Old wisdom for today’s life.
There are many reasons why you can have a bad day.
- Things don’t go your way.
- You argue with your boss.
- Your family doesn’t value you,
- Money is not enough.
- You got a traffic ticket.
And only a few things that make it better. I know.
But certain spiritual traditions, tested over millennia, can bring you back to your center. And that’s vital to recovering from a bad day.
Here’s a tool from one of those millennia-old spiritual traditions — Zen — to help you recover from a bad day as quickly as possible.
Don’t worry ahead of time.
In the Zen tradition, we are told that you can’t get that legendary Buddha attitude through Ushin or Mushin.
- Ushin is the worldly mind, attached to the self, constantly seeking survival.
- Mushin is the attitude of considering everything as an illusion and obsessing about being primarily spiritual by cutting off ties with reality.
The trick is finding balance; you can use the Fu-zenna concept (non-attachment.)
Summarized in one sentence: if you don’t obsess about your goals (future) and don’t run away from anything (past), your mind will be serene.
And a serene mind is the fastest way to change a crappy day.
How to do it
In the book Zen. The Art Of Simple Living, the Zen monk Shunmyo Masuno reminds us of the anecdote of the father of Zen Buddhism, Bodhidharma.
Bodhidharma had a disciple named Huke. And he was always with his head full of worries. And one day, he asked Bodhidharma how he could stop being anxious.
Bodhidharma told Huke, “Very well, go through all your anxieties and put them here in front of me.”
Huke could not do it because anxieties are not things. They are thoughts. And he couldn’t reach into his head to pull out his anxieties and put them in front of Bodhidharma.
Moral: worries are intangible. They are not real, even if they seem so to us. They can, however, f*ck up our day.
My grandfather always told me, “Don’t worry before your time because if you do, you worry twice: before and when it happens. And that will take away your energy to solve problems when they come up.”
Application to your life
Having a bad day depends on our internal narrative. From seeing problems as tragedies rather than opportunities. Of being anxious about things that haven’t happened and may not happen.
Being irritated because we are not where we want to be is the same as being dissatisfied with the present.
And by not accepting things as they are, our mind longs for the past or yearns for the future. But it does not operate in the present to change things.
To do so,
- You will have to find the calm to operate in the present at 100%, not 25% of your capacity.
- Detach yourself as much as possible from the results to observe things objectively.
- To reduce the ego’s desires, think with clarity, evaluate what has screwed us in our day in its proper measure, and not apply a degree of gravity more significant than that of each situation (which we constantly do).
Last words
Remember that anxieties are inventions of our minds. And the best way to improve a crappy day is to subtract the intangible and emotional components of those things that take away our peace of mind.
It’s good for you, and it’s good for finding solutions to your problems. Because to be more efficient and to save you time and troubles, a serene mind is always better than a tormented mind.
So follow this zen advice, and when you have anxiety about something, ask yourself, “Where is my anxiety?”
And since the only answer is in your mind, start by doing what is necessary to calm your mind, and your day will improve.
You can do it in five minutes of Zazen.
Just sit down, and try to do nothing, it seems silly, but it works miracles. Because 5 minutes of doing nothing, sometimes is what you have to do to change everything.
A virtual hug.
AG