The Internal Power of Zen

And My Takeaway Tenants

I was having dinner with some friends the other night, and a conversation took place where I joked about needing to go home somewhat depressed. The friend asked if this was some sort of proponent to writing sad stories, or getting into “my feels.” I let the conversation pass, but found it as an interesting point to talk about Zen, and how it has impacted my life for the better.

Growing up, I’ve always found myself in the spot of an emotional person. I was the boy who cried, the laughing kid, the class clown, the kid with a crush. Needless to say, in a society which values a male with stereotypical masculine traits, this never went over well with my peers. I was more often than not viewed as a lesser male, someone who found better friends in women, and never cared for dick measuring contests. Most of my childhood was laced with depressive episodes and bouts of intense loneliness. I only recall one birthday where I had friends from school actively attend the party – everything else was family-based.

Wake up, son of mine
Momma got something to tell you
Changes come
Life will have its way
With your pride, son
Take it like a man

As I grew older, I naturally began to adopt traits of stereotypical masculinity in order to masque and protect myself from the opposing system. As an adult, I recognize these traits to be actively destructive in my journey of self-discovery. But over the pandemic, I reached a breaking point. Being isolated and alone, I had a terrible existential crisis. Surrounded by constant news of death, I was forced to face my inevitable fate head-on. It led me down a path of questioning. At first, metaphysical, then interpersonal. 

I began to take notice of these patterns, especially the patterns in which I’d inherited from my family. I remember dating a girl in high school who had cheated on me. I tried for nearly two years to stay with her during a rough period in her life. But the episodes of cold silence, verbal tirades, and broken trust defeated me at every turn. I came out of that relationship a broken and bitter man. A worse man.

I remember the day I walked away, it was the final straw. She’d run away from home and her mother had called me crying at 1:00 AM. After finding her drunk at a party, I stormed back to my house and never spoke to her again. I held in all of my pain with a shield of hatred; I never acknowledged her in passing, or said her name – she was privy to Voldemort. When I finally moved on, she suddenly transformed into the woman I had learned to love. Bombastic, heartfelt text messages begging me to see her – more often than not, drunk. My response was often reciprocated with the same crass and cruel energy I have received over that two year span. I held that anger and resentment inside for a long time. It fueled me like the Chernobyl reactor – imminent to meltdown.

So, sitting in my living room during lockdown, I naturally began to examine my own father and his relationships with women. Every relationship he had was short-lived and more often than not, toxic and volatile. His anger and resentment fed on him like a cancer, and it is no wonder that the woman who broke my heart and fueled that same resentment was a Cancer too.

But despite my recognition of these patterns, the truth was that they had dug into my psyche and would take years of practice to even begin to control. But I had a starting point, and it was my great-grandmother’s favorite philosopher, Alan Watts. His books and lectures were a jumping point for me – a way to dabble into the art of Zen, or The Way. 

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.

Despite my studies, I still remained a student of failure. I trudged through the next seven years of a new relationship without seemingly learning anything from my past. That same anger and hatred carried over, which caused a crack in the foundation of everything I had built. Every small occurrence which bothered me snowballed into a destructive avalanche of fury and retaliation. Football had taught me to hit your enemies hard when they opposed you. But I’d been so quick to ignore the tattoo on my forearm. Taekwondo had taught me the slow burn of courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self control and indomitable spirit. It is no coincidence that my mind had been so quick to dismiss the foundational blocks of my philosophy in favor of these masculine traits I had been groomed to adopt. 

This takes me back to where I started the story – the pandemic. I developed a terrible anxiety of death which had broken down the very pillars of masculinity formed within my psyche. Afterall, being afraid is an unmanly trait, men are never afraid – only angry! At the time, I thought medication would help me, and I shamefully took it in secrecy without any of my peers knowing. Of course, anxiety meds are rarely effective on their own,  which forced me to reexamine my lifestyle and my behaviors leading up to now. It was painful, and more often than not, I’d mistakenly ventured down the wrong path. But with each failure, I’ve learned what not to do, which naturally propels me toward some hint of enlightenment. 

Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say… for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. 

 

Internal Tenant #1

Learn to let go

I’ve been rejected, failed, belittled, and made fun of more times than I can count. And despite the fact that I’ve let go of these things, they still hurt immensely to recall – let alone admit to an audience. I’ve seen so many people go through life with such a self-righteous resentment of their past that they refuse to see a shining future in front of them. Not only this, but we become so bogged down and self-critical that we lose confidence from our failures. The loss of confidence means that you’re actively self-sabotaging to get less than what you deserve. 

Letting go is all about personal agency. Take for example, rejection. The natural instinct is to feel pain, grief, anger, guilt, etc. We want to hold onto this thing, in hopes that things might change. But this more often than not feeds entitlement and resentment into the mind. In so letting go, we retake our agency over them, disallowing these situations control over us. 

This is a powerful tool, which is often misused by mistake. I had a friend who was turned down by a woman, he flipped into a frenzy, saying how, “she didn’t matter,” and that there are, “better ones out there.” For a guy who thought so little of her, she sure occupied his mind for a long time after this! 

So, what does letting go look like in practice? Well, it’s natural, of course. It’s allowing that initial resentment to boil over, then to realize that most of the time, people don’t intend malice. And if they do? Well, it sounds like they need some Zen! Whenever I need to let go of something, I’ll often write about it, just to express it somewhere. This leads me to the second tenant. 

Internal Tenant #2

All feelings are valid

Feelings are important to acknowledge, but also important to move past. If we repress our feelings, then we lose part of what makes us living, feeling human beings. But if we latch onto these feelings, we become obsessed, delusional, and irrational. 

For men; sadness and fear are more often than not the most repressed emotions. Countless times, have I seen men who, instead of crying, lash out into a violent frenzy of anger to ward off any potential witnesses of a shed tear. The tragedy of this, is naturally the high suicide rate of men in the modern world. In repressing these emotions, they can never be properly expressed nor acknowledged. Therefore, they eat the interior mind like a festering tapeworm. 

For women; anger and desire. My mother is my idol. As a woman, she’s never allowed men to direct or control her. She has always been her own person, with her own dreams and ambitions – even as a single mother. Too often do women feel the need to sustain themselves within a narrow public image of femininity. I deeply admire a woman who has the strength to oppose these standards, as they are exponentially imposed on them, compared to men. 

This is what I mean, when I say, “I need to be a little depressed today.” I need to allow the natural cycles within my mind to play out. Repressing them would be like attempting to compress a coil to prevent it from expanding – the harder you compress, the more pressure you’re building up. 

Many emotions are akin to a passing storm – we sit tight and ride it out. After the storm has passed, I can analyze these emotions with a better lens, and hopefully be more proactive in the future.