People keep asking me about Zen. So I decided to meet them halfway.
This essay is part of a three-part series on mindfulness and Japanese philosophy
The reason I started using a mindfulness app
“Takeshi, have you ever tried Headspace?”
I get questions like this more than you might expect. Americans, Europeans, the occasional Australian — curious people who’ve heard me talk about Zen practice and want to know where the ancient tradition and the modern app actually overlap. For a while, I gave the philosophical answer. I explained the difference between zazen and guided meditation. I drew careful distinctions. I was, I’ll admit, a little insufferable about it.
Then I decided to just try the apps myself.
What Mindfulness Apps Promise — And What That Promise Actually Means
Open the App Store and search for “mindfulness.” Within seconds, you’ll encounter a familiar constellation of claims: reduce stress by up to 32%, improve sleep quality, boost focus and productivity, lower anxiety in 30 days.
These are compelling words. They are also, I want to suggest, a particular kind of language — the language of conversion funnels.
I’m not saying they are lies. I am saying that “stress reduction,” “improved sleep,” and “enhanced productivity” are the phrases that make people download apps. They are keyword promises, engineered for the moment of decision. And the relationship between those promises and what actually happens when you sit quietly with your own mind for ten minutes a day is considerably more complicated than a download button allows for.
The claims that sell apps — stress reduction, better sleep, sharper focus — are measurable-sounding outcomes applied to a practice that resists measurement almost by definition.
Consider what can actually be tracked. Heart rate variability. Respiratory rate. These are real signals of autonomic nervous system activity, and some apps do surface them thoughtfully. But “stress reduction” as a felt, lived experience? The quality of a night’s sleep? A subtle shift in how you move through a difficult afternoon? These are not things a dashboard captures. And here is the deeper problem: even if these shifts occur — and I believe some of them do — the person experiencing them is often the last to notice.
The Quiet Trap of Measuring What Cannot Be Measured
Here is a scenario I have come to think of as the mindfulness paradox in its modern form.
You download an app. You practice for several weeks, genuinely, consistently. You notice nothing dramatic. You feel, perhaps, a little calmer on certain mornings — but you can’t be sure if that’s the practice or simply the season, or that you’ve been sleeping slightly better, or that a difficult work situation finally resolved. The signal is buried in noise.
So you continue. You watch your streak counter. You complete your sessions. You wait for the benchmark to appear.
And then something quiet happens, which I have seen in myself and in others: the waiting itself becomes its own source of tension. You are practicing stillness while simultaneously evaluating whether the stillness is working. You are observing the water, wondering why it hasn’t boiled.
The pursuit of calm becomes its own form of agitation. The search for the effect is the very thing preventing it.
This is not a flaw in the apps. It is a flaw in the framework we bring to them — a Western wellness framework that quite reasonably expects effort to produce legible results on a predictable schedule. That framework works for many things. It does not work especially well for this.
The Apps Are Actually Good — Within Limits
Let me be clear, because I know what people expect from someone with my background: the apps are genuinely well-made.
The breathing exercises are precise. The body scans are methodical. The guided sessions ease complete beginners into a practice that, without guidance, can feel intimidating or pointless. If you’ve never sat quietly with your own mind before — and many people genuinely haven’t — these apps provide a real service. They lower the threshold. They make starting possible.
I used one every morning for several weeks, and I noticed something. Not enlightenment. Not a transformation of consciousness. Something quieter: a slight but consistent shift in how I arrived at the rest of my day. A few degrees of calm that compounded slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite something.
But I want to be precise about what I mean. The shift I noticed was not the result I had been promised. It didn’t appear when the app suggested it would. It wasn’t measurable in any way I could confidently attribute to ten minutes of guided breathing rather than a dozen other variables in my life. It arrived sideways — the way most things worth having arrive.
What Happens When Relaxation Becomes an Effort
There is a specific pitfall I want to name, because I don’t see it discussed enough.
Some mornings, I would open the app and find myself — almost immediately — working very hard to relax. Noticing a thought. Releasing it. Noticing another. Releasing it. Becoming subtly frustrated that the thoughts kept arriving, that the mental quiet I was supposed to be cultivating kept interrupting itself.
This is, I want to be clear, the opposite of what was intended. And yet it is entirely natural. When you are told to release your thoughts, the instruction itself creates a monitoring process: Am I releasing them? Have I released that one? Wait — is that a new thought?
The mind instructed to stop thinking is a mind thinking very hard about stopping.
A quiet morning practice before breakfast — or a few minutes before sleep — can absolutely anchor the day in a useful way. The ritual itself has value. But when relaxation becomes effortful, when releasing becomes grasping, something has gone wrong at the level of intention rather than technique. No app update fixes this. Only a different relationship with the practice itself can.
The Word That Changes Everything: 悟り (Satori)
There is a Japanese word — 悟り, satori — that gets translated as “enlightenment” in most English texts. The translation isn’t wrong, but it loses something critical.
In Western usage, “enlightenment” carries the weight of arrival. You didn’t have it; now you do. Before and after. A destination reached.
Satori doesn’t work this way. It isn’t a prize for accumulated effort. It isn’t the reward that appears after enough meditation sessions or enough journaling or enough correct living. Zen teachers have said for centuries that the harder you chase satori, the further it recedes. The pursuit itself is the obstacle.
And here is the thought that stays with me, the one I find genuinely difficult to express without sounding cryptic: the person who has experienced satori probably has no idea that they have.
Because to recognize it, name it, and claim it — “I have achieved calm,” “I have reduced my stress” — is to have already stepped back out of it. The experience has no ego-handle. There is nothing to grab.
Satori cannot be attained by chasing it. The closest you come is when you stop measuring whether you’re close.
I’m not sure this is comforting news for anyone hoping the thirty-day streak badge means something. But I think it is true. And I think it matters — not as a reason to abandon the practice, but as a reason to hold it differently.
The Invisible Accumulation
This is where I want to offer something that isn’t despair.
If the effects of mindfulness practice cannot be measured, felt, or claimed — why bother?
Because the effects are real. They simply accumulate in the way a landscape changes over years of weather rather than the way a room changes when you repaint it. You don’t see it happening. You notice it, eventually, in retrospect.
You will find yourself, some ordinary afternoon, speaking more calmly in a difficult conversation than you would have spoken a year ago. You won’t know why. You won’t be able to point to the morning that changed you. The practice, maintained quietly and without demand, has altered something in you that doesn’t announce itself.
This is what I mean when I say the effects of zazen — of genuine stillness practice — cannot be easily separated from life itself. They seep in. じわりと染み込む — a Japanese phrase I find useful here: to permeate slowly, the way ink spreads in water. Not a dramatic wash. A gradual staining of everything.
So Should You Use a Mindfulness App?
Yes. Probably. If you’re drawn to it, try it.
But go in with what I’d call a pre-results intention. Not “I will use this app to reduce my stress.” Instead: “I will sit quietly for ten minutes before the day begins, because ten minutes of stillness has a quality worth experiencing — and I am not going to evaluate it.”
Let go of the thirty-day benchmark. Let go of the three-month before-and-after. Let go, especially, of the morning when you notice you’re working very hard to relax, and take that noticing itself as the practice — oh, there it is — rather than as a failure.
If a shift happens, it will likely happen sideways. You’ll notice it in how you spoke to someone. In how a difficult moment felt slightly less catastrophic than it would have a year ago. You won’t see it coming. You won’t be able to say exactly when it started.
That, honestly, is the closest I can bring you to what stillness practice actually feels like from the inside. Not a peak. A slow, quiet change in the texture of ordinary days.
A Final Thought
I still use the app sometimes. Not every day. Not with a streak. Not with a goal.
I use it the way I might walk through a temple garden — not to get somewhere, but because the walk itself has a quality worth experiencing. The garden isn’t trying to teach me anything. I’m not trying to learn anything. We’re just here, together, for a few minutes.
The keyword promises that brought you to the app may not be what you find inside it. But something is there, if you stop demanding that it introduce itself on schedule.
That shift in intention — small as it sounds — may matter more than the practice itself.
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.