Stop Trying to Be Zen, You’re Screwing It Up

22 Jun

Like any committed metalhead with unresolved control issues and a fondness for noise, I’ve got a battle vest.

It’s a crusty denim carcass from a charity shop on Highway 101, sleeves hacked off with crusty kitchen shears and festooned with the loudest, most illegible logos money can buy. It smells faintly of energy drinks and sweat. It has absorbed mosh pits, petrol station burritos and awkward conversations in airport security queues. It is sacred. It is ridiculous. It is me. Or at least the me that I project onto an unsuspecting — and largely indifferent — world.

On my dresser, there’s a sad little pile of twenty or so patches waiting to be stitched in — like underworld mercenaries without orders. Bands like 1349, Watain, Belphegor, all screaming frostbitten allegiance to the black metal pantheon. There’s also Black Sabbath for the roots, Rammstein for the menace, and a gigantic “666” patch I got free with a T-shirt from Poland — because subtlety is for jazz fans.

The vest is a declaration. It says: I’m part of this tribe. I belong here. I worship at this altar. I speak the language of the riff and the scream and the power of the breakdown. But zoom in and you see it for what it really is: a wearable ego shrine.

It’s not just about music. It’s about identity. The undercurrents are loud and clunky: I’m different from the people in the supermarket. I’m darker than the alt-rock people. I’m more kvlt than the old-school headbangers. It’s a tattered provocation — an ego in corpse paint, screaming for meaning in a world burning to the ground. And it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: separate me from you while pretending to connect us.

Somewhere between Slayer tours and nightly doomscrolling, I got tangled up in Buddhism. Not the pithy, incense-infused pageantry you find on Instagram, powered by carefully-staged photographs and ham-fisted self-empowerment quotes. The real thing. The kind with blood on its robes and silence like a knife passing through the night air. The kind that sits in stillness so long it forgets its own name.

I bounced between schools like a spiritual tourist on meth. Theravāda, with its clinical dismantling of suffering like an autopsy report. Tibetan Vajrayāna, with its kaleidoscopic mandalas, deities, death manuals and tantric pyromania. And then there was Zen: the chain-smoking, wall-staring punk rock uncle of Buddhism who just stares you down and says, “Who the hell is asking?”

And here’s the thing — I liked little bits of all of them. Too much. Just like I like bits of black metal, death metal, thrash, stadium rock, ‘80s pop and cheesy ‘70s ballads. The problem is that I wasn’t studying Buddhism. I was trying on spiritual battle vests. I wanted to belong to a lineage. I wanted to know which chants to chant, which texts to quote, which dead guy to venerate when things got weird. And just like that, I turned liberation into branding.

This morning, while drinking a coffee strong enough to melt enamel, I cracked open The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I hit a passage on reincarnation that didn’t just raise an eyebrow — it set off a full internal alarm. It didn’t feel like deep truth. It felt like cosmic fan fiction. And like a junkie switching lanes, I pivoted to Zen, thinking I’d find a cleaner take. What I got instead was a koan and a shrug: “What is your original face before your parents were born?”

Which is another way of saying: why are you still trying to be someone?

And that’s when it hit me. I’ve been trying to be Zen. Which is the most un-Zen move possible. That’s like trying to impress water by being wetter.

Trying to be Zen is a trap. It starts innocently enough. You read a book. You sit in silence. You notice yourself not reacting to a rude barista and think, hot damn, I’m basically Dōgen in Doc Martens. Then it creeps in. You update your social bios. You buy incense you don’t need. You casually mention to strangers that you practise mindfulness while silently judging their hairstyle. Suddenly, you’re not living Zen. You’re LARPing it. You’re that guy at the metal show wearing patches for bands he’s never listened to — a walking Wikipedia page with opinions and no soul.

And that’s where Zen slaps the teeth out of your mouth. Linji — that chain-smoking, no-prisoners Zen master — said, “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” He meant it. If you meet anything you’re trying to become, torch it. Because Zen is not about calm. It’s not about looking enlightened. It’s not about reciting the right dead guys. Zen is the blade that cuts through all of that. It’s a Molotov cocktail lobbed directly at your curated identity. It wants your attention, not your performance.

Only when you stop trying to be someone can you start to feel what you actually are — awake, aware, wildly alive, and absolutely not a brand.

So what do you do instead?

You sit. You shut the hell up. Not to become anything, not to get anywhere, but to sit like a dumb, beautiful animal with no story and no goal. You do one thing at a time. You walk. You eat. You breathe. You feed your dogs. You stop narrating your life like a TED Talk. You let go of the idea that you’ll ever get it, because there’s nothing to get. And once you really see that — I mean feel it in your bones — then maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally start living the life that was always waiting for you, right here in the middle of the goddamn chaos. According to people way smarter than I am, anyway.

But this morning, the light dawned. I can’t be Zen. All I can do is burn off everything that isn’t.

And in that wordless, shining moment — the one without dogma, without decoration, without a single thing to prove — I heard it; the laugh of Zen, howling like a blast beat in an empty temple, echoing through the smouldering ruins of who I thought I was.