Six ordinary problems.
None of these needs a cushion to be understood, and none of them is a disorder. They are what having a mind is like. Here is what fifteen hundred years of Zen literature says about each — and one thing to try tomorrow morning.
Nothing on this page is medical or mental-health advice, and none of it promises a result. Zen doesn’t make promises; that is arguably its best feature.
“I know exactly what to do. I’m not doing it.”
The fourth Monday
You have the plan. You have had the plan for weeks. The plan is not the problem, and one more plan will not fix it — which you also know, which is its own small humiliation.
Watch the moment closely and you will find it is not a failure of will. It is a negotiation. A voice proposes; another objects; a third offers tomorrow as a compromise, and tomorrow is accepted because the negotiation is exhausting and stopping it feels like relief. Willpower is the attempt to win that argument by force, which is why it works for eleven days and then does not.
Zen’s move is not to win the argument. It is to notice who is listening to it. The voices are weather; they arrive without permission and leave without being answered. Nothing obliges you to be their referee — and when you are not, the fourth Monday is no longer a verdict on your character. It is just Monday, and the thing either gets done or does not.
Discipline, in this tradition, is not a muscle that some people were issued and you were not. It is what is left over when you stop taking the negotiation seriously.
Taught that seeking is itself the obstruction — the effort to get somewhere is what keeps you where you are.
Tomorrow, when the voice proposes tomorrow, do not argue with it and do not obey it. Say “that is a thought” — silently, without contempt — and take the first physical step of the thing. Not the whole thing. The shoes, the file, the first sentence.
“It’s 2am and I’m rehearsing a conversation that already happened.”
The rehearsal
You are drafting the sentence you should have said. You are now on the ninth version. In none of them does the other person behave, and yet the ninth version feels urgent, as though the right wording would reach backwards and change something.
The mind is doing what it does: running a simulation to protect you. It cannot tell that the danger is over, and it will not be reasoned out of it, because the part of you doing the reasoning is the same part running the simulation. That is why “stop thinking about it” has never once worked, for anyone.
The old instruction is not to stop the thought. It is to change what you are identified with while the thought runs. Something is aware of the rehearsal — that awareness is not rehearsing, is not anxious, and has been quietly present for all nine versions. It is not somewhere else. It is what is reading this sentence.
The rehearsal does not necessarily stop. It stops being yours, which turns out to be most of what was unbearable about it.
Opened the Inscription on Faith in Mind with the observation that the great way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose — the trouble begins with for and against.
Do not try to sleep and do not try to stop. Put attention on the fact that you can hear the room. Hearing happens without effort and cannot be done harder — which is why it is a doorway. When the rehearsal resumes, and it will, hear the room again.
“Somebody said one sentence three days ago and I’m still carrying it.”
The sentence you cannot put down
It was eleven words. They have probably forgotten. You have built a case, appealed the case, and reopened it twice since Thursday.
What holds it in place is rarely the insult. It is that the insult made contact with something you were already defending — a picture of yourself you did not know you were carrying until someone bumped it. The anger is the sound of the picture being protected.
Which is why forgiving them on purpose so seldom works: it leaves the picture standing and gives you one more thing to be virtuous about. Zen goes at the other end. If there is no fixed thing there to be insulted, the eleven words have nowhere to land, and the case closes itself without a verdict — not because you rose above it, but because the defendant could not be located.
Told ordinary people in plain language that anger is something we produce by turning the mind into a self and then defending it — and that the Unborn was never damaged by anything.
Ask what picture of yourself the sentence contradicted. Do not defend it or disown it — just find its wording. “I am someone who is competent.” Most of the charge is in never having seen the sentence written down.
“The phone gets the first hour, before I’m properly awake.”
Where the day goes
You reach for it before your eyes have adjusted. Forty minutes later you are informed, slightly worse, and you have not yet chosen anything.
It is worth being exact about what has been taken. Not time — an hour is recoverable. What the first hour of the day sets is the posture: whether today happens to you or is met. Beginning inside a stream of other people’s urgencies teaches the nervous system, before any decision is made, that attention is something that gets claimed rather than placed.
Zen’s answer is neither discipline nor deleting the app. It is that attention has an owner and the owner can be found. Ten minutes of sitting is not ten minutes of relaxing; it is the only part of the day where attention is not being spent by someone else, and it is enough to remember what placing it feels like.
People who sit in the morning usually do not report using their phone less. They report noticing the reach — a half second earlier each week, until at some point the noticing arrives before the hand does.
Insisted the sitting is not a method for producing awakening later; it is the thing itself, done now, with no gaining idea attached.
Put the phone across the room tonight so the first reach requires standing. Then sit for ten minutes before you cross the room. Not to feel better — to find out what the first hour is like when nobody is spending it.
“I got the thing I wanted. It was good for about a week.”
The week afterwards
The promotion, the flat, the person, the number. It arrived, it was genuinely good, and then the floor rose to meet it and the wanting relocated — usually to something adjacent and slightly larger, and usually within days.
This is not ingratitude and it is not a defect in you. It is the mechanism working exactly as built. What is worth noticing is the shape: every want carries an implied sentence — when this happens, I will be all right. The thing arrives. The sentence does not come true. The mind, rather than examining the sentence, issues a new want and attaches the same clause to it.
Zen’s claim is that the sentence was never going to come true, because it has the subject wrong. The thing that would have to be made all right by the promotion is the same thing that was fine before the promotion existed and will be fine after it is forgotten — and it was not waiting for anything.
This does not make ambition wrong or wanting shameful. It relocates the load. You can go after the thing without needing it to complete you, which is also, incidentally, how people get good at things.
Told his students to stop looking for something outside themselves and pointed instead at the one, right there, doing the looking.
Take one thing you currently want and finish the sentence honestly: “When I have this, I will finally be ______.” Then find the last time that blank was filled by something, and how long it stayed filled.
“I don’t know what I want. Everyone else seems to.”
The comparison
It looks like a shortage of ambition. More often it is a surplus of borrowed ones: enough absorbed pictures of a good life that the question “what do I want” returns a committee rather than an answer, and the committee is loudest at three in the morning.
They do not seem to have this problem, whoever they are. That is what a life looks like from the outside — a finished object. From the inside it has the same weather as yours.
Zen does not hand you a purpose. It does something less consoling and more useful: it quietens the committee long enough for you to notice which of the voices was ever yours. Most were installed. Some were installed by people who loved you. A few survive the quiet — and those, the tradition would say, are worth following, and are usually more ordinary than the ones that were installed.
Received the transmission as an illiterate woodcutter, which the tradition has never let anyone forget: nothing about position, education or the shape of a life was ever the qualification.
For one week, when you catch a comparison, name only the concrete thing being envied — not the person. “Their mornings are unhurried.” Envy, made specific, usually turns out to be information about what you want, rather than a verdict on what you are.
All six are the same problem.
In every one there is a voice — negotiating, rehearsing, defending, wanting, comparing — and there is something quieter that hears it. The voice is not a fault to be corrected. It is simply not you, and it has never once been you.
That is the whole of what Zen points at, and it is why the tradition does not offer six techniques for six problems. It offers one practice, sat every morning, aimed at the single case of mistaken identity underneath all of them.
Say the difficulty out loud. Hear a talk made for it.
MyRoshi sits you for ten minutes, listens to what actually happened this morning, and composes a talk about it in a voice — drawing on the same literature the six sections above draw on. Not a chatbot, and not a library of recordings made for everybody.
You do not need any experience. If it turns out you want a human teacher, the app will tell you so and help you find one.
If you are in crisis, this is the wrong tool. MyRoshi is unmonitored by design: nobody is reading, which means nobody can help. Please contact your local emergency services or a crisis line.