Zen Practice for Hacking the Ego
Yogetsu Akasaka — Zen Monk
YOGETSU AKASAKA (JPN)
Zen Buddhist Monk & Zen Music Artist
Be a good friend to your ego. Acceptance, tolerance, and compassion are the keys. Don’t deny or resist anything negative or positive; just accept the feeling, experience it, and then let it go.
Summary
- Ego is a fundamental mental construct used to identify oneself, yet it causes suffering by constantly generating desires and aversions. - Developing a healthy relationship with the ego involves treating it as a best friend by listening to it and acknowledging its presence without judgment. - Daily practices like cleaning provide opportunities to observe the ego's resistance and experience the connection between the inner self and the outer environment. - True transformation requires total acceptance of emotions, allowing them to appear and disappear naturally rather than resisting or attaching to them. - Mindfulness and meditation serve as mirrors to the self, helping to develop tolerance and compassion for others by first understanding one's own internal reactions.
Article
Zen Practice For Hacking The Ego
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, Yogetsu Akasaka Offered A Quiet Rebuke To The Age Of Self-Optimisation
In a gathering devoted to upgrading the body and sharpening the mind, Yogetsu Akasaka arrived with a more elusive proposition. Speaking at **Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam** on **Saturday, 15 October 2022**, the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, beatboxer, handpan player and live looping artist did not promise domination over the self. He suggested something more difficult, and perhaps more humane: friendship with the ego.
His presentation, **Zen Practice for Hacking the Ego: Mindfulness, Acceptance & Compassion**, unfolded less like a productivity lecture than a spiritual inversion. In a culture obsessed with transcendence, Akasaka argued that suffering begins with the ordinary mechanics of identity itself. The ego, he said, is necessary. It allows us to know who we are, to name our roles, our histories, our desires. Yet it is also the force that keeps whispering dissatisfaction: I want this. I do not want that. I need more. I must avoid pain.
The question, then, was not how to destroy the ego, but how to live beside it without becoming its prisoner.
The Ego As Companion, Not Enemy
Akasaka refused the easy language of self-erasure. The ego, in his telling, was not a villain to be conquered but a constant companion to be understood.
“My answer is: be a good friend to the ego,” he said.
It was a striking formulation, especially in a room likely accustomed to language of control, hacking and enhancement. A good friend, he explained, listens. A good friend does not deny presence. A good friend stays.
That approach shifted the moral geometry of inner life. Instead of waging war against craving, irritation or judgment, Akasaka proposed a disciplined intimacy with them. The ego speaks through resistance, especially in the moments we least want to examine. The path forward, he suggested, lies in noticing that resistance without surrendering to it.
Cleaning As A Spiritual Technology
The heart of Akasaka’s talk was not a breathing protocol or a neuroscience chart. It was cleaning.
Alongside chanting and cooking, cleaning formed part of what he described as a basic Zen triad, a set of practices through which one encounters the mind in motion. The choice was almost defiantly unglamorous. Cleaning is repetitive, physical, easy to dismiss, and often coded as low status work. That was precisely the point.
“Through the practice of cleaning, you can experience that your inner world and the outer world are connected,” Akasaka said. “When you clean the outside world, you clean your inner world, and vice versa.”
He spoke of the Zen monastery, where cleaning is not treated as an interruption to spiritual life but as one of its clearest expressions. Every surface becomes diagnostic. Every act of wiping, scrubbing and clearing reveals the private mutiny of the mind: this is beneath me; this is unpleasant; this is not my job; I should be doing something more important.
That internal narration, Akasaka suggested, is the ego announcing itself.
The Toilet, The Sacred, And The Revolt Of Disgust
If Akasaka wanted to test the sincerity of mindfulness, he took his audience to the least romantic place imaginable: the bathroom.
Can a toilet be sacred? In his tradition, the answer was yes. Akasaka described the presence in Japanese temples of **Ususama Myou-o**, a deity associated with the toilet and depicted with a blazing sword that burns impurity. Practitioners bow before entering and after leaving, acknowledging the space with gratitude rather than revulsion.
The symbolism was powerful because it was so unsentimental. The toilet is where disgust lives close to the skin. It is where aversion becomes immediate and honest. It is also where modern people reveal the hierarchy of what they consider meaningful. Few want to clean what others leave behind. Fewer still want to admit how quickly resentment blooms.
“If you do something that most people don’t really want to do, it is going to be a virtue,” Akasaka said. “You can feel that you did something truly worth it, not only for yourself but for others.”
There was nothing abstract in the lesson. To clean the dirtiest place is to meet the part of the self that recoils, judges and separates. In that recoil, Zen finds its curriculum.
Acceptance Before Compassion
Akasaka’s talk moved from physical practice to emotional consequence with notable clarity. Cleaning was not virtuous because it was humble in some decorative sense. It mattered because it exposed the mechanics of reaction.
When confronted with dirt, disorder or another person’s carelessness, the mind surges into indignation. Who did this? Why should I deal with it? Why am I the one cleaning up? Akasaka urged the audience not to suppress those responses, but to see them.
Acceptance, in his account, was not passive resignation. It was accurate recognition. Notice the negative feeling. Do not deny it. Do not decorate it with shame. Experience it fully and allow it to pass.
“Everything flows; everything appears and disappears in the end,” he said. “When we resist or attach to something, it sticks to your life. It keeps coming back until you totally experience and accept it.”
From that came tolerance. And from tolerance, compassion.
The moral logic was simple and demanding. If one has faced one’s own pettiness, aversion and hurt without flinching, one becomes less eager to condemn those same movements in others. “Everything is a mirror of ourselves,” Akasaka said. “When you accept what you have in your mind, you will be more tolerant of others because you understand they are doing the same things as you.”
This was compassion stripped of sentimentality. It did not depend on feeling kind. It depended on seeing clearly.
Music As Meditation, Breath As Anchor
In the closing minutes of the session, Akasaka turned to sound. With a handpan in hand, he guided the audience into meditation, using rhythm and resonance to draw attention away from compulsive thought and back toward breath and bodily sensation.
The transition did not feel ornamental. It completed the argument. If cleaning was meditation enacted through labor, then handpan practice was meditation enacted through vibration and listening. In both cases, the aim was the same: to interrupt the ego’s endless narration and restore contact with the present tense of experience.
“Zen practice is something you can feel rather than just thinking about,” Akasaka said. “It is something you already have inside of you, not something you learn from outside of yourself.”
For a summit built around tools and interventions, it was a quietly radical idea. The essential technology, he implied, was already available: attention, breath, sensation, repetition, acceptance.
A Different Kind Of Hacking
What lingered after Akasaka’s presentation at **Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam** was the way he reclaimed the language of hacking from the culture of domination. His method did not seek to overpower the ego with discipline or outsmart it with performance metrics. It asked for something more patient: to observe, to clean, to bow, to breathe, to listen.
In an era that often mistakes self-improvement for self-escape, his message landed with uncommon force. The way through suffering, he suggested, was not to become someone else. It was to meet oneself more completely, even in the toilet, even in disgust, even in the tasks the world teaches us to avoid.
That was the quiet provocation of Yogetsu Akasaka’s talk. Inner peace was not elsewhere. It was waiting in the least glamorous corners of daily life, where the ego complained, where the hands worked, and where acceptance began.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam