — and in waiting, never begin. Five honest minutes beats a beautiful intention. I know this better than most, because my own practice, after a lifetime of it, is smaller than five minutes on most mornings.

The second feeling was harder to name. Something closer to unease.

Because lately the words around all of this — meditation, mindfulness, Zen — have taken on a particular shape. Tom Hanks tells the story of how he used to collapse every afternoon, useless from three o’clock to seven, until someone taught him to meditate; now those are the most productive hours of his day. Kendall Jenner took up the same practice to manage the anxiety and burnout of an impossible schedule. And the people who write about where all this is heading in 2026 have a name for the condition it’s meant to treat: tired and wired — exhausted but unable to rest, alert without clarity, the nervous system never quite finishing one stress before the next one starts.

I recognize that state. I imagine you do too. And I don’t doubt for a moment that meditation helps with it.

So here is my unease, stated plainly: I’m not sure the thing that helps with being tired and wired is the thing I’ve spent my life near. It might be. It might even be better than the thing I know. But it has borrowed a very old word, and I’d like to talk about what that word had inside it — before we quietly agreed it meant “a doorway to a more productive afternoon.”

I don’t doubt meditation helps. My unease is smaller and stranger: I’m not sure the thing that helps is the thing I’ve spent my life near.

Let me make my own confession first, though, because I don’t want to sound like I’m standing above any of this.

The kettle

I grew up inside it. Kendo and judo from childhood. Years studying in the temples of Kyoto. Enough hours on the cushion to have worn through the knees of several pairs of trousers. If anyone should be able to tell you what Zen delivers, it ought to be someone with my mileage.

And my daily practice, described honestly, is this. In the morning I put water on for coffee, and I sit for however long the kettle takes to boil. Two minutes. Three. Then the water is ready, and I get up.

I don’t do it to achieve anything. I’ve never once sat down thinking, this will make me calmer, sharper, better. If you asked me whether it’s correct — whether a monk would even recognize what I do as practice — I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me what it’s for, I have no answer that would satisfy you.

It is closer to brushing my teeth. I do it because not doing it feels faintly wrong, and I stopped asking why a long time ago.

My practice is a few minutes while the kettle boils. I can’t tell you if it’s correct. I can’t tell you what it’s for. I’ve simply stopped being able to walk away from it.

I’m not speaking from the far side of some accomplishment, in other words. I’m speaking from the kettle.

What it doesn’t promise

I’ll try not to lecture here, because the moment I lecture, I’ve already missed the point.

Zen does not promise you anything.

Not clarity. Not peace of mind. Certainly not a cleaner inbox or a better morning routine. The version being sold to you — the five-minute session, the article headlined How Ancient Japanese Monks Got More Done — I’m honestly not sure what that is. It may be useful. It may even be good for you. But it has kept the word and quietly set down the thing.

What’s missing is the destination — and not in the tidy way people mean when they say the journey matters more than the arrival. I mean there is no arrival. No graduation. No moment when anyone, the master included, gets to say I’ve finished, I understand now. The tradition is full of people who were certain they’d reached it — satori, the whole of it — and were sent back to sit more. What felt like arrival was the gate.

I’ve been standing near that gate for thirty years. I think.

What it did give me

There are things this practice has given me. Not promised — given. They are simply not the things the apps advertise.

I notice more. Not in a sharpened, high-performance way — more that I’ve grown slower to file things away as background. The green of the trees in Osaka in early October is not the green of late October, and the difference matters to me, though I couldn’t defend why it should. My tiredness on certain evenings is a specific tiredness, asking for a specific thing, and I’ve slowly learned to hear the difference.

None of this makes me more productive. It contributes to no measurable outcome. But it does give me the sense that I am actually here, inside my own life, rather than moving through it at a slight remove.

And here is the one cultural observation I trust. A practice with no goal, repeated for centuries, doesn’t stay on the cushion. It leaks. It shapes how a culture uses silence in a conversation, how a craftsman relates to a task he has done ten thousand times, how a garden is built to make you feel something that has no name. When the point of an activity is not its result, attention itself changes character. That, more than any doctrine, is what Zen did to the people who grew up breathing it — myself included.

I did my first meditation at six, though I didn’t know that’s what it was. Before kendo practice, the whole class would kneel, bow, and then sit in mokusō — two or three minutes of silence — before we ever picked up the shinai. Several times a week, from six until sixteen. Nobody explained it. Nobody said it was for anything. You closed your eyes because that was simply what you did before you began.

Which means I have no idea what it did to me. There is no earlier version of me to measure it against — no Takeshi who never sat in that silence.

When you’ve done a thing since before you could think to question it, you can’t isolate its effect. You can’t step outside your own life to check.

The trouble with a goal

Every self-improvement system is built around a goal. Less anxious, more focused, more content — more something. The practice is the means; the goal is the end; and when you arrive, you know it.

The practice I’m describing has no such shape. You sit. You return to the sitting. When the mind wanders — and it wanders constantly, mercilessly — you return. Not to achieve a quiet mind, but because the returning itself, over and over, without scolding the wandering, may be the entire thing.

I have felt, on certain mornings, that something opened and I could see a little further in. Every teacher I’ve ever trusted has met that feeling the same way. Good, they say. Now sit more.

So I sit more.

The mirror it doesn’t give you

There’s a fear I understand completely, because I’ve felt it myself reading the breezy version of all this: there’s no effect. I’ve been wasting my time.

Weight training never lets you feel that. The muscle grows; you see it in the mirror; you know it worked. Meditation offers no mirror. And here is the part that sounds like a contradiction but isn’t: the longer you continue, the harder the effect becomes to see at all. It stops being something that happens to you and becomes part of the ground you stand on — and you cannot see the ground you’re standing on.

So I won’t tell you what continuing will give you. I’m only certain of the other direction. If I stopped, I would lose something. I can’t tell you what that something is — only that its absence would be real.

Brushing your teeth is like this. You feel nothing while you do it. Then one day, if you had stopped, there is the cavity. Some practices announce their results. Others only ever announce their absence.

I can’t tell you what continuing gives me. I’m only certain of the other direction: stop, and you lose something you were never able to name.

Then why write about it

If I’m honestly unsure whether I understand this, and if it can’t be summarized or applied like a method — then why write about it at all? A fair question. I’ve put it to myself.

The only honest answer I have is: because the alternative is worse.

The alternative is to leave the word entirely to the people packaging it as a productivity system, a seven-step path to inner peace. I’m not angry at them; the tired-and-wired need is real, and five minutes at the kettle is a kind thing to offer someone drowning in a day. But if the word drifts far enough from what it names — if Zen comes to mean only “calm and uncluttered” — then something real goes quiet, and is lost.

I’m not the right person to guard that gate — I’ve already admitted I’m not sure what’s behind it. But I can stand near it.

What I’m carrying

What a lifetime beside this thing has actually felt like is this: long stretches of nothing, occasional glimpses of something, a steady uncertainty about what it all means, and a stubborn inability to stop even when I can’t justify it.

If that sounds familiar — not the Zen part, but the being-pulled-toward-something-you-can’t-quite-name part — then maybe that’s the conversation worth having.

Here is the smallest version of what thirty years has taught me: sometimes knowing yourself means knowing, honestly, that you don’t know — and sometimes that honesty is the closest thing to healing on offer. I can’t promise it is. I’ve stopped needing it to be.

That’s what the kettle is for, if it’s for anything. It boils. I get up. And for a moment, I am here.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

Beyond the Scoreboard: What Buddhism Teaches Us About Surviving — and Thriving — in a World Obsessed with Winning

Explore how ancient Japanese wisdom applies to your modern life.

The Game Nobody Wins by Playing

There is a particular kind of exhaustion I have noticed in people around me — in the faces of men and women who have, by every external measure, succeeded. They hold the titles. They command the salaries. They occupy the seats that others spent entire careers trying to reach. And yet something in their eyes tells a different story. A flatness. A restlessness that no achievement quiets.

I am not here to tell you that competition is wrong, or that the modern economy is broken, or that we should all seek some imagined equality. I do not believe those things. Competition is real, hierarchy is real, and the desire to excel is, at its root, a form of life itself asserting its vitality.

But there is a difference — a difference so important that Buddhism spent two and a half millennia trying to articulate it — between competing and being consumed by competition.

“The one who fights the current exhausts himself. The one who understands the current moves with it — and arrives further.”

The Decay from Child to Adult

Watch a young child play. They are entirely inside the activity. There is no self-consciousness, no monitoring of how they appear to others, no tallying of wins and losses. They are, in the Japanese phrase, muga-muchu — absorbed in selfless concentration, lost in the thing itself.

Now watch most adults work. The task is almost secondary. What occupies the foreground is positioning — where do I stand relative to others? Am I gaining or losing ground? Who noticed? Who didn’t?

Buddhism calls this the construction of a fixed self — and considers it the primary source of human suffering. Not because the self is evil, but because it is fictional. The great insight of Śākyamuni Buddha was that what we call “I” is not a fixed entity but a fluid process — a constellation of relationships, conditions, and responses that is constantly arising and dissolving. The Sanskrit term is śūnyatā: emptiness, or more precisely, the absence of fixed, independent existence.

We do not lose our selves when we stop clinging to them. We find something larger — the web of relationships from which we were never truly separate.
This is not nihilism. It is liberation.

The Middle Way Is Not the Average

Buddhism’s famous Middle Way is frequently misunderstood as moderation — a kind of philosophical averaging, the lukewarm center between extremes. This is precisely wrong.

The Middle Way is the path that refuses to be captured by either pole. Not “winning is everything” nor “winning is nothing.” Not “the self is supreme” nor “the self must be annihilated.” It is the ability to engage fully — with complete commitment — while remaining unattached to the outcome as the measure of your worth.

Consider Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers pitcher who came to Los Angeles carrying the weight of perhaps the largest pitching contract in baseball history. On the mound, he faces situations of acute, public pressure. A full count. Bases loaded. The World Series on the line.

And yet, those who watch him closely notice something. He does not look like a man fighting the moment. He looks like a man inside the moment — fully present, committed to the next pitch, not the final score. When he said, after winning the World Series, that losing was simply not an option, he was not expressing reckless confidence. He was expressing something closer to vow — a samurai’s resolve that does not inflate the ego but rather dissolves it into the task.

The pitcher who fears the strikeout cannot locate his fastball. The executive who fears losing the deal cannot hear what the client actually needs.

Science, Mystery, and the Danger of “Explain or Dismiss”

There is a habit in contemporary intellectual culture — one I respect in its intention, but distrust in its reach — of treating anything that cannot be measured as therefore nonexistent. If it cannot be quantified, it is not real. If it cannot be replicated in a laboratory, it is superstition.

Physicist Roger Penrose’s work on quantum processes in neural microtubules (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) is fascinating not because it proves anything about consciousness, but because it demonstrates how much our most rigorous science still does not know about the relationship between matter and awareness. The gaps are enormous.

I grew up in the Kobe–Osaka area, and as I studied Zen and Buddhism more deeply — first in the temples of Kyoto, then in the classical literature of Japan — I found myself increasingly drawn to Shinto not as superstition, but as a sophisticated awareness of presence in the natural world. When I visit a local shrine in a mountain village, when I stand before an ancient cedar tree whose roots go deeper than any building I have ever entered, I am not worshipping in any evangelical sense. I am acknowledging something I cannot explain but refuse to dismiss.

The Japanese concept of kami — often poorly translated as “gods” — refers more accurately to a quality of presence, power, and significance that inheres in certain places, objects, and phenomena. It is closer to what a physicist might call a field than what a theologian might call a deity.

To say “I don’t understand this” is wisdom. To say “therefore it doesn’t exist” is a different kind of superstition.

Altruism as the Exit from the Closed Loop

Here is the structural problem with living for status and position: it is a closed loop. Every victory creates a new horizon of threat. Every seat you occupy can be taken. Every metric you optimize becomes the new floor.

Buddhism’s answer to this is not to stop caring — that is the error of false detachment — but to redirect the care. The concept of metta (loving-kindness) and the Bodhisattva ideal are not sentimental. They are strategic, in the deepest sense. When you are playing to protect something beyond your own position — a family, a team, a genuine vision, a community — you are no longer susceptible to the anxieties of the status game in the same way. You can lose a battle without losing yourself, because yourself was never the point.

The samurai who fought for his lord, the mother who sacrifices sleep for her child, the researcher who publishes findings that help others long after she is gone — these are not losers in the game. They have changed what game they are playing.

The man who fights only for himself has everything to lose. The man who fights for something beyond himself has already found what he was looking for.

What Changes — And What Doesn’t

I want to be honest with you, because I find the current wellness industry’s relationship with honesty troubling. I will not promise you that reading this article, or practicing zazen, or studying the Tao, will make you more productive, more successful, more peaceful, or more anything.

If any of this resonates with something you recognize in yourself, I would suggest something simple. Not a practice. Not a discipline. Just this: take a few minutes and look up at the sky. Watch the clouds shift. Watch the way wind moves through trees — how each branch responds slightly differently, how the whole thing is never still and never chaotic. Or, if you can manage it, spend one day on a weekend doing genuinely nothing. Not productive nothing. Not self-improving nothing. Just — nothing.

I am not asking you to drop out of the race. I would never presume to tell you how to live. But switching yourself off, even briefly, even imperfectly — that is not weakness. It is maintenance. And you may find, when you switch back on, that something has quietly rearranged itself.

What I will say — carefully, from decades of practice and reflection — is that something shifts. Not always where you expect it. Not always in ways you can name. The man who sits in zazen for six months may not meditate better. He may simply become slightly less reactive in a difficult meeting. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

The child’s capacity for muga-muchu — that selfless absorption — does not have to be left behind in childhood. It can be recovered. Incompletely, impermanently, but genuinely.

That is what I am after. Not transcendence. Not optimization. Just — a little more of that.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. 
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

D.T. Suzuki Pointed at the Moon. We Photographed His Hand.

How the man who introduced Zen to the West became the beginning of a very long misunderstanding — A conversation at a kissaten near Nakanoshima

Two Men Named Suzuki

Nicholas has, by his own admission, owned a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind for eleven years. He bought it at an airport bookstore in 2013, read the first chapter on the flight to Tokyo, and hasn’t opened it since. He is not alone in this.

“I always figured that was the Suzuki,” he said. “The Zen one.”

“That’s Shunryu Suzuki,” Catherine said — she’d clearly done some reading before this conversation. “He founded San Francisco Zen Center. The beginner’s mind one.”

“Right. And the other one?”

“Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki,” I said. “D.T. Suzuki. Born 1870, died 1966. He’s the reason you’ve ever heard the word satori in English.”

They are completely different people. Shunryu Suzuki was a Soto Zen priest who came to California in 1959 and spent the rest of his life teaching people how to actually sit — how to practice. D.T. Suzuki was a scholar and philosopher who spent most of his adult life translating the idea of Zen for Western thinkers, decades before most of them had ever met a Japanese person.

Both were essential. They just did entirely different things. And confusing the two — which nearly everyone does — is itself a small illustration of the problem we were about to discuss.

What He Was Actually Trying to Do

D.T. Suzuki spent decades in the West — London, New York, Columbia University — and he had one fundamental problem: how do you describe something to people who have no frame of reference for it at all?

He wasn’t trying to teach Westerners how to practice Zen. He wasn’t that kind of teacher. What he was trying to do was something stranger and, I think, more ambitious: he wanted Western thinkers to understand that a particular kind of human experience existed. That it was real. That it had been documented, explored, and refined for over a thousand years in Japan and China — and that it had nothing to do with what they assumed religion was.

He called it satori. And he described it not as a theological event but as a psychological phenomenon. A shift in consciousness. Something that happens to a person rather than something a person achieves.

“Like a breakthrough moment?” Catherine asked.

“Something like that. But not one you can engineer.”

“Jung was completely fascinated by him,” she said. “I’ve read some of their correspondence. Jung wrote the foreword to one of Suzuki’s books.”

Yes — and that tells you something important about how the work was received. It wasn’t Buddhist monks who first responded to Suzuki with excitement. It was European philosophers and psychologists. Jung. Erich Fromm. Later, Heidegger engaged with the ideas. These were people who had spent their careers mapping consciousness and the depths of the human mind, and Suzuki was showing them territory they’d suspected existed but had no language for.

“So basically,” Nicholas said, “he was doing philosophy. Not religion.”

“He was doing both, in a way. But he understood which audience he was writing for.”

Nicholas nodded. “Okay. I can respect that. Guy identified the market and positioned accordingly.”

I let that one sit for a moment.

A Rainy Afternoon in the Desert

Here is where it gets complicated.

Imagine you’ve spent your entire life in a desert region where it never rains. Not as a metaphor — literally. You’ve never seen rain, never heard it against a window, never felt the particular drop in air pressure that comes before a storm rolls in. And someone tries to explain to you the feeling of a rainy afternoon in November. That specific mood — the gray light, the way time seems to slow, a melancholy that isn’t quite sadness but sits in your chest like something heavy and familiar.

No matter how many words they use, you won’t get there. Not really.

And here’s the thing: that feeling is not a technique. It isn’t a skill. It’s a phenomenon — something that happens to a person under particular conditions. You can’t learn it. You can’t practice your way into it. It either arrives or it doesn’t.

Satori, as Suzuki described it, is something like this. I’m not saying they’re the same thing — that would be exactly the kind of overclaiming I want to avoid. But structurally, the situation is similar. It’s a category of human experience that resists instruction. Suzuki knew this. He wasn’t writing instruction manuals. He was writing something closer to weather reports from a place his readers had never been.

Catherine was quiet for a moment. “So when people talk about achieving mindfulness…”

“They’re asking how to manufacture the feeling of a rainy afternoon,” I said. “Which is the wrong question entirely.”

“But — “ Nicholas leaned forward. “If someone meditates every day and their stress actually goes down, isn’t that real? That’s measurable. That matters.”

“Of course it does.”

“Then what’s lost?”

I thought about it. “Nothing is lost for that person in that moment. What gets lost is what Suzuki was actually pointing at. The wellness industry took his weather report, removed all mention of weather, and started selling people techniques for recreating the feeling of humidity.”

He was quiet for a second. “Okay. That’s a fair distinction.”

“Takeshiさん,” Catherine said, with that careful way she has of addressing people older than her, “do you think Suzuki knew this would happen? That the meaning would drift like this?”

Honestly? I think he suspected it might. But I think he also believed — and maybe he was right — that even an imperfect transmission was better than silence. That pointing at the moon imperfectly was better than never pointing at all.

The question is what happens when people forget about the moon and start photographing the hand.

How It Traveled

The journey from D.T. Suzuki to your morning meditation app is not a straight line, but it has a certain logic to it.

Suzuki’s work reached the Beat Generation in the 1950s — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder. They received it not as philosophy but as liberation, which is a very American thing to do with a foreign idea. Zen became tangled up with freedom from conformity, from postwar materialism, from the whole suffocating machinery of mid-century American life. That interpretation was romantic, and it was genuine, and it was also about thirty degrees away from what Suzuki had been describing.

Then Shunryu Suzuki — the other Suzuki — arrived in San Francisco in 1959 and started teaching actual practice. Sitting. Breathing. The physical reality of Zen as a discipline. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came out in 1970 and landed in exactly the right cultural moment.

Meanwhile, Jon Kabat-Zinn was building what would become Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at UMass in the late 1970s. He was a molecular biologist, a meditator, and a committed pragmatist. He took the sitting practice, deliberately stripped out the Buddhist philosophical framework — because he wanted it accessible in clinical settings, to people dealing with chronic pain and anxiety — and created something measurable, teachable, and reproducible.

That was a genuine contribution. MBSR has helped a lot of people.

“But,” Nicholas said.

“But,” I agreed.

What came after MBSR was the productization. The eight-week program became an app. The app became a subscription. The subscription became a line item in corporate wellness budgets. Somewhere in that sequence, the weather report became a thermostat.

“Hold on.” Nicholas wasn’t ready to concede this. “I use one of those apps. Ten minutes in the morning, most days. My stress is down. My sleep is better. I’m telling you this is real.”

“I believe you.”

“So then — “

“I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m saying it’s something different from what Suzuki was describing. Both things can be true.”

He looked at me, then at Catherine.

“You know,” she said carefully, “it’s like — maybe the app gives you some of the humidity. But you still haven’t seen rain.”

Nicholas stared at her. “Did you just use his analogy against me?”

“I’m just saying both things can be true.”

“I genuinely cannot tell whose side you’re on.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works,” she said, and smiled into her coffee.

The Paradox of This Article

I want to be honest about something.

Everything I’ve written here — this entire conversation, this article — is doing exactly what D.T. Suzuki did. And exactly what the wellness industry does. I’m using words to describe an experience that is, at its core, resistant to words. I’m pointing at the moon.

I cannot give you satori through a Medium article. I couldn’t give it to you if we sat together for a month. I’m genuinely uncertain that a lifetime of practice guarantees it — and I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise.

What I can do is what Suzuki did: describe the territory as honestly as I’m able to and trust you to understand the limits of the map.

The difference — and this is the only distinction I’m claiming — is that Suzuki knew he was drawing a map. The wellness industry sold people the map and told them the map was the destination.

“So what are we actually supposed to do with any of this?” Nicholas asked. It wasn’t a hostile question. He was genuinely sitting with it, which is not something he does often and which I’ve come to recognize as a sign that something has landed.

I didn’t have a good answer.

Catherine looked at her coffee for a moment. “Maybe not having a good answer is the most honest thing you’ve said all morning.”

Nicholas picked up his cup. After a pause, he said: “You know what Statcast still can’t measure? What it actually feels like to stand at the plate in the ninth inning with two outs and the game on the line. All that data, and that’s still invisible.”

I looked at him.

“I’m just saying,” he said. “I think I understand the point.”

What We Didn’t Figure Out

We stayed at that kissaten for another hour. The conversation drifted, as it usually does — Nicholas brought up Aaron Judge’s contract extension, Catherine mentioned something about her thesis, I watched the street outside and thought about nothing in particular, which is about as close to practice as I get on most days.

We didn’t resolve anything. We didn’t arrive at a conclusion about what modern mindfulness is missing, or whether the drift from Suzuki’s original intention has any practical consequence for the person who feels genuinely calmer after ten minutes with an app. We didn’t agree on where legitimate adaptation ends and fundamental distortion begins.

What stays with me is the rain metaphor — not because I’m proud of it, but because it named something I’ve felt for a long time without being able to say clearly. Suzuki stood in front of the Western world and tried to describe the feeling of a rainy November afternoon. And the world — eager, well-meaning, genuinely moved — built a humidifier and called it weather.

Whether that matters to you depends entirely on what you were looking for in the first place.

What was D.T. Suzuki trying to give you — and do you still want it?

A solo essay about Daisetsu Suzuki

Nicholas and Catherine are fictional characters inspired by real people and real conversations.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. 
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

The Reward of Meditation: Why You Won’t See It — and Why That’s the Point

What do you do when progress is invisible? A Zen practitioner’s honest answer to the question everyone asks.

Someone recently pushed back on something I’ve been saying for years.

I teach Zen practice, and I’ve always been careful not to oversell meditation. I don’t promise transformation. I don’t list “10 benefits backed by science.” What I do say — consistently — is this: the effects of meditation are not visible in the way the effects of, say, weightlifting are visible.

That’s when someone said to me: “If there’s no visible result, how am I supposed to stay motivated to keep going?”

It stopped me. Not because I didn’t have an answer, but because it was such an honest question. And honestly, it deserved more than a quick reply.

The Gym Comparison That Almost Works

We live in an era of measurable progress. Weightlifting gives you something to see. Your arms change shape. The numbers on the plates go up. You take a photo in April and compare it to one in January, and the mirror tells you a story you can believe in.

Meditation gives you nothing like that.

There’s no before-and-after photo. No number that climbs. No test to pass.

And so the logic seems to follow: if there’s no visible change, maybe nothing is changing at all.

But that logic has a flaw in it — a quiet one that’s easy to miss.

The Student Who Didn’t Know What They’d Built

Think about a student who studies hard every day through school. Years pass. Then one day, much later, they look back at their life and think: “I’m glad I studied. If I hadn’t, everything would be different — my job, my choices, the person I became.”

The studying worked. But here’s the thing: it only became visible in hindsight.

What made it visible during those years of effort? Tests. Grades. External structures that turned invisible development into something you could point to. Remove the tests, and the studying still happens. The growth still happens. The transformation still happens. It’s just that no one gives you a score for it.

Meditation has no test. That’s not a design flaw. It’s simply the nature of inner work.

The change is happening. It’s just not leaving a visible trail.

What “Invisible Change” Actually Means

I want to be careful here. I’m not asking you to take my word for it, or to practice on blind faith until some distant payoff arrives.

What I’m saying is more specific than that: there will come a moment — I can’t tell you when, and I can’t promise what form it will take — when you look back and realize that something has been quietly different. That you responded to a situation in a way that surprised you. That a moment of stillness came to you when you hadn’t asked for it. That you were somehow less at the mercy of your own noise.

I can’t tell you what your reward will look like, because it will be yours. And I won’t push meditation on anyone. That’s not how I teach, and it’s not the spirit in which I practice.

A River in Osaka, and the Idea of Turning Off

Here is what I can tell you from my own life.

I practice meditation. It’s a habit now — it’s been woven into who I am for long enough that I don’t think of it as something I do so much as something I am. And sometimes, in the evenings, I walk along the Okawa River and feel the cool air off the water. Or I sit and watch rain fall. And in those moments, something shifts. Not dramatically — just quietly. The way a room changes when someone opens a window.

The best way I can describe it is this: meditation gave me a way to turn myself off.

Not to disappear. Not to escape. But to have a moment — a real, available moment — where the current running through me simply stops. Where I am not producing, reacting, planning, or performing. Where I am just sitting with what is.

If I hadn’t developed this practice, I think I would still be running on the same continuous current. The power would never go off. The engine would never rest. I’d be living entirely in the “on” state — and I wouldn’t even know it, because I’d never have experienced the alternative.

That is my reward. Not something I can photograph. Not something I can hand you. But real — more real, in fact, than most things I could measure.

What Zen Actually Says About This

In Zen, there is a concept called mushotoku (無所得) — literally “nothing to attain.” It refers to practicing without attachment to results, without grasping for an outcome, without needing the practice to produce something you can show to others.

This might sound discouraging to a results-oriented mind. But look at it from another angle.

The moment you stop practicing for something is often the moment the practice actually begins. Because then you’re not waiting for a reward. You’re not checking to see if the investment paid off. You’re simply here, simply breathing, simply present. And that presence — that capacity to be rather than to monitor — is precisely what develops over time.

The reward of meditation is meditation. Not what it produces, but what it makes you capable of inhabiting.

On Staying Motivated Anyway

I want to return to the original question, because it was sincere, and sincerity deserves a sincere answer.

How do you stay motivated when the results aren’t visible?

I think the honest answer is: you probably can’t rely on external motivation. Not for long. Motivation that depends on visible feedback will fade whenever the feedback stops — which, in meditation, is most of the time.

What sustains a practice over years is something quieter. A growing familiarity with stillness. A subtle recognition, not always articulable, that something is different — that you are different — even if you can’t quite name it.

That recognition doesn’t arrive on day three, or week two. But it comes. And when it does, it’s not a dramatic revelation. It’s more like remembering something you already knew.

A Note to Anyone Just Starting

If you’re new to meditation and wondering whether it’s “working,” here is what I’d offer:

The question itself may be worth examining. “Working” toward what? For whom? Measured how?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions meant to deflect. They’re the beginning of the real inquiry — the one that meditation, done honestly, tends to open.

I can’t promise you a result. What I can say is that the practice of sitting quietly, of turning your attention gently inward, of learning — slowly, imperfectly, repeatedly — to simply be with yourself without fixing or fleeing, is not nothing.

It is, in fact, quite a lot.

You may not see it for a while. But one day, by a river or in the rain or in some quiet ordinary moment, you might notice that something has changed.

And you’ll know.

Continue Reading — This essay is part of a three-part series on mindfulness and Japanese philosophy:

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT is founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Rooted in years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, it explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life — without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

I Stopped Trying to Stay on Top. That’s When Things Got Easier.

What a forgotten Japanese tradition taught me about accepting the things I cannot control.

A few weeks ago, I sat in a café with Nicholas and Catherine and watched Catherine describe what I recognized immediately: the specific exhaustion of someone who had been trying very hard to stay in a good place, and had failed, and was now convinced the failure was her own fault.

She’d been working well for months. Good momentum, good output, good feeling about her research. Then one thing went wrong — her thesis outline came back for a complete rethink. Not a failure, just a redirection. But by the time she told us about it, that single event had somehow grown into a full indictment of her presence in Japan, her academic ability, her future plans.

Nicholas called it panic. He wasn’t wrong. But I kept thinking about something older than financial terminology — a way of understanding cycles that I’ve carried for a long time, not because I studied it formally, but because it was simply part of the air I grew up breathing.

What Onmyodo Actually Is

Most Westerners encounter yin and yang as a symbol — the circle with the two interlocking shapes, one dark, one light, each containing a seed of the other. It’s been on t-shirts and tattoos long enough that the meaning has worn smooth.

But the tradition behind that symbol, Onmyodo (陰陽道), is a cosmological framework that has shaped Japanese thought for over a thousand years. It’s not a religion in the Western sense. It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything supernatural. At its core, it simply describes the structure of change — how everything moves between states, and why neither state is permanent.

Yin (陰) and yang (陽) are not opposites at war. They are phases. One is always transforming into the other. Yang — the bright, active, expansive — carries within it the seed of yin before it reaches its peak. And yin — the quiet, receptive, contracting — carries within it the seed of yang before it reaches its floor.

This is not a metaphor. It’s meant as a description of how things actually work.

The Part That Changed How I Move Through the World

I was not always as calm about difficult periods as I probably appear now. I trained in Kendo from the age of six, and Kendo teaches — or is supposed to teach — fudoshin: immovable mind. I misunderstood this for years. I thought it meant never being disturbed. An inner stillness so complete that nothing could reach it.

That’s not what it means. It means being disturbed and not losing your footing.

The difference is enormous. One is a fantasy of imperviousness. The other is a skill you actually develop.

Onmyodo helped me make peace with that distinction. If yin always follows yang — if the low always follows the high, not as punishment but as physics — then the goal cannot be to prevent the low. The goal is to know it’s coming. Not intellectually, in a way that sits untouched in the background, but actually know it, in a way that changes your posture before it arrives.

I keep a prepared bag near my door — water, a few days of essentials, documents, a small amount of cash. I’ve kept it there since the 1995 earthquake. Not because I think about earthquakes every day, but because having it there means I’ve already accepted the possibility. The bag doesn’t cause me anxiety. It prevents it. The preparation is the acceptance, and the acceptance is what makes it possible to live without bracing.

The low period works the same way.

Three Things I Actually Do

I want to be careful here. I’m not an Onmyodo practitioner in any formal sense. I can’t explain the cosmological significance of directions, or interpret the traditional calendar. What I can say is how this framework has shaped my habits — the small, ordinary things I do when I feel the cycle turning.

1. I name the phase without judgment.

When things slow down — work feels heavier, energy feels thinner, ideas feel less alive — I try to say to myself, as plainly as possible: I’m in a yin phase right now. Not “something is wrong.” Not “I need to fix this.” Just: the cycle is here. This is what it looks like.

That naming does something. It converts a vague anxiety into a simple fact. And simple facts are easier to be with than vague anxieties.

2. I stop trying to force yang.

This is harder than it sounds. Modern life, especially professional life, runs entirely on the assumption that productivity should be continuous. If you’re slowing down, you need to troubleshoot. You need to optimize. You need to find the leak.

Sometimes there is no leak. Sometimes the cycle is just in yin, and the most sensible thing is to let it be yin.

I use this time deliberately. I do the less demanding work. I read more than I write. I walk instead of running. I cook slowly. None of this is giving up. It’s recharging in the way the season actually calls for, not in the way I wish the season was.

3. I change something small in my environment.

This might sound odd, but I’ve found it genuinely useful. When I feel stuck — when the quality of a yin phase starts to feel heavy rather than just quiet — I change something physical. Sometimes I move my desk to face a different direction. I put a plant on my worktable. I clean a space I’ve been ignoring.

The function isn’t feng shui in any mystical sense. The function is signal. Moving the desk is a physical act that tells my body: something has shifted. It’s a small ceremony of transition. It works on my nervous system in ways I can’t fully explain, and I’ve stopped needing to.

The Part Catherine Understood Before She Had the Words for It

What struck me in our conversation wasn’t the spiral itself — that’s common enough, and understandable. What struck me was the moment Catherine said: I turned one thing into everything.

That’s the real work of a difficult cycle. Not surviving it, but keeping it the right size.

The thesis came back. That was the event. Everything that followed — the questions about belonging, the sleeplessness, the spreading doubt — that was the mind’s response to the event. The event was yin. The spiral was something the mind built on top of yin.

I’ve done it myself. Anyone who has worked hard for a long time and experienced a sudden reversal has done it. You start asking what it means. And the mind, left to its own devices at 3 a.m., will find the darkest possible answer.

What Onmyodo gave me wasn’t optimism. It gave me a different kind of question to ask when things turn. Not what does this mean? but what phase is this? Because what does this mean is a question with no floor. It can spiral downward as long as you let it. But what phase is this is a question with a simple answer: this is yin. It won’t last. That’s not a promise — it’s the nature of the cycle.

A Note on What This Isn’t

I’m not suggesting everyone should study Onmyodo or reorganize their life around it. I’m not a practitioner, and I have no interest in being a cultural gatekeeper about something I hold loosely myself.

What I am saying is that this particular idea — that low periods are not malfunctions, that they are phases with their own logic and their own end — has been genuinely useful to me. Not as a philosophy I believe in the way one believes in a doctrine, but as a frame I reach for when the cycle turns.

Nicholas reaches for scenario planning. Catherine, I think, is still working out what she reaches for. That’s fine. The specific container matters less than having one.

What This Means to Me

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped trying to maintain the high. It wasn’t a single decision. It was more like a gradual loosening — the way you stop fighting a current and start moving with it.

What I know is that since then, the difficult periods are still difficult, but they don’t compound the way they used to. A slow week is a slow week. A setback is a setback. They don’t become evidence of some deeper failure, because I’m not trying to prove anything by staying on top.

The earthquake bag by the door isn’t optimism or pessimism. It’s just honesty about the nature of things.

The low periods are the same. They’re coming. They always were. Knowing that isn’t resignation — it’s the only preparation that actually works.

This essay is a companion to the dialogue “Everything Felt Wrong at the Same Time. Was That Just Bad Luck? (Diarogue)” — a conversation with Nicholas and Catherine about cycles, spirals, and why the first bad thing is rarely the real problem.

The River Is Still There — Even When You’re Not Looking (Diarogue)

A conversation about meditation, attention, and the season you almost missed.

Late May, Osaka. A bar with an open terrace along the Okawa river, just east of Kitahama. The air is warm but the night breeze carries something cool underneath it — the last of spring before the heat arrives. The cherry blossoms are long gone. Now it’s roses: the park along the riverbank has been in full bloom for two weeks, though most people walking past haven’t slowed down to notice. Takeshi, Nicholas, and Catherine have claimed a table outside. Two beers and a glass of white wine. The river moves quietly below.

Nicholas: God, this is nice. I walk past this river every single day on my way to the office and I never actually — look at it. You know what I mean?

Takeshi: I know exactly what you mean.

Nicholas: It’s just there. Background. Like elevator music.

Catherine: The roses are blooming too, did you notice? In the park. There are so many varieties — I went last weekend and spent probably an hour just walking around. I didn’t even know that park existed until last month.

Nicholas: Seriously? I’ve worked in Kitahama for three years.

Catherine: (laughing) I only found it because I got lost.

Takeshi: This is my favorite time of year in Osaka. Not summer — summer is brutal. And not the cherry blossom weeks, honestly, because everyone is out and there’s a kind of pressure to enjoy it properly. This — right now — this in-between. Warm enough to sit outside, cool enough that the night air still feels like something. Another few weeks and it’ll be gone.

Nicholas: Yeah, well. Some of us have quarterly reports due.

Takeshi: And yet here you are.

Nicholas: (raising his glass) And yet here I am. Fair point.

A boat passes slowly on the river, its lights trailing across the water. The three of them watch it for a moment without saying anything.

Catherine: Can I ask you something, Takeshi-san? I read your essay — the one about meditation. The line that stayed with me was the one about being present on the riverbank. “Not somewhere else in my head.” I’ve been thinking about that all week.

Takeshi: What part of it stayed with you?

Catherine: The part where you said you don’t call it meditation. But it kind of is, right? Just… standing there, watching the water.

Takeshi: I think so. Or at least it’s pointing in the same direction. Whether you want to put the word “meditation” on it — I’m not sure the label matters that much.

Nicholas: Okay, I’ll be honest. I’ve always found the whole meditation thing a little — I don’t know. Precious? Like, I get that it probably does something, but the idea of sitting cross-legged and trying to think about nothing for twenty minutes sounds like something I would fail at immediately and then feel bad about.

Takeshi: Most people do. Fail at it, I mean — or think they’re failing. Usually because they’ve decided the goal is to stop thinking.

Nicholas: Isn’t it?

Takeshi: No. That’s probably the most common misunderstanding. Thoughts will come. They always come. The practice isn’t stopping them — it’s noticing that you’ve followed one, and coming back.

Nicholas: Coming back to what?

Takeshi: To here. To now. To whatever is actually in front of you.

Nicholas: (gesturing at the river) Like — like this? Just watching the river?

Takeshi: If you’re actually watching it, yes. If you’re watching it while mentally drafting tomorrow’s emails, that’s something different.

Nicholas: (pause) Okay, that’s fair. That’s — yeah, that’s me most of the time, honestly.

Catherine: I tried using one of those apps for a while. Headspace, I think. I did it every morning for about a month and then just… stopped. I’m not sure why. It didn’t feel bad. It just felt like one more thing I was supposed to be doing correctly.

Takeshi: That’s a real problem with the way it’s usually presented. It becomes a performance. Something you complete. Check the box, move on.

Catherine: Exactly. And I could never tell if I was doing it right.

Takeshi: What did “right” feel like in your head?

Catherine: I guess — calm? Like, fully calm. No thoughts at all.

Takeshi: And how often did that happen?

Catherine: (laughing softly) Never. Maybe once, for about thirty seconds.

Takeshi: That thirty seconds wasn’t the reward for doing it right. That was the practice. The thirty seconds of noticing that you were here, without friction. The rest of the time — the wandering, the returning — that’s also the practice.

Catherine: So there’s no moment where it clicks and you’re just… good at it?

Takeshi: I’ve been doing some version of this for thirty years. I’m still wandering and returning. The wandering doesn’t go away. The returning gets a little more familiar.

Nicholas: Thirty years. See, that’s the part that gets me. Because I can commit to something if I know what I’m training for. Like — (he thinks for a moment) — okay. Aaron Judge. You want to hit like Aaron Judge, you work on your mechanics, your timing, your strength. There’s a target. There’s a way to measure whether you’re getting closer. What’s the target with meditation?

Takeshi: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure I can answer it in a way that’ll satisfy you.

Nicholas: Try.

Takeshi: The target, if there is one, is something like — the gap between something happening and you reacting to it. Right now, for most people, something happens and the reaction is almost simultaneous. Someone says something annoying in a meeting and you’re already tense before you’ve even registered being tense. The practice creates a little space in that gap. Not distance — space. You still feel the irritation. You just have a moment before you become it.

Nicholas: Huh. (he considers this) Like pitch recognition.

Takeshi: What?

Nicholas: In baseball. The best hitters, they don’t just swing or not swing — they see the ball early, they have a fraction of a second more than everyone else to decide. That’s a trained thing. You develop it.

Takeshi: Yes. That’s actually very close to what I mean.

Nicholas: (slightly surprised at himself) Okay. That I can work with.

Catherine sets down her glass and looks out at the river. The roses in the park are invisible in the dark, but the scent reaches the terrace occasionally when the breeze shifts.

Catherine: I think what I actually miss — when I’m too busy — is noticing the season. Like, I’ll suddenly realize it’s June and I have no idea when that happened. The cherry blossoms, I barely saw them this year. I was studying for an exam.

Takeshi: The Okawa is famous for the cherry blossoms. Did you know that?

Catherine: I’d heard that. I kept meaning to go.

Nicholas: I went. For about ten minutes. Then my phone buzzed and I ended up answering emails standing under the trees.

Takeshi: (quietly) That’s — that’s actually a kind of sad image, Nicholas.

Nicholas: (laughing) Yeah, okay, I know. I know.

Takeshi: The seasons move whether you’re watching or not. The cherry blossoms don’t wait. The roses right now — in two weeks, maybe less, they’ll be past their best. This air, this temperature, this specific quality of the evening — it won’t come back. Not exactly like this.

Nicholas: Is that supposed to make me feel better or worse?

Takeshi: Neither. It’s just true.

Catherine: It makes me want to come back to the rose park before they’re gone. Like, actually put it in my calendar.

Nicholas: That’s a very Catherine thing to say.

Catherine: What’s wrong with that?

Nicholas: Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it. I’m just — (he pauses, looking at the river) —

I’m trying to remember the last time I did something just to look at it. Not as a break from something. Just because it was there.

Takeshi: That’s the thing, I think. You don’t have to meditate in any formal sense. You don’t need a cushion or an app or a teacher. But you do need to occasionally stop moving long enough to notice where you are. Even five minutes. Even just — standing at the railing on the bridge and watching the water.

Nicholas: And that does something?

Takeshi: I think so. I can’t prove it. I can’t tell you your sleep will improve or your quarterly reports will get easier. But I think something shifts, over time, when you make even a small habit of being where you are. What shifts — I genuinely can’t promise.

Nicholas: Very reassuring, Takeshi. Really.

Takeshi: (smiling) I know. I’m sorry. But I’d rather say that than make a promise I can’t keep.

Catherine: I actually appreciate that. Every wellness article I read promises you’ll be transformed in thirty days and then — nothing. Or something, but not the thing they promised.

Nicholas: Okay, so — no promises. But you’re saying it’s worth trying.

Takeshi: I’m saying it costs almost nothing and the direction it points seems worth pointing in. That’s the most I’ll give you.

Nicholas: (draining his glass) Fine. I’ll try standing on the bridge for five minutes on my way to work.

Catherine: I’ll come back to the rose park.

Takeshi: Good. Come before they’re gone.

The boat that passed earlier is long out of sight. The river is quiet again, just the sound of water and, from somewhere further along the bank, music from another terrace. The breeze shifts, and for a moment the scent of roses is unmistakable.

Nicholas notices it before any of them says anything.

He doesn’t mention it. But he doesn’t pick up his phone either.

What to Take Away

This conversation didn’t arrive at a technique or a program. It didn’t need to.

What came up instead was something simpler: the season is moving, the river is there whether you look at it or not, and five minutes of genuine attention might be the beginning of something — or it might just be five minutes of genuine attention. Either way, it seems worth finding out.

The cherry blossoms are gone. The roses won’t wait. What’s in front of you right now won’t be there in exactly this form tomorrow.

That’s not a reason to be anxious about it. It might be a reason to look.

About the Characters

Takeshi Kitagawa is a graphic and textile designer based in Osaka. Nicholas is a General Manager at an international financial firm in Kitahama. Catherine is a humanities graduate student at Osaka University in Toyonaka. Nicholas and Catherine are fictional characters based on real people and real conversations.

If this conversation left you with questions about where the practice actually comes from —

The ideas touched on here — mushin, the gap between knowing about something and knowing it, what D.T. Suzuki was really pointing at — are explored more directly in an earlier piece.

This article was written with AI assistance for English expression. “AI is my brush, not my brain.” — Takeshi Kitagawa

You Don’t Need to Empty Your Mind

On meditation, muscle training, and the kind of change you can’t see in the mirror.

Let me say what this essay is not.

It’s not a guide. It won’t tell you which app to use, how many minutes to sit, or what to do with your thoughts when they arrive uninvited. There’s no shortage of that kind of writing already, and I’m not sure I’d trust myself to add to it.

What I want to do is something smaller. I want to think out loud about what meditation actually is — or at least, what I’ve come to understand it as after decades of practice — and why the expectations people bring to it so often get in the way.

I should be upfront: I’m Japanese. I grew up around Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. I spent nine years training in Kendo and Judo at a local police station, starting at age six. The particular quality of stillness that exists in a dojo before practice begins — that silence that isn’t empty but somehow full — that was part of my life before I had a word for it. I’m not saying any of this as a credential. I’m saying it as a caveat. My relationship to these ideas is not the same as choosing to try meditation as an adult. I don’t fully know what that’s like from the inside.

So take what follows as one perspective. Not a prescription.

The Gym Comparison, and Why It Only Goes So Far

When people ask me how to explain meditation to someone who’s never tried it, I sometimes reach for the gym analogy. You don’t go to the gym once and become strong. You go consistently, over months and years, and the change accumulates in ways that aren’t always visible from week to week. Meditation is like that. Consistency matters more than intensity. You’re building something, even when it doesn’t feel like anything is happening.

This comparison is useful, and I’ve used it. But it has a limit I’ve started to notice more as I get older.

When you train at the gym, you can point to results. The numbers go up. The mirror changes. There’s a before and an after you can photograph. The feedback is concrete, relatively rapid, and measurable. Three months of serious training and most people can see the difference.

Meditation doesn’t work like that. And this isn’t just a matter of scale — it’s not simply that the results take longer. It’s that they appear in a different register entirely.

The changes meditation produces, if they come, are changes in how you are inside an experience — not what you can do, or what you look like, but how something feels from the inside while it’s happening. How you move through a difficult conversation. Whether there’s a half-second of space between something irritating you and your reaction to it. The quality of your attention when someone is speaking.

None of that shows up on a scale. None of it photographs. And because it doesn’t, a lot of people practice for a while, notice nothing visible, and conclude that nothing is happening.

Something might be happening. The problem is the instrument you’re using to check.

What the Zen Tradition Actually Says About This

Suzuki Daisetsu — D.T. Suzuki, whose work I’ve written about elsewhere — spent decades trying to describe to Western readers what Zen practice was actually pointing toward. He was careful, in a way I find admirable, not to dress it up as a self-improvement system.

What he described, at its most ambitious, was something like mushin — 無心, often translated as “no-mind,” though that translation loses something. It’s less about the absence of thought and more about a state in which thought and action are not separated. The swordsman who has trained for twenty years doesn’t think now I raise my sword — the raising happens. The distinction between the person and the action dissolves. Suzuki saw this not as a trick of expertise but as a fundamental quality of consciousness that practice makes available.

Alongside this, he pointed toward what might be called an overcoming of the ordinary fear of death and loss — not through denial, but through a shift in how one holds the boundary between self and world.

These are large claims. And I want to be honest: I am not going to tell you that sitting on a cushion for ten minutes a day will take you there. It probably won’t. Getting to something like mushin — if it’s possible at all outside of decades of intensive practice — requires conditions most people aren’t interested in creating.

I don’t say this to discourage. I say it because I think the distance between “ten-minute daily practice” and what Suzuki was describing is real, and pretending otherwise does nobody a favor.

But here is the other thing I want to say, and this is the part I’ve had to think about more carefully.

The Part Where I Stop Being Discouraging

The fact that the ceiling is high doesn’t mean the floor isn’t worth standing on.

I’ve heard people say — more than once — I tried meditation but I’m bad at it. I can’t stop thinking. And I always want to ask: who told you that was the goal?

The idea that meditation means successfully emptying your mind is one of the more persistent and, I think, counterproductive misconceptions around the practice. It sets people up for a test they were never meant to take.

You don’t need to stop thinking. Thoughts will come. In Zen practice — and I should say, there are many forms of meditation and I’m speaking from a particular tradition — thoughts arising during sitting are not failures. They’re just what minds do. The practice, if there is a practice, is simply noticing that you’ve followed a thought, and returning. Not with self-criticism. Just returning.

That’s it. That’s most of it.

There’s no goal state to reach during a session. There’s no correct amount of calm to achieve before the timer goes off. Sometimes you sit for what feels like a long time, and when you open your eyes, three minutes have passed. Other times you settle somewhere quiet and look up to find that ten minutes went by without your noticing — not because you went blank, but because the friction between you and the present moment dissolved for a while.

Both of these are fine. Neither is better than the other.

Sitting Is Not the Only Form

There’s something else I want to say, because I think it matters and I don’t see it said enough.

Formal seated meditation — eyes closed, cushion, timer — is one form. It’s a useful form. But the underlying quality it develops, that capacity for genuine attention, shows up in other places too.

On my lunch break sometimes, when the weather is good, I go somewhere I can see the sky. Not to think about anything in particular. Just to watch it. Clouds move. The light shifts. Nothing needs to be done with this. It isn’t productive. But there’s something in the simple act of watching something that doesn’t need your participation — something that moves on its own schedule, indifferent to your presence — that I find returns me to myself.

Japan is moving from spring into summer right now. The evenings are warm but the night air still carries a coolness that feels like a small gift. Lately I’ve been walking along the Okawa — the river that runs near my home — after dark. The water is lit from below, the light broken up and shifting on the surface. I’m not doing anything in particular. I’m not solving a problem or planning tomorrow. I’m standing at the railing, feeling the breeze, listening to the sound the water makes. That’s all.

I don’t call this meditation. But if someone asked me what I was doing, I think the most honest answer would be:

I was present. Not somewhere else in my head. Here, on this riverbank, in this particular evening, with this particular light on the water.

That, I think, is what the practice is pointing toward. Not the cushion. Not the app. The capacity to actually be where you are.

“[Photo: The Okawa at night — the lit water, the quiet bank, the last of the spring breeze before summer arrives]”

Walking through a garden. Sitting with a cup of tea and actually tasting it, rather than drinking it while looking at a screen. Standing somewhere and listening — not for anything specific, just listening to what’s there.

In the Zen tradition, there’s a quality called shizen — naturalness, or being at ease with the present moment — that isn’t achieved through forcing anything. It emerges when you stop trying to be somewhere other than where you are.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that looking at clouds is the same as formal meditation practice. But I do think the direction they point is the same. And for someone who finds formal sitting genuinely impossible, beginning with attention to the natural world isn’t a compromise. It’s a reasonable place to start.

What I Can and Can’t Promise

I’ve been practicing in some form for most of my adult life. I can tell you that something has changed in me because of it. I can’t tell you precisely what, because the changes are the kind that don’t show up when you look directly at them — they’re more visible in retrospect, or occasionally noticed by people who knew you before.

I can’t promise you any particular outcome. I can’t tell you that your sleep will improve, or that anxiety will decrease, or that you’ll find yourself making different decisions. Maybe. Maybe not. Those results seem to happen for some people, and I have no reason to doubt them. But I’m skeptical of the framing where meditation is a delivery system for measurable wellness outputs, because that framing misses something about what’s actually being practiced.

What I can say is this:

The practice of returning your attention, again and again, to what is actually happening right now — without demanding that what is happening be different from what it is — is not a small thing. It runs against most of what contemporary life trains us to do. Most of life is optimization: make this better, get more of that, be somewhere other than here as quickly as possible.

Sitting with what is, without improving it — that’s the practice. Simple to describe. Genuinely difficult. And the difficulty is not a problem to be solved. It’s the point.

How to Start, If You Want To

No app required. No cushion required, though a firm surface is more comfortable over time. No timer required, though it helps some people.

Sit somewhere reasonably quiet. Close your eyes, or leave them slightly open and unfocused. Breathe normally — don’t try to control your breath, just notice it. Notice when a thought arrives and takes your attention. Notice that you’ve been gone for a while and come back. Don’t criticize yourself for leaving. Just return.

That’s it.

If three minutes pass, that’s fine. If you find yourself still sitting when ten minutes have gone by, that’s also fine. If you do this every day, something will probably shift over months, though I can’t tell you when or how. If you do it only occasionally, that’s also fine.

The practice is the returning. Not the staying.

What This Means to Me

I was about thirty years into something resembling a practice before I stopped expecting it to produce results I could identify.

That sounds like a long time, and maybe it is. But I don’t think the first thirty years were wasted — I think I was just measuring with the wrong instrument. I was looking for the gym results. The visible change, the number going up.

What I understand now — or what I think I understand, with the caveat that tomorrow I might see it differently — is that the practice doesn’t build something. It removes something. Specifically, it gradually removes the habit of being somewhere other than where you are.

That removal is invisible. There’s no mirror for it. You can’t photograph what isn’t there anymore.

But occasionally, in the middle of an ordinary moment — drinking coffee, watching the sky, sitting in a difficult meeting and finding that you’re not somewhere else in your head — you notice something.

A kind of presence.

Not peace, exactly. Not calm, necessarily. Just the sensation of being where you are, without the usual friction.

I can’t promise you that. I can’t even fully describe it. But I’ve been in that room enough times to think it’s worth looking for.

Even if you find it for only a few minutes at a time.

Even if some days you don’t find it at all.

You don’t need to empty your mind. You just need to notice, again and again, that it’s full — and to find that noticing itself is a kind of quiet.

About the Author

Takeshi Kitagawa is a graphic and textile designer based in Osaka. SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture for Western readers — through dialogue rather than instruction.

A note on Suzuki and where this began

Much of what I’ve touched on here — the gap between knowing about an experience and actually being inside one, the limits of instruction as a path to understanding — is something I’ve explored more directly in an earlier essay. If this piece raised more questions than it answered (which may be appropriate), the conversation continues there.

This essay was written with AI assistance for English expression. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration. — Takeshi Kitagawa