April 3, 2018

“Faster, stronger, more snap! You're not good enough!” Man, I remember those days — my practice was so ambition driven. Looking back I wonder how much I savored the joy of the moment or was I putting my mind out there on some distant horizon. Today I approach my practice much differently. Maybe it is a sign of getting older, but I attempt to live in the present, extracting everything I can from the "now". What's on the horizon will come soon enough. Don't get me wrong, drive is good, I still train about 4 hours a day, but I have made friends with my practice. It is more like a companion now than an adversary. I often train late at night (3:00-4:00 in the morning) when the rest of the world around me is asleep. Something about the quiet helps me connect. In many ways I've distilled my practice down to a hunt for the essential — technique leads to principle and principle leads to something much deeper at the core, some fundamental truth that is at the substrate of all things. For me, it is my connection to the Blessing of this moment. When I started to feel that, everything seemed to change. My priorities were rearranged. Things like friendship became more important than politics, laughter more important than worry. It was as if I woke up to some funny miracle that I had forgotten. Of course I fade in and out of that state because of my frailty as a human, but I now recognize this is the quiet truth of the path. If I had any ambition left, it would be that our humble group of Sunday Morning Keiko would bring this quality back as a central theme to a practice, for joy in the heart is a state of Grace.