I have always had a special love for the writing of Albert Camus, the French-Algerian Nobel Prize–winning author and philosopher. From an early age, I felt disturbed and confused by what appeared to be the inherent meaninglessness of life. I became preoccupied with the inevitability of my own death, the certainty of losing or being separated from everyone I ever loved, and the stark realization that there was nothing I could do about any of it. It seemed like my parents had played a bad joke on me—bringing me into this world. I felt gut punched when the full scope of life’s apparent futility dawned on me. But most of all, I felt completely alone with it. Like someone had put me on a cosmic spinning wheel, then pushed me off and left me to tumble into a cold, dark universe. 

A few years later, I would encounter the writing of Albert Camus, and it would be nothing short of an epiphany: I was not alone. His debut novel, The Stranger, explored a seemingly senseless world; his book The Plague took on the inevitability of human suffering; and the most dearly tender and gentle of Camus’s oeuvre, his last unfinished autobiographical novel, The First Man, laid out his own very personal quest for identity and meaning in a world marked by colonialism and poverty. Camus, often labeled as an “absurdist,” a label he himself regretted, was deeply interested in the conflict between our human desire for meaning and the world’s perceived lack thereof. In reading Camus, I felt understood in my own confusion and existential angst. Like no one else, Camus allowed me to see through the eyes of his characters and experience my angst through them—thereby experiencing a community, a form of human union. Camus didn’t necessarily offer solace—I wasn’t sure there was any—but what he did offer was companionship.  

My own angst, despair, and confusion ultimately led me to discover Zen, and despite holding Camus’s writing dearly, it had been a while since I had endeavored to dive back into his work. That is, until recently. While I had known about his nonfiction essay The Myth of Sisyphus—often considered the central expression of his philosophy of the absurd—I had never actually read it. Perhaps it was the companionship that I found and cherished about his novels that made me shy away from his philosophical treatise, which I had written off with preconceived notions that no philosophy could possibly provide answers to these existentialist dilemmas his novels illustrated so well. So it was with some surprise and even a bit of wonder, when recently stumbling over that very essay in a literary magazine, how clearly I could see core tenets of Zen practice expressed there within. It felt like coming full circle; it felt like coming home.

Sisyphus, we are told, was the first king of Corinth and was known for his trickery. He was ultimately punished by the Greek gods for cheating death (if you can believe it…), and, as a result, they condemned him to ceaselessly rolling a rock up to the top of a mountain, at which point the rock would immediately fall back to the bottom. This process would then repeat, ad nauseam, for eternity. “They had thought with some reason,” Camus writes, “that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Sisyphus’s story is our story. The story of our life and the human condition. And just like a Zen koan, it confronts us with the deep delusions of our mind and invites us to break open to a deeper reality. “Of course,” we might think, “this is a terrible punishment.” Sisyphus’s task seems meaningless, devoid of purpose, ultimately repetitive, and boring. There is no achievement or progress and nothing to gain. All the things our mind is so fixated on—gone. And to make matters worse, the gods condemned Sisyphus to his task for all of eternity. Our mind cannot even find solace in the idea that eventually it will be over.

Our habitual mind (newsflash!) has a deeply ingrained tendency to seek happiness outside ourselves. Salvation, it believes, comes from things happening to us on the outside: experiences we have, progress we make, things we gain. Take those away and happiness seems unachievable. That is why Sisyphus’s story is such a perfect mirror for the way our mind creates our world. Camus concludes his essay with the following lines: 

“One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the Gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Let’s replace the Gods in the story with our thinking mind. The mind that craves approval, progress, possessions, has a million preferences and aversions, and seems to generally be in charge of most of our lives, just as the ancient Greeks imagined their Gods. If we replace Sisyphus in this metaphor with ourselves, it becomes clear that the one that is punishing us is our very own mind. So what does Sisyphus do? He negates the Gods. Is that not what we learn to do in Zen practice? We don’t negate our thinking minds (after all, thoughts are just thoughts) but we negate their godship. We commit to seeing beyond the world of thought. By focusing on the breath, the present moment reality of our belly moving in and out, we allow thoughts to arise and dissipate without clinging to them. We start to look at what is, without the attachment to our thoughts. And just like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz, who turns out to be none other than an ordinary small man, the God-likeness of our thoughts seems to crumble. Our mind may be telling us “this is futile, boring” or simply “I don’t like this,” but we pay this no attention. In Zen practice, we gradually wake up to a reality that is not mediated by our thoughts, where we no longer buy into the narratives our minds create. And how do we do that? By raising the rocks, as Camus writes. By focusing on what it is that is right in front of us: this breath, this step, this task. 

So what happens when we learn to live a life beyond the tyranny of our thinking minds? That thinking mind, that posits happiness as existing on the outside, utterly dependent on what we can gain, achieve, and create in our lifetime? “This universe henceforth without a master,” Camus writes, the master here being none other than our thinking mind, “seems to him neither sterile nor futile.” You may have even had that experience during or after a meditation session: your mind quiets down, and all of a sudden you seem to be able to experience the “same old” environment with completely fresh eyes, as if you saw it for the very first time (you indeed do—as you are seeing without the filter of your thinking mind), and it is more rich, full, and alive than ever before. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world.” This is the reality we can start to experience in Zen practice: namely, that whatever we thought of as a struggle, dull, or meaningless a moment ago, when we wake up to the physical reality of it, “each atom of that stone” is a world in itself. Vast and boundless. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” 

It is not what our mind falsely believes—the outcome, the impact, the thing—that makes us happy. It is the moment-to-moment lived reality of being alive. Our intention and attention focused on the actual “raising of the rock.” This “raising of the rock” is what we practice in zazen: moving our attention from the wandering mind that deals in dualities (meaning, no meaning) to the present moment reality experienced in the body. “Returning” again and again, to the ever new present moment, like coming home again.

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Many years ago, on one of my first weeklong Zen retreats, I was suddenly overcome by a deep sadness of an intensity I had never experienced before. It seemingly came out of nowhere and I felt it taking me deeper and deeper into a bottomless well of despair. I didn’t know where it came from—it simply showed up during the retreat and threatened to gradually take me over. 

When you are on a Zen retreat, be it a weeklong or just an evening sit with a Zen group, you immediately begin to notice that everything is planned through to the nth degree. The moment you step into the meditation hall you basically hand over any need to make decisions. Upon entering, one might notice that there is a certain way to bow to the altar and a certain way to walk to the mat, a certain way to hold the body during zazen and then a predetermined time to sit, followed by a certain way to practice walking meditation and the chanting of predetermined texts. There is an exact length of time for the breaks and—if you are on a multi-day retreat—an exact time to get up and an exact amount of meditation rounds over the course of the day, none of which you are allowed to skip, along with exact times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (during which you eat whatever is served). In short, no one cares how, when, and how long you would like to practice, you just go with the program. 

This is hard, even in the best of conditions. But when you feel yourself in the vortex of a gradually increasing feeling of despair, the last thing you want to do is mindfully experience it with nothing to distract or uplift you. What you do want to do is run away or, even better, make it go away. That’s where I found myself at the retreat. All I was focused on was how to not feel all that sadness. And not just the sadness, but also the intense fear that had now shown up with it: worrying about the sadness, how far it would take me, and whether it would ever go away again. But the meditation retreat continued and so I needed to go back to the meditation hall. I managed to get an interview with the Zen teacher leading the retreat in one of the next rounds and when I talked with him about my despair, confiding in him that I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to continue with the tight regiment of the retreat, he said to me: “At the beginning you hold the structure. Then, gradually, the structure will start to hold you.”

I wasn’t quite sure I understood what he meant but I did continue with the retreat. And that afternoon—just as the intense sadness had come out of nowhere—it disappeared just the same. This was not because I did anything differently; I just continued sitting and the deep sadness moved through me like heavy rain clouds, eventually clearing the way for the sun again. This was one big insight for me from this experience: we tend to think we have to do all kinds of things to get rid of an unpleasant or even deeply disturbing feeling. But when we stick to the discipline of simply taking an observer role (mindfully being present to the feeling) instead of allowing the feeling to dictate our actions, we allow the feeling to move and eventually pass through us (this does not mean that pausing a retreat cannot also be the right or even necessary thing to do in certain cases). 

In Western culture, we usually think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want. If I get to choose what I do, this means that I am free. But who is this “I”? This “I” has seemingly endless desires, constant impulses, never-ending wants, unlimited dislikes and aversions, out-of-the blue feelings of sadness, countless worries, and seemingly endless stories about how we are being wronged, shortchanged, or threatened. In short, this “I” is a prison. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, maybe we can do what we want but we cannot want what we want. And if equanimity or peace of mind is what we want, our “I” is definitely not the way to go. Because even if it thinks it might want equanimity, it does every conceivable thing to not have it. We could say our “I” is a suffering machine but that is not necessarily true. It is only true as long as we identify with it and give weight to it. When deep sadness appeared on the retreat, did that directly translate into suffering? Or was it simply an arising phenomena like all phenomena, and did my resisting it turn it into suffering? 

When I was a teenager, I practiced aikido for a while. Commonly, when the opponent has you in a hold, they twist your arm and wrist until you indicate that you want to be released with a tap on the mat. During one of those aikido practice sessions, a more experienced aikido practitioner twisted my arm until I tapped the mat. But instead of stopping, he twisted further. I tapped harder. No response. “Stop!” I yelled. “Relax” was his response, “don’t resist.” Was he crazy? What is that supposed to mean, relax? It hurts. But he kept twisting. And then something unexpected happened. The pain transformed simply into sensation. I had stopped resisting. I had surrendered (or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the pain had surrendered me). And without the part of me that did not want to have the pain, the pain was simply phenomena arising. Now, I do not in any way endorse twisting someone’s arm when they say stop (in hindsight, this was a clear physical boundary violation), but for me, in that moment, it was an awakening. An awakening about the power of surrender or the releasing of this “I” that wants and doesn’t want. When we release it and its constant compulsion to resist the present moment as it arises, even direct physical pain can transform into something else. 

However, this is much easier said than done. How do we surrender? Trying to surrender can become just another thing our “I” now wants and gets frustrated about when we can’t figure out how to do it, adding another layer of resistance to present moment reality. We feel sad but we don’t want to feel sad, we want to feel happy. Now we think if only we were able to surrender we wouldn’t feel that bad, so now we want this new thing: surrender. But we can’t seem to do it. Welcome to our “I” hell!

Wanting to surrender is an oxymoron. It does not work. We don’t surrender—we are surrendered. Our “I” cannot surrender. It would be like asking a fish to fly. It can only do what it knows to do: want and not want things. So in Zen practice, we don’t try to surrender but instead we create conditions that facilitate surrender. Conditions that make our “I”’s whims and wants less relevant. My “I” did not want to feel sadness when sadness arose. But because I was held by the structure of Zen practice, it did not matter. I didn’t follow my “I”’s wants to distract myself, read, watch TV, go for a run, call a friend, or eat ice cream. The structure of the retreat was in charge, not my “I.” 

In some ways, one could argue that your “I” with its supposed free will is largely unemployed when you enter Zen practice. That is not entirely true: we do need to use our discernment to ensure that the structure and form is safe and respects our physical and emotional boundaries and limits. But when you trust the structure and form, you simply follow: bow in that direction, walk in this direction, bow again, sit down for this exact period of time, etc. It’s a shock to our “I” when we don’t pay much attention to it. And what happens in that process is that we start to realize how much larger we are than that “I.” In our day-to-day interactions, we tend to think we are our “I.” But we are not. Clearly not. After all, we are still alive and attentive and doing one thing, while our “I” constantly wants to do something else. In short, we disidentify with our “I” through the practice of structure and form.

At the beginning you hold the structure, then the structure holds you. The first “you” in that sentence is not the same as the second. We come to Zen practice with our notion of who we are, deeply attached to the notion that we are that “I” with all its desires and despair, its needs, its wants, and its aversions. That “I” is the one that resists the sadness and suffers. But it’s also the “I” that’s attempting to break out of that suffering, that summons the energy and persistence to go on a Zen retreat, and to hold the structure. And then the structure holds you. But what that “you” is, the one that is being held, that you need to find out on your own—by following the structure and the form.

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Since I could think, I have struggled with an intense fear of rejection. This fear can play out in a whole range of ways—and at times it takes on rather comic forms. For example, attending a party where I don’t know anyone fills me with dread. Professional networking events, Super Bowl parties, holiday parties, birthday invites, you name it. I still go most of the time, maybe out of a sense of obligation or the belief that this time it will be easier.

Either way, when I do go, it often looks something like this: I arrive and immediately make a beeline for the bar. Everyone else standing around in small groups seems to know one another, and the last thing I want to do is “intrude.” After all, my fear of rejection leads me to think that none of these people will want to talk to me. The bar seems like a legitimate place to stand, but only until I receive my drink. I squeeze my glass of sparkling water tightly, not knowing where to go next. I reconsider the possibility of joining a group of strangers but reject that idea—it seems too high stakes. By now I feel ultra-self-conscious: I have been standing at the bar for what already seems like an eternity, all by myself. I am convinced now that everyone in the room has taken notice: “Who is this weird loner at the bar that no one wants to talk to?” Did I hear little murmurs? Seconds now feel like hours—tick-tock. All I want to do is disappear at the bar, maybe fall into a secret hole or something. There’s usually no happy ending to this: I awkwardly stand around, make a few clumsy attempts at conversation, and then make for the nearest exit. 

I have tried to work with this fear in different ways over the years, with some success. At a cognitive-behavioral training for therapists, I let the trainer convince me that I needed to do something he called “shame-attacking.” “By doing the very thing we feared most,” he explained, “we would realize that it wasn’t ultimately that bad, and so overcome our fears.” He suggested I find a coffee shop, go in, and yell at the top of my lungs, “I feel very lonely. Is there anyone here that would like to go out with me?” which is precisely what I did. I was so scared that for a second it felt like my heart might stop beating. But after the tsunami of fear faded, I did feel a sense of relief—I was still alive. Still, this exercise didn’t make my fear of rejection go away. 

I have also worked with skilled therapists on understanding where this fear of rejection comes from: an old and deeply held belief that I am not OK. That being my full self would mean people would not love and accept me. And while those sessions helped me to cultivate greater empathy toward my fear and feel less ashamed of it, going to a party full of strangers still feels scary to this day.

I began practicing Zen in my teens (around the same time I started going to parties), partly in an attempt to deal with the pain of not feeling truly OK and the confusion around who I authentically was. One of the Zen sayings that stuck with me early on was by the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dogen: 

To know the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things. When actualized by the myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away.

What did Dogen mean by the myriad things? “Actualize” means “make a reality of,” and the “myriad things” are nothing other than the very things in front of us right now. Whatever that may be at that moment. So making the very thing in front of us a reality is the same as forgetting ourselves. In Zen, “making something a reality” means dedicating ourselves completely to that very thing. And by dedicating ourselves to it—by looking at it without any interfering thoughts, ideas, or concepts—we free it from the ideas we have about it, thereby making it a reality. 

In zazen, this usually means dedicating ourselves to our breathing. We allow ourselves to be actualized by the breath by practicing to be 100 percent with the breath. A Zen saying goes: “When we completely hand ourselves over to the breath, nothing remains between heaven and earth except the weight of a flame.” When we manage to completely focus our attention on the breath, all sense of self drops away. Just breath remains, with no one breathing it. This is what Dogen is saying. Of course, the myriad things do not have to be the breath. Anything and everything can be the myriad things—the dirty dishes in your sink, the email in your inbox, your overbearing boss—but the practice remains the same. We surrender to what arises in the now, thereby releasing the constant notions we create about things and ourselves.

So what about the party guests? After nearly three decades of Zen practice, why do they still scare me instead of actualize me? Several months ago, I was invited to a professional mixer. When reading the email invite, I realized that I never thought to actually use these parties as a practice ground. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking Zen is something we practice mainly on our cushion. In reality, every moment of our lives is an opportunity to practice, an invitation to awaken. But how do we practice at a party we dread, a meeting we fear, an encounter we try to avoid? How do we forget our self during those moments?

It starts with setting the intention to practice. We say to ourselves, “I am going to use this next thing as a practice ground.” That little shift in our approach already makes a big difference. Effectively, we are saying, my focus is on how I approach this situation, rather than the outcome of this situation. Instead of focusing on an imagined future, which is always an idea (“They will think I’m intruding”), my focus remains on the present moment (the very word a person says, the sensation of the handshake, and of course the ever-changing sensation of breath).

I usually feel a great amount of self-judgment and shame for my lack of self-confidence at a party. Through my practice, I can increasingly allow all of this to soften a bit by unconditionally accepting whatever is arising. What is present right now? Fear of rejection. Where do I feel it? In my heart and gut—pressing and pounding. What else is there? Judgment. What does the judgment say? You are a joke, Matthias—it’s ridiculous that you feel like that during a party. All of it is OK. The fear is OK, as is the shame about the fear, as is the judgment. In Zen practice, we shift from a participant in the drama of our mind to a simple witness. The witness simply witnesses what is—it doesn’t control, interfere, or try for any particular outcome. It just shows up. And when our mind judges and controls, we witness that too. 

I can fast-forward to tell you that my attempt to apply my practice to the professional mixer wasn’t without its challenges. After the elevator doors to the event popped open, my intention to use the event as a practice ground and to accept whatever arose immediately vanished. Nope! I saw small groups of complete strangers scattered across a huge hall—my general nightmare. There was that deep fear of rejection rearing its head again. But one of the wonderful things about Zen practice is that every moment is an opportunity for a fresh start. So I took a deep breath, refocused on my posture, and simply walked up to the first small group I could see. I used the short walk toward the group to practice walking meditation, focusing my attention on each step (although I tried not to make it look like anything special—just mindful walking). 

Once I arrived at the first group, I reached out my hand and said, “Hi, my name is Matthias. What is your name?” Another rush of fear showed up in that moment (“They sure think I intruded on their conversation”), but my conscious focus remained on the breath and the very act of reaching out my hand. “Jamal” was the answer from the first person. And then something wonderful happened. Just as our focus can be completely immersed in the breath during zazen, my focus was now completely immersed in Jamal’s words. I listened to him deeply and intimately, and for brief moments, there was only the present-moment experience of listening and talking. No Matthias left, no Jamal, no fear of rejection. There were brief moments when self-consciousness flashed up, like when the time came to move on and meet a new group and I could hear my mind say, “Oh, no, what do I do next?” I thanked Jamal, took a deep breath and a few steps, and reached out my hand to the next group with the intention to pay complete and utter attention to whatever would arise. 

Just as Dogen said, I forgot myself. I forgot myself by being actualized by the various party guests, the words, handshakes, looks, etc. In a way, you could say that for stretches of the experience, I was not there at all. No one was. It was free, unbound, intimate, and completely new. 

Has the experience healed me from my fear of rejection? No. In fact, a few weeks later, I attended a holiday party, where, although I knew a few folks, I didn’t know most of the rest. I completely forgot about my intentions and fell right back into old patterns of feeling and thinking, wanting to leave the very moment I arrived. You don’t graduate in Zen. Sometimes practice can be pure grace: everything suddenly clears up and we are free. But often, Zen is simply grit, and we must remind ourselves to practice again and again and again in ever new domains and areas of our life. With the myriad things. Even when the myriad things are party guests.

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