Read time 7 minutes. Awareness Beyond Conditioning is a stand alone article in our Everyday Zen series.
Today’s lesson is one we can get excited about. It’s where the knowledge we’ve been gathering begins to shift into practice—into something lived. Many of Charlotte Joko Beck’s teachings turn on Zazen, the seated meditation practice central to Zen. But Beck also spoke of something else, something less formal and perhaps more demanding: what she called Everyday Zen.
What does she mean by this phrase?
In the film Glengarry Glen Ross the sales mantra is “ABC—always be closing.” No matter where they stand in their pitch, the endgame is never out of sight. Everyday Zen offers a different sort of ABC: Awareness Beyond Conditioning.
Can we move through the hours of our days—work, chores, conversations, meals—with this quiet directive in the background? Can we take care of what must be done without losing the thread of awareness itself? This is the work. And it is practice that can loosen the grip of conditioning—sometimes in ways more radical than hours of seated meditation. Beck put it simply: we are not reprogramming ourselves; we are deprogramming ourselves.
Here are five tools to jumpstart that deprogramming.
Greet the day
The first act of practice is also the simplest: waking.
When you open your eyes in the morning, pause. Take a beat to be grateful, or to simply be. Feel life flowing through you. Let yourself enjoy, for a second longer, the warmth of the bed. Greet the day with presence.
As you rise, glance honestly at whatever you feel—eagerness, dread, neutrality. It doesn’t matter. The glance itself is enough. That glance contains all that we’ve learned so far. It is the reminder of what we are really trying to do with this day.
Difficulties will come. Some tasks will feel pointless. Others will sting. But every challenge is an opportunity for practice. They will all serve the same purpose if we allow them to: the realization of peace. This is not about sugarcoating, not about forced positivity. It is about priority. As Nisargadatta Maharaj said: If you want peace, deserve it.
Presence through the senses
Presence is not something to chase. The moment you reach for it, it slips. So presence is something we learn to invite it.
Breath practice is one way. Feeling the subtle energy of the body is another. But there is an older, simpler way—one you’ve known since birth: the five senses.
Think of the smell of a favorite meal drifting from the kitchen. Or the sudden cry of a hawk overhead. In moments like these, life sharpens. Attention becomes effortless. Presence arrives unannounced.
A delicate balance of effort and surrender that allows experience to become pure. This is Everyday Zen: watching closely enough so that ordinary sensation becomes extraordinary life.
Active meditations
Life is crowded. Few of us feel we have thirty spare minutes each day to sit cross-legged in silence. For some, the demand itself becomes a barrier.
There is another way. We call them active meditations—practices folded into the fabric of ordinary activities.
Watching TV can be practice, if done as a neutral observer. Standing in line can be practice, if we refuse to collapse into the trance of waiting. There is no waiting anymore. There is only the moment before you.
Here lies the danger: reaching for your phone, distracting yourself, chasing comfort. These are the habits that hide practice. But even bad practice—fumbling, restless, distracted—is infinitely better than none. Active meditation trains us to choose awareness over old illusions, moment after moment.
Observing thoughts and emotions
An old saying: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.”
The work doesn’t change. Only the quality of attention does.
Some jobs are unpleasant. Bathrooms still need scrubbing. Taxes still need filing. What changes is the stance we take toward our inner commentary. Beck emphasized this point again and again: our mental narrative shapes the quality of our lives.
We can acknowledge the story: This is boring. I don’t want to be here. This should be someone else’s job. Fine. But once seen, the story loses its absolute authority. In that space, acceptance can open.
Self-observation also cuts short the vicious circles of thought and emotion. Complaining does not clean the bathroom. It only amplifies resistance and exhausts the body. Observing without clinging frees energy for what needs to be done. This is Everyday Zen at work.
Letting go
The last tool is also the most radical: letting go.
This practice builds directly on self-observation. Noticing thought and emotion is step one. Releasing them is step two. At first it feels impossible. But in time, it becomes the natural extension of awareness itself.
Think of it as a signal. Just as the moment of waiting has been reframed into a moment for practice, the moment of not feeling right can become the same kind of signal. It is not a problem to solve. It is a reminder: let go.
This does not mean abandoning common sense. Urgent situations call for action. Life-or-death requires attention. But once that has been determined, thought and emotion have already served their purpose. Past that point, they only drag us deeper into illusion.
Everyday Zen trains us to recognize these alerts quickly, and to respond just as quickly with practice. If you want peace, choose peace.
Everyday Zen as a lifestyle
At first, these tools require convincing. You will argue with yourself. You will stall. But persistence reshapes habit. In time, the glance becomes instant, the shift effortless. Doing becomes not-doing.
This is the arc of Everyday Zen: awareness that is no longer effortful, but natural. Life is lived not in reaction, but in recognition.
Cross the threshold. Greet the day. Enter presence through the senses. Practice while active. Observe thoughts. Let go. Do these not once, but continually. Then Everyday Zen ceases to be a concept. It becomes the life you are living.
Explore more:
As I said, there is more than one way to peel a potato. One of those ways is Zazen.
This article from the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies explores the differences between Zazen and meditation. It is beautifully written, rich in detail, and digs deeply into Zen philosophy—what makes it distinct from other traditions. Consider this excerpt:
“Dōgen (1200–1252) was the founder of the Sōtō Zen tradition… Dōgen uses various terms to describe Zazen, one of which is gotsu-za, meaning ‘sitting immovable like a bold mountain.’”
The imagery is simple, stoic, and powerful—and yet, at the same time, it gestures toward nothing. From there, the article continues, offering a wealth of insight into the unique character of Zazen.
Meditation vs. Zazen
The article explains:
“Traditional meditation is structured dualistically, with a sitting body as a container and a meditating mind as the contents. The emphasis is always on meditation as mental exercise. In such a dualistic structure, the body sits while the mind does something else.
For Dōgen, on the other hand, the objective of Zazen is just to sit in kekkafuza correctly—there is absolutely nothing to add to it. It is kekkafuza plus zero. Kōdō Sawaki Roshi, the great Zen master of early 20th century Japan, said, ‘Just sit Zazen, and that’s the end of it.’ In this understanding, Zazen goes beyond mind/body dualism; both the body and the mind are simultaneously and completely used up just by the act of sitting in kekkafuza.”
The delicate art of Zen revealed
Here we see the quiet paradox at the heart of Zazen: the removal of goals, the collapse of duality, the dissolution of striving. It is not about self-improvement. It’s not about accomplishment. It is simply sitting—body and mind consumed in one act, nothing extra.
This is also where Zen often seems most unrelated to the transformation we imagine we are pursuing. But in that very distance lies the heart of it.
As the article concludes:
“In reality s/he is doing only one thing—to continuously aim at the correct sitting posture with the whole body. The human being is freed from being a human being… and finally, tunes into the universe.”
–
Thanks for visiting Greatfruit Zen Mind.
We want to hear from you.
→ Join The Undercurrent.
🌀 From the GZM Archives – Polished, Preserved, Still Relevant.
Leave a Reply