I didn’t find Zen. Zen found me — and lately, it has been finding me in the hardest places.
A hospice room. A phone call I was but wasn’t ready for. A letter written in Japanese that I could barely read — holding it in my hands, knowing what it meant, not knowing how to say it to my mother.
Grief has a way of making everything else very small — and very clear — at the same time.
My aunt Miyoko recently passed as a Buddhist priest. So direct and no-nonsense, yet she moved through this world with a purposeful grace I am still learning to understand — rooted in something ancient, something unshakeable, something that made you feel steadier just standing near her. She understood impermanence the way most of us only read about it. She lived it. She taught it. And then, quietly, she embodied it one final time.
When my cousin Tatsuya wrote to tell us she had passed, his letter came in Japanese. I sat with that letter longer than I want to admit. My Japanese — limited, rusty, learned in fragments across a lifetime, was not enough. And yet I had to find a way to bring its meaning to my mother. My mother, who has dementia. I sent a copy to my sister, and awaited her translation. As I waited with my mother, who some days knows me completely and some days is somewhere else, somewhere I cannot follow. I sat beside her and read what I could. Filled in what I couldn’t. I watched her face move through something ancient and wordless. The kind of knowing that lives deeper than language, deeper than memory, deeper even than the disease that has been quietly stealing pieces of her.
She understood.
Not every word. But the weight of it. The love behind it. The loss. The emotional raw, uncontrollable ‘Oh no’ the only words she could summon. Repeated. I could only put my arms around her, trying to comfort her and myself. If I did speak the words, she couldn’t comprehend them. Tears I had never seen from her, so big, flowing unstoppable out of her closed eyes. Not moving as she sat there with the note tightly in her bent arthritic hands.
And in that moment I understood something too.
Zen was never about having the right words. It was always about being present enough to sit inside the ones you don’t have.
This season of my life has been the most humbling curriculum I have ever been handed.
With my father’s decline and recent passing. My mother’s dementia. The daily practice of showing up as a caregiver when you are also a daughter, still grieving, still learning, still human.
Some days I show up with patience and presence. Some days I show up anyway — depleted, uncertain, doing my best with what I have left.
Both count. Zen taught me that. Miyoko taught me that.
Here is what I know now that I didn’t know before…
Impermanence is not a concept to understand. It is a lived experience — and it changes everything.
You can study mindfulness for years and still be undone by a Tuesday afternoon letter written in a language you only half remember.
Grief and gratitude are not opposites. They live in the same breath.
Also that presence is not a luxury for people who have time. It is the only thing that actually helps when everything else falls away.
The ancient teachers knew this. They built entire philosophies around the truth that nothing lasts. Not because life is cruel, but because impermanence is what makes each moment worth paying attention to.
Mono no aware. The bittersweet beauty of things passing.
I feel that now in my bones. In my mother’s eyes. In a letter I could only half read. In a grief that doesn’t announce itself — it just quietly sits down beside you and stays. I am not writing from a place of having it figured out.
I am writing from the middle of it — the caregiving, the grief, the love, the exhaustion, the gratitude, the daily practice of coming back to what is true and simple and real when everything else feels uncertain.
That is what KotsuZen is built on now.
Not perfection. Not arrival. Not a life that looks good from the outside.
A life that is honest. Present. Rooted. Even when the ground is shifting beneath your feet and the words on the page are only half yours to read.
And underneath all of it — a thought I keep trying not to finish.
The one that starts when she laughs at something only she can see. Talking to her stuffed pig she has adorned with earrings from her recently rediscovered jewelry box. When she reaches for my hand the way she always has. When she tilts her head at me with that look — that goofy, unstoppable, ever-ready look that has been following me through my entire life now like the world’s most devoted little shadow.
My mother has always been my Energizer Bunny.
Still going. Still present in her own way. Still her, even now. Even inside the fog that dementia wraps around a person like slow weather. She is still in there. I know she is. I can feel her.
And that is exactly what makes this so hard.
She was more than my mother.
She was my travel guide. My interpreter. My cultural compass through every temple gate, every stone garden, every incense-thick morning in Japan that I would not have understood without her walking beside me — matter of fact and reverent in the same breath, the way only she could be.
She could move through a sacred space and explain it to you without ever breaking the silence of it. She made ancient things feel personal. She made foreign ground feel like home.
Every temple we explored together — Kyoto, Nara, the small ones tucked into hillsides that no guidebook ever listed — she named them, explained them, stood quietly inside them with a kind of belonging I was still learning. I was always learning from her.
Aunt Miyoko walking with us — a Buddhist priest among the places her practice was born — the three of us moving through spaces where impermanence was not just philosophy but architecture. Stone worn smooth by ten thousand hands. Incense smoke rising and dissolving. Bells that rang and then returned to silence.
I didn’t know those trips were also lessons.
I know now.
Mono no aware.
The Japanese phrase for the particular ache of beautiful things passing. It is not quite sadness. It is not quite gratitude. It is both at once — the bittersweet awareness that this moment is precious because it will not last.
My mother taught me that word the way she taught me everything — by living it so naturally I almost missed it.
I am not missing it now.
I try not to let my thoughts finish the sentence that begins with what will it be like when —
I try. Some days I am better at it than others.
Zen does not ask us to pretend the hard things are not coming. It asks us to be here fully — right now, in this moment — before the next one arrives. To not spend today’s presence on tomorrow’s grief.
So I come back.
To her laugh. To her hand in mine. To the way she still looks at me sometimes like I am the funniest thing she has ever seen. Inspecting my clothes. This mostly goofy little Energizer Bunny, still going, still here, still bits of my mom for this moment.
I come back to that.
One breath at a time.
That is the practice.
It’s all that practice ever is. and I write my books that meet you where you are.
The Essential Handbook of Daily Zen Hacks — because simplicity saves us when complexity overwhelms us.
Daily Zen Hacks Guided Journal — because sometimes writing our way through is the only way through.
Sigma Teen Energy — because teenagers are carrying weight no one taught them to put down, and they deserve real tools, not platitudes. And coming soon — Kotsu Zen Teen Energy — because this next generation needs Zen more than any before them, and they need it in a language that actually reaches them where they live.
If you found your way here —
Maybe life got loud. Maybe someone you love is slipping away — slowly, in pieces, in a language you can’t quite reach. Maybe you are the one holding everyone else together and quietly wondering who is holding you.
You are in the right place.
Not because I have the answers. But because I am asking the same questions. Sitting with the same grief, the same love, the same impermanence and I have learned that showing up honestly, with one quiet breath at a time, is itself a practice worth everything.
Miyoko knew that.
My mother, even now, knows that. Every day I try to remember.
— Audrey Kaihatsu Author | Teacher | Caregiver | Daughter Daily Zen Practitioner Founder, KotsuZen | Daily Zen Hacks