Through fasting, I’m seeing with new clarity something I’ve long suspected: the mind is an extraordinarily powerful tool, but if misunderstood it can become our worst enemy. How many times have I justified what I was eating with thoughts like, “I’m on holiday,” “It’s Friday,” “It’s a birthday…” The body doesn’t know these stories. It only asks for what nourishes it, not poisons that satisfy fleeting ideas.
I’m not interested in dwelling on the past, but in recognizing this: the mind often governs our lives in ignorance, dragging us into habits, traditions, and cultural patterns that have little to do with what we truly need. We become slaves to small pleasures that don’t nourish but deceive.
And yet, the mind is not only deception. It is also guidance, healing, and teaching. I don’t demonize it—how could I? To do so would be to deny the very root of my experience. Even this tool I’m writing with now wouldn’t exist without the human mind. The mind is double: it creates chains and it breaks them, it builds prisons and points the way out. The key is to know it, to discern with honesty.
Having ideas is not the problem; the problem is identifying with them, mistaking them for who we are, defending them as if they were our very skin. I live in a world of ideas—I know this works for me—but I try not to impose them. I exchange them. They pass through me like in a tube, without getting stuck. They enter, they leave. When they don’t cling, they become tools for dialogue rather than prisons.
The real difficulty lies here: accepting fluidity, not clinging. It’s frightening, because it threatens what we’ve always believed to be solid. But this is the heart of Zen practice: to dissolve the solid, to melt false securities, to allow things to be alive, flexible, free from rigid identities and convictions.
To be human means, first of all, to know oneself. And to know oneself is to look at the mind with courage: to see its illusions, to welcome its creativity, to face its double nature without fear. This is how we learn not to live confined within the walls of the mind, but to explore the whole of life with gratitude and curiosity.
Zen Mindfulness Cambridge Zenways Italia 