“Live courageously bold! Live in such a manner that at the end of this day, at the end of this year, at the end of this precious life, you can hold your head up high, smile, and be proud of a life well lived.”
—Steve Maraboli
 

eah, but shouldn’t you be in the moment and allow life to decide how to live? Isn’t it egotistical to have goals? Wouldn’t wanting something for yourself be an attachment? I thought Zen was about just being – not doing.”

I see a common thread in questions like these. One that is pervasive and points seekers to a very conflicted approach to taking action in the world. People come to Zen practice assuming that it’s about calmness, dispassion, passiveness, and peacefulness. While I will agree that on the inside, people practicing mindfulness, harmless livelihood, and introspective, compassionate self-mentoring will be Centered – on the outside, their lives can look extremely active and complex.

The threads that bind these stereotypes about Zen and “egoless living” are concepts logically formulated by the voices of egocentricity themselves.

The voices take the spirit of living in the moment and twist it into rules of conduct – filled with shoulds, right/wrong, good/bad, absolutes, shame, and quietism. They paralyze a person from planning anything in the future – arguing there is no future. Or they take goals and present them from their own self-centered, egotistical point of view and make them off-limits to us – convincing us that pursuing them will make us egotistical (the irony)! Bound by these rules, a person can’t even leave a difficult situation because that would be wanting something different than “what is.” Trapped by these rules, a human is left to drift in a safe, secure, small, flatlined existence of ineffectiveness (led by the nose by the voices, of course). The only thing served by this ridiculous arrangement is the ego itself, for it thrives off the suffering it creates by controlling us regardless of the content. And if it can use spiritual practice as the content, so much the better!

In my experience, a practitioner’s life is an expression of conscious creation. It is a moment-by-moment choice to do what is best for all, which includes growing and developing in ways that threaten the voices and bolster the human spirit. It is about setting goals that free themselves from limiting Karmic patterns, and in this way free others from the same. Someone practicing in this manner uses their experience to learn how resistance works – not in theory, but by going up and facing it head-on. Life, from practice, is a game and a grand experiment. Goals are created and used to evoke the person inside of themselves who is needed to achieve that goal. In this way, our goals transform our spirit. They call out the best in us to rise up and step free of conditioned mind.

What will happen when you choose to live this way? You’ll experience excitement and you’ll also experience fear.

Know this to be true: YOU, authentic you, is the one experiencing the excitement. The voices are experiencing the fear. Their fear is not your fear. It’s just very close to you. Their fear is the fear they have of losing your soul. That’s why they’ll tell you it’s your fear. They will tell you it’s your fear of failure, or embarrassment, or even death. But I will tell you that they are using those fears as weapons targeted to convince you to quit. They will say these fears are coming at you from the outside. But they are not. Only the voices can beat you up for being a “failure,” by labeling it as such. Only they can attach significance to what other people may or may not be thinking about you to “embarrass” you. Only they can project a worst case scenario that may or may not come to pass if you take a single step. They will blame the world and they will blame you so that they may hide themselves.

Make no mistake, they are threatened. And this is good!

They know, and you now know, that taking steps in the direction of living powerfully is a threat to their control over you. Which is perfect enough reason to take the first step. To prove to yourself that you can do it.

So that you may continue taking steps toward living courageously bold. So that at the end of the year, day, moment you may smile proudly at yourself for a life well lived!