Unfortify Your Mind
The Stoics taught us to construct an inner fortress to withstand life’s blows. Zen teaches the opposite... to drop the walls entirely.
Life is full of adversity. No matter who you are, no matter how carefully you plan, misfortune will find its way in.
Illness strikes without warning.
Relationships fracture and dissolve.
Bills pile up and drain your savings.
Hopes and dreams collapse under their own immense weight.
There is no path through life that avoids pain, loss, or uncertainty.
Sooner or later, every one of us will face the storm.
The Stoic Fortress
The Stoics were well acquainted with adversity and misfortune.
Epictetus was born into slavery and walked with a crippled leg for most of his life.
Seneca spent years in exile and was later forced to kill himself by Emperor Nero (who was also his student at the time).
The Stoics arrived at their own version of the Buddhist dukkha — the teaching that suffering is simply an inseparable part of the human condition.
They taught that rather than trying to avoid adversity, we’re better off accepting this truth at face value and preparing ourselves with the tools to navigate it skillfully.
Their answer was to build an inner fortress — a citadel of self-control and rigid discipline to protect us from the destructive tendencies of our own raw and untethered emotions in the face of adversity.
When we allow our emotions to rise up and react emotionally to hardship, we suffer twice — once from the event itself, and again from the fallout of our own inner turmoil.
Reactive emotions cloud our ability to see things clearly and leave us vulnerable to missteps that worsen our condition.
Marcus Aurelius put it plainly — “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
His message was simple — we can’t stop the storms of life, but we can control how we respond to them. If we let every setback dictate our inner state, we become slaves to circumstance.
His thesis was that if we master our mind, we can endure anything — not because the world becomes less cruel, but because we stop giving it the power to undo us.
Zen Emptiness
The old Zen masters shared a similar vision of resilience, but disagreed on the method. Where the Stoics sought protection in the form of towering inner walls and thick emotional armor, Zen embraces the exact opposite — to tear down the walls and leave nothing for the storm to strike.
The real destruction from the storm doesn’t come from the wind or the rain, but from the resistance to it.
We endure by creating empty space for the storm to flow through us without resistance.
This is the same approach the palm tree takes to survive devastating tropical storms.
The palm tree doesn’t grow strong trunks like the oak, or sprawling branches like the pine — instead, it forms wide-spaced fronds on top of long, supple trunks.
This openness allows even the strongest hurricanes to pass right through them.
The mighty oak, with all its strength, is uprooted and broken — its rigid trunk splintered under the forces it failed to resist.
What It Means To Create Space
The Stoics suggest that through emotional discipline, our shield becomes strong and unyielding — but it also becomes heavy and burdensome. It demands constant effort to keep it raised.
The Zen approach rests less on guarding against every blow and more on opening space. This space is made by releasing the stories we cling to and the judgments we cast on our experiences.
Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch said — “The mind should be like a mirror: bright and clear, reflecting without clinging.”
Grief, anger, joy — all appear, all pass. The mirror does not retain their image.
When we let go of clinging, we release the demand for life to be different than it is — to stop gripping the past, chasing the future, or clutching at the illusion of control. There is no “how things should have been.”
To drop judgment is to stop slicing experience into “good and bad,” “gain and loss.”
Instead, each moment is met directly, nothing added, nothing taken away — reality seen as it is without distortion.
When we meet life this way, we leave no barriers for the storm to grip and tear us apart. Like the palm that bends under the fiercest winds, misfortune passes through us without breaking us.
I was inspired to write this after reading the book The Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday.
Ryan’s books are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the ideas of the early Stoics. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but notice a funny overlap between certain Stoic ideals and Zen, despite both having very distinct cultural origins.
I’ll probably write more in the future on this topic and how it overlaps (or counters) with Zen. Subscribe if this topic interests you.
There’s something honest here about exhaustion from self-control dressed as virtue.
I don’t fully buy the Stoic vs Zen framing, real people move between armor and openness depending on the wound.
Dropping the wall takes courage, not softness, because then you feel everything without the fantasy of mastery.
The danger is turning openness into another technique to feel safe.
Thanks for this excellent reminder of what two invaluable streams of ancient wisdom have to teach us - very helpful for a distracted amateur like me. The palm tree example is memorable.