What Is Zen: The Art of Simple Living About?
Zen: The Art of Simple Living is written by Shunmyo Masuno, a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest and garden designer. The book takes ideas rooted in Zen and brings them into everyday life through 100 short practices.
Some of them are almost surprisingly ordinary: wake up fifteen minutes earlier, take off your shoes neatly, enjoy a cup of coffee, breathe slowly. Others explore worry, attachment, comparison, gratitude and the way we relate to other people.
You don’t need any previous knowledge of Zen to follow the book. Masuno explains each idea through familiar situations, and most chapters are only a few pages long. You can read one while having breakfast, another on the train, or open the book somewhere in the middle when you have ten quiet minutes.
100 Simple Zen Practices for Everyday Life
The 100 practices are divided into four parts, beginning with small adjustments to everyday habits and gradually moving towards relationships and broader ways of looking at life.
The format makes this a particularly nice book to read slowly. There is no real benefit in racing through ten practices and forgetting nine of them by lunchtime.
One way to read it is to keep a pencil nearby and mark the chapters that make you stop for a moment. Come back to those later. You may find that five or six practices become much more useful to you than trying to remember all 100.
A journal also works well alongside the book. After a chapter catches your attention, write down just two things: Why did this one stand out? Where could it fit into my day?
What Makes Zen: The Art of Simple Living Different?
Masuno often starts with things that are already part of the day.
The window you open in the morning. The cup you’re drinking from. Your handwriting. Your shoes by the door. Your breathing.
That practicality is one of the book’s most appealing qualities. You aren’t being handed an elaborate new routine that needs an earlier alarm, a shopping list and forty-five uninterrupted minutes every morning.
Take the chapter about morning air. You don’t need to add anything to your schedule. You only have to notice something that was there anyway: the cool air coming through an open window, the sound of traffic beginning outside, a grey October sky, the difference in the light as the seasons change.
This is where many of Masuno’s ideas fit naturally with the way we think about slowing down at Slow Mornings Club. Life doesn’t necessarily have to stop for us to experience it with a little more attention. The day still moves forward. There is still work to do, somewhere to be, breakfast to make. A few minutes of space can exist alongside all of that.
8 Lessons from Zen: The Art of Simple Living That Stayed With Us
Out of the 100 practices, these were the pages we kept marking and returning to. Together, they say quite a lot about how much can change in the ordinary parts of a day.
Wake Up Fifteen Minutes Earlier
Of all the chapters we marked, this one might be the closest to the heart of Slow Mornings Club.
Fifteen minutes isn’t a dramatic lifestyle change. It could simply mean having enough time to sit at the kitchen table instead of drinking coffee while getting dressed. You might actually finish breakfast. You could write a few lines in your journal, water the plants or leave home without that familiar last-minute search for keys.
The important part is what happens to those extra minutes.
If waking earlier simply creates another quarter of an hour for emails, chores and getting ahead, the morning can quickly become just as crowded as before.
Try waking fifteen minutes earlier one morning and don’t plan anything productive for that time. Make your usual coffee. Sit down while you drink it. See what changes when the morning has a little margin built into it.
Make Time for Emptiness
Think about the last time you had five minutes with absolutely nothing to do.
Maybe you arrived early for an appointment. The kettle was boiling. Your friend was running late. You were sitting on the bus with three stops to go.
Chances are, your phone came out.
Masuno writes about deliberately creating emptiness in the day. That idea feels increasingly unusual when almost every small gap can be filled with messages, headlines, videos, podcasts or another quick task.
It can be interesting to leave one of those gaps alone.
Let the coffee brew without checking anything. Sit for five minutes after breakfast before getting up. If you arrive early, wait without automatically reaching into your bag.
You may notice impatience first. Or boredom. Your mind may immediately start producing a list of things you could be doing instead.
That’s useful to notice too.
Savour the Morning Air
This is such a small practice that it would be easy to overlook.
Open the window before the day gets going and pay attention for a moment.
An October morning might bring cold air against your face, the smell of rain, leaves moving along the pavement or the first sounds from the street below. On another morning, the room might fill with bright sunlight before you’ve even made coffee.
The point isn’t to make the moment special. You’re simply noticing what this particular morning feels like.
If you want to turn it into a tiny mindfulness practice, stay at the window long enough to notice three things: something you can see, something you can hear and something you can feel.
Tomorrow’s answers will probably be different.
Make a Delicious Cup of Coffee
We were unlikely to pass over a chapter with this title.
Masuno uses coffee to draw attention to the amount of work and care contained in something we consume so casually. Before that cup reaches the breakfast table, coffee has been grown, harvested, processed, transported, roasted and prepared.
Most mornings, none of this crosses our minds. We press a button or fill the French press while thinking about what comes next.
There’s no need to turn coffee into a ceremony. Give it your attention for the first few minutes.
Listen to the coffee machine. Notice the smell when you pour it. Feel the warmth of the mug in your hands. Take the first sip before opening Instagram or checking your messages.
The coffee hasn’t changed. Your experience of drinking it probably has.
And yes, the same applies to tea.
Put Pen to Paper With Care
Handwriting asks for a different pace.
We type quickly, correct ourselves instantly and delete sentences without much thought. A pen moving across paper is slower. Sometimes that extra second is enough to let a thought develop before we move on to the next one.
Masuno’s chapter doesn’t require a long journaling practice, and neither do we.
A single line can be enough.
If the page is blank and nothing immediately comes to mind, start somewhere concrete:
What does this morning feel like?
What has been occupying my thoughts lately?
What would I like a little more room for today?
What am I looking forward to?
Or simply describe what’s around you – the half-finished coffee beside the notebook, rain against the window, a quiet house, a morning that already feels rushed.
There doesn’t always need to be a lesson hiding at the bottom of the page. Sometimes writing down where you are is enough.
Breathe Slowly
This practice needs very little preparation because your breath is already there.
Masuno’s suggestion is simply to pay attention to it and slow down.
Try it while you’re still sitting on the edge of the bed in the morning. Or while waiting for the kettle. Or at your desk before beginning work.
Take five unhurried breaths and notice each inhale and exhale. There is no need to count perfectly or turn it into a formal meditation.
We particularly like this practice because it travels well. A quiet morning at home is lovely, but calm can’t depend entirely on having the perfect surroundings. Your breath is still available on a busy commute, in an airport queue or five minutes before a difficult meeting.
That makes this one of the easiest ideas in the book to carry into the less peaceful parts of everyday life.
Make Time to Be Alone
There is an interesting difference between being physically alone and actually having time to yourself.
You can sit alone on the sofa while listening to a podcast, answering messages and scrolling through the lives of dozens of other people. Technically, nobody else is in the room. Your attention is still very crowded.
Masuno encourages making deliberate time for solitude.
It could be a walk around the neighbourhood without headphones. Breakfast alone at the table. Ten minutes on the balcony. A cup of coffee without your phone beside it.
If spending time alone feels unfamiliar, start small. You don’t need an entire silent afternoon.
And if you journal afterwards, there is one question worth sitting with:
When I’m given quiet time, what do I naturally want to do with it?
Cultivate Your Sense of Gratitude
Gratitude appears often in wellness spaces, and repetition can sometimes make the practice feel automatic.
Write three things. Tick the box. Continue with the day.
Masuno’s chapter encouraged us to look more closely.
Instead of writing I’m grateful for my morning coffee, ask what you’re actually appreciating about it. Maybe somebody made it for you. Maybe it was ten peaceful minutes before the house woke up. Maybe it was the first warm thing you held after stepping out of bed on a cold morning.
Adding one word can help:
because.
I’m grateful for this quiet breakfast because I know the rest of my day will be busy.
I’m grateful for the message from my friend because it made me feel remembered.
I’m grateful for the rain because I finally had an excuse to spend the morning at home.
Specific gratitude tends to reveal things that a general list can miss.
When Zen Starts to Look a Lot Like a Slow Morning
By the time we had marked all these pages, the connection was difficult to miss.
Wake a little earlier. Open the window. Notice the air. Make coffee with care. Write something down. Breathe. Leave a little empty space. Spend some time alone. Remember what you appreciate.
None of this requires a two-hour morning routine.
That matters to us.
Slow Mornings Club has never been about having endless free time or moving through every day at half speed. Most of us have work, appointments, families, travel, errands and mornings when the alarm goes off far earlier than we’d like.
Slowing down can happen inside a life that is still moving.
Perhaps you have fifteen minutes before leaving for work. Keep your phone away while you drink your coffee. If mornings are hectic, take three slow breaths while the toast is in the toaster. Write one sentence rather than three pages. Notice the cold air during the walk from your front door to the car.
If you’d like to put Masuno’s ideas into practice, choose one of the eight for the next seven days.
Keep the practice the same and make a one-line note afterwards about what you noticed. At the end of the week, look back over those seven lines.
Did the practice fit naturally into your day? Did you begin to remember it without prompting? Did anything about that small part of your day feel different?
You can keep it, change it or leave it there. Gentle routines are much easier to trust when they have actually earned their place in our lives.
Who Is Zen: The Art of Simple Living For?
This book is likely to appeal to readers who enjoy mindfulness, journaling, simplicity and practical ideas they can experiment with in everyday life. It’s also an approachable place to encounter Zen-inspired thinking if you haven’t read much about Zen before.
The short chapters make it easy to read when you don’t have long stretches of uninterrupted time. You can keep it on the bedside table, read one practice over breakfast or return to a marked chapter when you need it.
It is useful to know what kind of book you’re choosing, though. Zen: The Art of Simple Living isn’t a comprehensive introduction to the history, philosophy or religious traditions of Zen Buddhism. Someone looking for a deeper study of Zen will need more than this book.
Masuno’s focus here is practical: how ideas shaped by Zen might show up in the way we wake up, eat, work, think, interact with others and move through ordinary days.
Is Zen: The Art of Simple Living Worth Reading?
If your mornings have been feeling rushed, cluttered, or disconnected, Stillness Speaks offers a gentle invitation back to yourself.
Not through dramatic transformation.
Not through complicated routines.
But through awareness.
A few pages.
A few quiet moments.
A little more attention to the life already unfolding around you.
Sometimes that is enough to change the entire feeling of a day.
If you’d like to explore all 100 of Shunmyo Masuno’s practices for yourself, you can find Zen: The Art of Simple Living on Amazon and choose the ideas you’d like to bring into your own everyday routine.
If Zen: The Art of Simple Living sounds like your kind of read, we have plenty more books to keep you company over a quiet cup of coffee. Explore our Books for Slow Mornings collection for thoughtful reads on mindfulness, reflection, simplicity and finding a little more space in everyday life.
A Soft Note to Carry With You
Leave a little room in your day with no plans for how to fill it. Drink the coffee while it is still warm, open the window and notice the air, write something down by hand. You don’t need to practise all 100 ideas in this book. Start with the one that made you stop and think, I could do this.
