Supports for Your Practice

Excerpt

When all is said and done, the most important support for mindfulness practice is the quality of your motivation and the degree of ardor you bring to it. No amount of outside support can substitute for that inward fire, that quiet passion for living life as if it really mattered, for knowing how easy it is to miss large swaths of it to unconsciousness and automaticity and to our deep conditioning. That is why I urge those who practice with me to practice as if their lives depended on it. Only if you know or even suspect that it actually does will you have sufficient energy to sit whether you feel like it or not, and really inhabit and make maximal use of that infinitude of timeless moments available to you in sitting, however long it is by the clock, without doing anything. Only if you know or even suspect that your life does indeed depend on your practice will you have sufficient energy and motivation to wake up earlier than you normally would so you can have some uninterrupted, undesignated time that could be a time just for yourself, a time for just being, a time outside of time; or to make a sacrosanct time for practice at some other hour of the day that works better for you; and to practice on days when you have a lot going on, and above all, to make your life into the real practice so that it is not merely a matter of making a regular time for formal practice, but a willingness to bring mindfulness to every moment, no matter what you are doing or what is going on, so that it feels after a while that the practice is doing you rather than you are doing the practice. All this comes over time and becomes less and less of an effort, more and more just naturally how you choose to live. But the ardor, the passion to engage in this radical act, so unusual for our time-pressured, driven way of life and the sea of distractions and demands we are so much a prey to, is vital if we are to maintain and even deepen our momentum and commitment to liberation from unawareness and the suffering it inevitably brings in its wake. …