At a certain point in your spiritual development, you realize that:
- Practice is essential
- Everything is practice
You really, really see (not just as an idea, but as a palpable, embodied realization) that you are always practicing.
How you live is your practice.
You are always reinforcing or releasing patterns. You are always strengthening old neural networks or building new ones.
This realization heightens your attentiveness to the sacred responsibility of this moment.
And leads inevitably to a commitment to daily formal practice. By formal practice I mean the daily commitment to formally sit in meditation. Why is this so essential?
Through formal practice you build your capacity to meet your life with an undefended heart and an unobstructed mind.
Formal practice builds your mindfulness muscle.
It untangles the knots in your body/mind that trap you in reactivity. It frees you and opens you to embody more and more completely the truth of who you are.
Without practice – you’re propelled through life by unconscious reactivity.
In formal practice, you learn to recognize and release your commitment to the reactive patterns of the past. And you make a new commitment – to cultivate the Wisdom Heart.
How do you cultivate love, wisdom, and an awakened life?
It’s Valentine’s Day in this part of the world. A good time to recommit to your practice – formally and in daily life – of growing love. The above dharma doodle and more than 50 others are available at Dharma Doodle (Free shipping ends today – Valentines Day – Februrary 14.)
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