The Mirrorless Moon

Meet What You Feel

I don’t want to write this. Truth be told, I don’t want to do much of anything right now. I’m going through a tough stretch—and even saying it that way doesn’t touch the gravity of what I feel inside.

As some of you are aware, I live with passive suicidal ideation. I have since I was around eleven. It’s a daily thing—and I say live with because after almost thirty years of it, it’s not always a sharp “suffering” anymore. It simply is.

When I described this to Jundo once, I said it’s kind of like a little kid in the background of my mind. Most days it’s playing off in the corner. It might get loud. It might cry a little. But for the most part it’s minding its business and doing what it does.

On tougher days, it starts scrounging around—like a kid left to its own devices too long—getting curious and loud, reaching into the drawers of my mind to see what it can dig up. Annoying, yes. But usually, eventually, it wanders back into the corner.

And then there are times like now—where the child is right in my face, screaming incessantly, and no amount of consolation—no amount of shushing—quietly gets it to settle. When it’s like this, a part of my mind wants to listen. It wants to sit down and scream and cry with it. It wants me to give in.

If you’ve dealt with—or live with—passive suicidal ideation, you know there’s a thin line here: between letting it be what it is… and taking it by the hand and turning it into something more dangerous. Thankfully, for me, that shift is rare. In my whole life, there have only been a couple of times I’d truly call “crisis.” But the line exists—and I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t.

And because I’m naming it plainly: If you’re ever close to that line, please reach out to a trusted person, a professional, or emergency services.

So why am I saying all of this?

Because I’ve noticed something—both in others and in my own mind. From a Buddhist perspective, people will sometimes say: “I practice Zen—I shouldn’t be feeling these things, right? I shouldn’t feel depressed. I shouldn’t feel ideation. I shouldn’t feel angry. I shouldn’t get upset at my parents. I shouldn’t feel sad when someone breaks up with me.”

And when I hear that—especially when it’s coming from inside my own head—I have to ask a follow-up question:

Why shouldn’t we feel anything?

Kodo Sawaki Roshi has that famous line we all like to throw out from time to time—zazen is good for nothing. Zazen isn’t here to be emotional anesthesia, or a self-improvement project.

Zen isn’t a panacea for our emotions. Practice isn’t here to amputate sadness, or erase grief, or make us “above” heartbreak.

In crisis—especially in heavy emotion—it’s easy to forget something basic: our human nature makes us capable of the full range of human feeling. And if that’s true, then why shouldn’t we also feel the “inverse” of what hurts?

Why shouldn’t I feel depressed when I lose someone I love? And why shouldn’t I feel grateful—remembering their life, and the love that was there at all?

We can’t treat Zen practice like a cure for feeling. We’re going to feel many things throughout our lives—especially hard things.

And we can meet those things the same way we meet anything else in practice—like zazen.

If an intense emotion rises up, let it rise up. I’m not saying to follow it. I’m not saying to turn it into therapy-on-the-cushion. And I’m definitely not saying to brush it off as some kind of spiritual bypass. I’m saying: let it be what it is—without making it into a moral failure or a “bad Zen student” report card.

Right now, for example, I’m feeling a crushing weight. And no amount of distraction—no amount of bypassing—no amount of practice-is-a-magic-trick is going to make that vanish.

And honestly… I don’t think we want it to vanish.

To circle back to ideation—our brother Sekishi has reminded me (more than once) that often it’s not that the person “doesn’t want to be here.” It’s that we just want the pain to stop. That distinction matters.

And I think that’s where Zen practice can help—not by deleting pain, but by letting us see and experience what Jundo sometimes calls Contentment—with a capital C—even in the middle of the storm.

Even when the mind is screaming, breath still breathes, and this moment still arrives.

I like my water metaphors, as a lot of Zen folks do. I read something recently—an older man describing grief—and his advice resonated. He said it’s like being a sailor in a storm: the waves come in, and at first they might be one after another—towering, relentless. But if we can ride it out—if we can find our place in the storm—we start to notice that the waves crash a little less frequently. At some point, they might not be as tall.

But they’re going to come again—other waves, other storms, other losses. And all we can do is recognize that we will have to feel what we feel and ride it out again.

Relatedly, there’s a line attributed to Ryōkan that I’ve been sitting with the last few days:

A relative asked, “Is there no way to avoid calamities?”

Ryōkan replied, “When you are met with calamity, meet it completely. That is the wondrous Dharma of avoiding calamities.”

So if you’re going through an extremely hard time—take care of yourself. Be compassionate with yourself. And don’t do that particular “Zen thing” where we use clever questions to dodge our own heart—“Who is feeling depressed?” “Who feels sadness?”—as if that settles the matter.

Feel what you need to feel. Let it be real. Let it be human. And remember: everyone has the capacity to feel what they feel.

And here’s my unsolicited advice—mostly because I need to hear it too:

When you’re going through a hard time, take a step back and ask how you’d respond if someone you love were going through the same thing. Most of the time, I guarantee you it would be more compassionate than the way we treat ourselves.

Gassho,
Koushi