Motivation, or lack thereof

Why is it that sometimes doing the things we know we love, and we know are good for us, is like pulling fucking teeth? Lately I’ve been struggling with motivation. Sometimes I like to blame it on the weather--its the rain! or the heat! but really, its me. Sometimes I feel the need to shame myself--like ‘goddammit kendall, kick it into gear!’ but what really needs to happen is some self-love and reflection. like why are you feeling so uninspired? why does everything feel like such a struggle? Why are simple choices met with such paralyzing anxiety? I feel such a pressure to ‘do something with my life.’ And yet I feel uninspired to ‘do’ anything.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the majority of my life with some illusory ‘grand plan.’ go to grad school, become a psychologist, make all the money, have all the babies. voila! But in a past few years these societally driven ideas about where I once thought my life should go now fell all wrong. It’s like one day I woke up and realized, “i’m drinkin the damn koolaid!” And I’ve never been able to turn back. I’ve tried to follow my heart, my intuition, but its not the most reassuring of tools when you have to pay rent and when your parents are wondering why you are going to india to study yoga instead of applying for the doctoral program.

why all this pressure to become people of importance? I feel like if I let that shit go I could lead a pretty contented life. Which is in essence all I want.

why this need to have a ‘calling?’ Do you think all people are born knowing what their calling is? this isnt reassuring in the present. and I dont know how many TED talks I have to watch about finding your passion (they don’t fucking help). but I do know that this, right here--this checking-in with myself is helpful. The consistent examination of the unfolding of my consciousness prioritizes a sense of being, as opposed to a sense of doing.

All the Dogs

This past week, I have been babysitting my sister’s puppy. He is a 9 week old German Shorthaired Pointer who is quite possibly the most dapper thing alive--sinewy legs, floppy ears, green eyes, and lion’s paws--yeah I’m in trouble.

I am what you could call a dog enthusiast. I grew up with Akitas as our family pets, but most recently adopted a dog of my own from the humane society. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Raising a dog can be fucking hell. You basically have to tether them to your abdomen for months so they don’t eat your curtains or shit all over your hand-woven himalayan rug. You drag them to the yard at 4 in the morning grumbling commands they don’t understand, waiting for them to take their sweet ass time to lift a leg. You are optimistic and take them to brunch with your work friends (cause there’s a patio and he needs to be socialized….right?) only to end up walking him around the block when he lunges at a passing Goldendoodle. Or maybe you even wake up one morning, your bed filled with pills from a gnawed through ibuprofin bottle and a sleepy-ass puppy--$300 stomach pup later, you giggle as he swipes your grilled cheese off the counter because you’re so thankful his little tail is still wagging!

Dogs can be a pain in the ass, but somehow they’re worth it. And after adopting Koba, I couldn’t shake the fever to get another pup! I obsessively stalk the local shelter’s websites--even stopping by to meet a dog or two that catches my eye. I have become one of those people who swoon at dogs in public--even the shihtzus.

I kept telling my boyfriend, “Koba needs a buddy,” subtly hinting that he should get a dog to fulfill my crazy dreams. So when my sister called me to double check that I would look after their new addition, I replied,

“Of course I’ll watch Wally while you are in Canada! No problem. In fact, why don’t you bring him over a few days early? Just because I can’t wait to snuggle with him!”

Wrong!

Two young male pups under the same roof are a feisty combo--one that no amount of margaritas and 409 can remedy. The run laps like greyhounds in a living room obstacle course; they dig the same holes under the bushes, they urinate on the same tiles in the kitchen, and then bark like chained up pitbulls at passersby.

But having these two snuggling in bed with me while I write--belly-up and snoring--it seems worth it. Everything is a lesson. Sometimes it takes being overwhelmed to recognize what doesn’t belong.

These past few days has really made me appreciate Koba and the role he plays in my life. I can recognize my desire for wanting more as just a quick fix for somethings I’m avoiding in my present. How did my obsession with having all the dogs take me out of the present or allow me to not focus on patterns that weigh me down? It all comes back to satisfaction. I need to learn to be satisfied with what I have in the present, not look to adding more to my already packed life to fulfill some grumbling void. As for now, I will love on this pup while he is here, and simply be grateful for my own when he is gone.

The Portland Marathon

At the starting gate!

7am pre-race hugs

crossing the St. Johns bridge. mile 17

hugs from my monkey after finishing. Feeling nauseous and proud :/

#teamKendall

sister support <3

Taffy loves my medal

Time for beer

 

Yesterday I ran 26.2 miles nonstop, averaging 9min 20sec per mile. I didn’t chafe, my blisters were minimal, I never felt out of breath—it was exhilarating and exhausting. And man oh man did I get my fill of endorphins cascading down my spine, hamstrings, and calves. It’s easy to paint the past through rose-colored tints—once an accomplishment is finished it doesn’t seem as daunting. But I’ll be honest when I say that this marathon has been a journey and then some.

I signed up for the race way back in March while I was predominantly sedentary, coming off a stint of living in India and getting almost zero exercise. My base was maxed at around 6 miles, running like 11 min miles or something ridiculous. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.

Why did I register? Why does anyone register for these things? I think I felt a sense of “fuck it, I can do it,” mixed with an urge to get my ass kicked and have something to focus on other than my overwhelming ‘newness’ in this city I just moved to. Mostly, I yearned for that sense of freedom that accompanies being able to run far and fast and through the shits and through the leg fatigue until those surges of ecstasy course through your veins.

You could say I caught the bug a year ago when I decided to run 21miles on my 21^st birthday. I trained for about 10 weeks, ran it alone on April 1st in the national forests around Missoula, Montana, having setup ‘water stations’ the night before since my college buddies were too hungover to commit to helping me out. During training, and after the run I felt like I was satisfying some primordial beast within, pushing mental/physical limits and also my understanding of myself.

There is certainly a zen-component to running long distance. It is reminiscent of intense Ashtanga yoga sessions, where you are forced to dive deep within yourself and just keep moving through the motions, the breath. Of course it takes a while to cultivate this meditative relationship with running, at least for me. At first, I would attack training runs—listening to pump-up music without any sense of pacing and wear myself out. Soon you learn that you have to relax into the run, relax into the uncomfortability building up in your shoulders, your feet, your quads—and lean into it, cherish it almost, because if you push through you feel higher than any drug could ever make you.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I can live my yoga without having a rigorous daily practice. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Ashtangis for too long, such that I feel guilty for attributing so much time to an activity other than the primary series. But I’m starting to see how the principles of yoga can be applied to many discaplines. And what yoga is really about is becoming a better, more mindful human; it shouldn’t matter the path through which you attain that. Patience, letting go, being present, dissolving ego-driven action—all of these practices have been strengthened through my running (although Guruji would cringe at the tightening of my hamstrings).

These were my mantras yesterday whilst pounding the pavement in a sea of neon bodies: “focus on the breath; loosen up the shoulders; easy posture, light strikes; if it feels like work, you’re going too fast; lose yourself in the movement.” And I fucking did it.

I remember at one point during training, my brother-in-law was asking me how it was going and I replied, “After this marathon, I’m never going to run again.” Maybe I have retrograde amnesia because I’m already looking up ultramarathons around Portland for next spring while I lay lathered in Tiger Balm, muscles crippled from the previous day’s ventures. Here’s to pushing limits and sweating profusely!

Everything the Buddha Ever Taught in 2 Words---Benjamin Riggs

   

When asked to sum the Buddha’s teachings up in one phrase, Suzuki Roshi simply said, “Everything changes.”

Everyone and their mom knows, at least intellectually, that the whole of creation is in a state of endless revolution. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “No same man could walk through the same river twice, as the man and the river have since changed.”
Impermanence is the very nature of life.

In fact, change is just another word for living—“to live” means “to change.” But few people go through life truly conscious of this fact. We “get it” but this knowledge fails to affect our behavior. We simply ignore the way things actually are. So the point of this discussion is not to explain impermanence to you, but to point it out; to wake you up to the truth of change.

Alan Watts used to compare life to music. The point of music is music, he would say. People enjoy listening to music for the rhythm, the stream of melody. No one is listening to music to hear it end. If they were then, as Watts pointed out, their favorite songs would be the ones that ended abruptly with one single uproar of noise. Life is the same way.

The point of Life is Life, to participate in the melody. Melodies are streams; they are flowing. You cannot frame them or dam them up. When you do there is no flow. That is death.

The only way to participate in the melody is through simple awareness. Simple awareness is fluid. A simple mind loses its sense of self in the music, whereas a self-centered mind keeps trying to pause the music. We are trying far too hard to hear what we want to hear, rather than moving to the music, living. We stand back as a spectator, a listener trying catch the beat. We want to grab a hold of it, own it, identify with it.

It is not enough to enjoy the music. We have to know the words. So, we keep pausing the song and rewinding it, in order to commit it to memory and claim it as our own.

The ego derives a sense of identity or meaning from its interactions with “other.”

These interactions produce vouchers, which the ego tries to collect and preserve. Rather than enjoying the concert firsthand, the ego takes pictures and films the concert, so it can talk about it and share the pictures later. The river of life is forever flowing, but for the ego, whose very existence is dependent upon freezing this stream of change, fluctuation is terrifying, which is why we call it impermanence.

From the pessimistic point of view of ego fluctuation represents a threat to its stability, but in the centerless state of basic awareness the space that enables flow or change is the womb of vitality. Life, adaptation emerges from this space. The ego seeks to ignore this space by stuffing it full of credentials and solicited testimonials.

The ego is the ultimate hoarder.

It keeps every voucher, every memory it stands to profit from. In an ego-centric mind there is no space, no room to breathe. But deep down the ego knows the whole thing may come crumbling down at any moment. It remembers the space, the silent gap between each note that enables the music to flow. This memory haunts the ego. It breeds paranoia and insecurity.

This insecurity is the benefactor that finances the ego’s obsession with collecting vouchers. An ego-centric mind is a co-dependent, and this co-dependency is all about avoiding space, fluctuation. The ego is dependent upon relationship or entertainment, which requires separation.

So, the ego has to think of itself as a distinct entity. It has to separate itself from life. Upholding this segregationist strategy is necessary, if any sort of exchange is to be possible. Separation is the foundation upon which the ego’s empire is built. As a result, it is chronically discontented or lifeless.
In addition to chronic discontentment, consider for a moment the problems one is bound to acquire, if they view themselves as an island or a solid entity in a fluid world.

Things change. However, the river is not the only thing that changes. According to Heraclitus, so does the man. But the ego sees itself as unchanging. When we stand in the river of life with our feet planted, like we are an island, life begins to feel like an overwhelming wall of water bearing down on us.

Take for example, the transition between being single and in a relationship. When you are single you develop a lifestyle that that doesn’t have to take into consideration another person. You can wake up in the morning drink your coffee, read the paper, have breakfast, go to work, go to the gym, hang out with friends, and watch whatever you want on TV. But when you bring another person into the mix you cannot continue to operate on the same schedule. The situation has changed, so your old schedule is outdated.

When ‘I’ is a fixed entity or a habit of thought, this transition is difficult. If you cling this expired image, the relationship will begin to feel claustrophobic. There will be one confrontation after the next. The intensity will continue to build over time until everything, your self image and the relationship—the man and the river—washes out.

What we think about ourselves is challenged by change. Many people say, “I shouldn’t have to give up who I am in order to be in a relationship.” I say, if you do not give up who you are, then you are not in relationship.

In fact, if you do not have to give up who you are every moment of every day, then you are not alive. To be alive is to be in a constant state of revolution. Changing situations should affect our behavior. That is sanity; allowing new information to inform my point of view. My point of view—the man in Heraclitus’ example—must remain open or fluid. “Everything changes.” That is the basic point, according to Shunryu Suzuki. Everything—the economy, politics, the weather, relationships, our beliefs, our very sense of identity—is in state of fluctuation. When we are open to change, the transition is relatively smooth. We are going with the flow. On the other hand, when we try to save all of our vouchers we drown.

We cannot swim with our hands full.

An open mind is a sane mind. An open mind is not a mind that gives due consideration to any idea, regardless of how ridiculous it is.

An open mind is a swinging door. It is a mind that does not resist change.  An open mind allows thought to be a reflection of change. From this point of view, thought is always fresh, because life is always changing. This is original thought, imagination. In basic awareness, the man and the river pour into one another.

We have to accept the fact that we cannot wrestle happiness out of this world simply by putting life in a head-lock and forcing it to play with us. We have to see that life is change, change is life; that they are one in the same thing.

Trying to organize impermanent phenomena into permanent categories of thought is like trying to herd cats. Furthermore, we are not somehow other than this change, we are Life. We are change. Confusion and discontentment arise from the mistaken belief that we are a noun. Contentment is realized when we stop swimming against the stream and settle into the fact that we are a current in the stream. The current is not other than the stream. It is the movement of the stream.

We are not a co-dependent noun standing on the bank watching life flow by, but a verb emerging out of the stream of life.

 This essay was originally publish on Elephant Journal

Buddhism vs. Speed: Busyness is Laziness--- Reggie Ray

Life emerges out of the silence of our inner being. The life that we have in our mind, the life that is a reflection of our planning, the life that has been constructed out of bits and pieces in our environment—external conditioning, things we have observed in other people, things that influential people have told us—is actually not who we are.

That pre-planned life is rigid. It’s artificial. It’s unresponsive. It doesn’t reflect the life that we were born to live.

As a student of mine observed, obstacles—which are always with us—are not really obstacles when you work with them in the right way. And we have to work with them.

Many, many people tell me “I’m having a lot of problems doing this [meditation] practice because I am so busy. I’m really busy. I have a full life. It’s busy and I run from morning ‘til night.” People actually say that.

Now think about that for a minute. What kind of life is that? Is that a life worth living? Some people feel it is. America is probably the most extreme example of a speed-driven culture—and this is not my particular personal discovery, but something that has been said to me by many people from other traditional cultures. The first time this was said to me was when I was 19 and I went to Japan.

Western people are running from themselves and they use the busy-ness of their lives as an excuse to avoid having to actually live their own life. We are terrified of who we actually are, terrified of the inner space that is the basis of the human experience.

We are actually incapable of being alone—of any work that requires genuine solitude, without entertainment, that requires making a connection with the silence of the inner being. The American family engineers a life in which there is never any time alone, where we never have to actually talk to each other. Even dinnertime is around the TV, at best—or we’re just grabbing something at McDonald’s.

But it’s not the larger culture. It’s actually us. It’s me and it’s you. We load our life up to the point where it’s about to snap. And when you ask someone to sit down and be with themselves they go, “I can’t. I don’t have time for that.” Now you and I may realize that there actually is a problem. Most people don’t think there is a problem.

We run our kids in the same way—and it’s destroying them. The soccer practice and the music lesson and three hours of TV and homework—it goes on from the minute they get up until they go to sleep. They never have an opportunity to experience silence. Psychological development requires periods of solitude. Anthropological psychology—studying other cultures, as well as our own—shows that when children do not have completely unstructured time, when there are no parental expectations looming over them, they actually can’t develop normally.

We see this at higher levels of education, too. Even the unusual and gifted students at Naropa [University]. These people are disabled, in many cases, because they have lived a busy life, fulfilling all expectations that middle and upper-middle class parents lay on their children because of their fear. The underlying thing is fear of space.

We all have it. I have it in a major way. I am busy. I have all these things that I like to do. When one thing ends, the next thing starts. It’s all important and I have to do it and I don’t sleep enough. So we all have to take another look.

The problem with being busy is that it is based on ignorance—not realizing that by keeping your mind occupied constantly you are actually not giving yourself a chance. We even put an activity in our life, called meditation, where you practice not being busy. Think about it. It’s actually genius. You have added another thing on top of everything else you do, but you are pulling the plug for a period of time every day—so it actually has a reverse effect of opening up and creating space. So you are just going to be more busy now! But this is good, especially in Western culture. People put meditation on their To Do lists. This is something I tell my students: “If you don’t put meditation on the top of your To Do list, it will be at the bottom, and it won’t happen.” I find that if meditation is not the first priority of my day it won’t happen. You know if I am foolish enough to say, “Well, I have to make this phone call, check my email…,” then it’s over. Finished. “I’ll do it later.” It never happens. Look at your life and ask, “Am I being honest with myself? Is it really true that I don’t have time?”

When I was in graduate school I worked with a Jungian analyst, June Singer. She used to say, “Work expands to fill all of the available space.” The problem is not the amount of things you have in your life, it’s the attitude. It’s your fear of space. Busy-ness in the Tibetan tradition is considered the most extreme form of laziness. Because when you are busy you can turn your brain off. You’re on the treadmill. The only  intelligence comes in the morning when you make your To Do list and you get rid of all the possible space that could happen in your day. There is intelligence in that: I fill up all the space so I don’t have to actually relate to myself!

Once you have made that list, it’s over. There is no more fundamental intelligence operating. So the basic ignorance is not realizing what we are doing by being busy. What we are doing to ourselves, what we are doing to our families, what we are doing to our friends.

When my daughter Catherine, who is now 24, was a newborn baby my wife Lee and I went home to my mother’s house. My father had already died. I grew up in Darien, Connecticut—the ultimate suburbia. Everyone works in New York and they are all busy. My best friend from high school came over with his wife, who was also a close friend of mine, and my godfather came over. This succession of people all came in…and Lee picked up on it right away, because she is from Alberta and out there, there is a lot of space!

These people…we loved each other. We were so close. But it was always the same: after 10 minutes they said, “Well, we got to run!” Every single one did the same thing. And Lee said to me, “What are they so afraid of?” Not one of them was actually present. It made me realize why I left the East Coast and went to India. “How far away can I get?” But these patterns are deeply ingrained in us, and running away is not going to solve the problem. It’s in us.

People on campus always say to me, “Gee, you must be really busy.” I could be standing there looking at an autumn tree. I say “No, I’m not busy, I have all the time in the world.” Now, I may not really feel that way—but somehow we have to stop this mentality. It’s sick. Literally. So I never say to my wife, “I’m busy.” Ever. I used to do it, but it didn’t evoke a good reaction. [Laughter]
“I’m too busy.” I am sorry. I don’t buy it. It’s self-deception: “I am too busy to relate to myself.” I don’t care if you have four children and three jobs—we have one human life. And if you can’t make the time, 15 minutes to relate to yourself, everyone else in your life is going to suffer. You have to realize that you are harming other people by making up excuses and not working on yourself. This is serious.

I do understand that things happen in life, and in the course of a week there are going to be times when you can’t practice if you have a job, a family. But to say that over a period of three months I can’t practice because I am too busy? That is the very problem that you came here to solve. I implore you.

My wife has developed some techniques to help with this problem. I am going to give them to you, and then I’ll ask her permission when I go home for lunch. [Laughter]

Being busy is tricky. We set up our life so we are busy. I do this to myself; this is one of my biggest obstacles. I get excited about things and agree to do things three months from now. But when the time comes I realize it is not a good idea because I can’t do it properly, because I have so much else going on. But I have no choice. I have to go through with it. “God, you idiot, how could you do that!” But getting angry doesn’t help, because there I am and I’ve got a 16-hour day I have to get through.
Unless you viciously carve out time to work on yourself it’s not going to happen. You have to be brutal about it, actually. If your mind is always busy then you have no sense of the world you live in. Because there is no communication, there is no space within which to see what we are doing. We will end up destroying our lives, and you may not realize what you have given up until you are on your deathbed. By being busy you are basically giving away your human existence.

One of the things about being busy is that it is a un-examined behavior. It’s habitual.

What’s the Point?
So when something comes up and you think “I need to do this,” the first question to ask is, “Why do I need to do this? What am I expecting to get out of this particular activity? What is the benefit going to be?”

A lot of times we actually don’t even think what we are going to get out of it, or what it’s going to accomplish. Amazing. Say I need to call so-and-so right away. Okay: “Why?” You’d be surprised. You think “Well, it’s obvious.” It isn’t. We have not thought through most of the things that we do at all. We haven’t looked at what the desired consequence is.

What are the Odds?
I may think I am likely to get something, and sometimes I do. But what is the likelihood that something is not going to happen? How sure am I that what I think I am going to get, will happen? What is the percentage of possibility?

Is Other Stuff Likely to Come Up?
This is the big one for me. Does this action have unforeseen karmic consequences? For example: I want to call up somebody and check on something. A lot of times they start telling me some terrible thing that has just happened. I’d allowed five minutes for this conversation, and 45 minutes later I am still on the phone. We do this all the time. We don’t look at the consequences of a particular action.
It’s like somebody who goes into a café, and there is this huge cheesecake right there. You could buy a slice, but you get a cappuccino and sit down with the entire cheesecake and start eating. Now, from a certain point of view this sounds like bliss. And maybe for a short period of time you are going to forget all the pain of the human condition. I mean, that is the great thing about cheesecake. [Laughter] It boosts your endorphins for 5 or 10 minutes. You feel great! But then, having eaten the entire cheesecake, you feel sick for the next three days.

Strangely enough, this is how we live our lives. We jump on things. Someone asks me, “Why don’t you come to Switzerland, teach for a few days and then hang out in the wonderful Alps?” By the time I get off the phone I am ready to pack. Then I talk to my wife. [Laughter] And she asks me, “Have you considered what a 17-hour trip is going to do to your bad back? Have you thought about that?” And then I get back on the phone. [Laughter]

But, because of our ambitions of all kinds, we are ready to fill our life up to the point where, even if I’m in Switzerland, nothing is different. This is one of the great discoveries: wherever I go it’s still lousy. [Laughter] It’s just me and my mind and I don’t feel good and I have got this work to do and I don’t have the energy. It’s the same story, no matter where I go or what I’m doing.

Except when I sit down and meditate. Then, I feel like I am creating an inner space so I can actually relate to the fact of what my life is, rather than just being in an out-of-control mode. So sit down and ask yourself, “What is important in my life, and what’s less important?” Almost on a daily basis, we have to look closely at the things that remain on our To Do list to see whether they are actually realistic.

Ten years ago, after I’d taught a Dathün—a month long meditation—some of the students said to me, “We feel bonded to each other and to you. We’d really like to keep going” And I said, “Well, we could start a meditation group.” And 10 years later I am trapped with a community of 200 people, called Dhyana Sangha. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful. But I got into it in a blind way. And there are many other things that I do not love in the same way that I get into blindly. We all do that all the time—and we wind up with a life that doesn’t work and isn’t helpful to others.

My ambition to accomplish things is going to be one of the last things to go. I can’t help it; it’s just the way that I am. I see a pile of leaves that need to be raked up and I start salivating. I love to do things. I love to be active. And you can say, “Well, that’s great.” But there’s neurosis in that. It’s a way of shutting out space. This is another thing my wife has taught me: when there’s no space nothing really happens.

I had a wonderful quotation by Chögyam Trungpa up on my wall during my [meditation] retreat. It goes something like, “If there isn’t a complete sense of openness and space, then communication between two people can not happen. Period. It’s that simple.” The communication we have with each other is often based on agendas: negotiating with other people to get what we want. That’s not communication.

My wife taught me that. Insistently. It’s to the point where that busy mind is just not acceptable in our house anymore. It doesn’t matter what’s going on my life. If she comes into my study, I have to be completely there. And that’s fabulous, because I’m never able to get invested in that neurosis. If I do, she’ll let me have it.

Giving up this state of busy-ness doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to be active, creative people. We’re giving up the mentality where you can’t actually relate to what’s in front of you because you have this mental speed going on. Let it go. I’m saying it to you. This is an issue that we are going to have to address if we want to be any good to anyone.

You’ll notice when you work in this way over a period of years—and this is something that I have discovered accidentally—the more you practice, the more you get done. If you sit for 2 hours in the morning, which is a lot for people, you will find that your day is 30 hours long. When you establish sitting, somehow, in your life—when you sit in the morning—your day takes care of itself. Things happen as they need to. There is a sense of auspicious coincidence throughout the day.

And when you don’t sit, things go to hell. [Laughter] Everything runs into everything. You say, “I don’t have time to sit ‘cause I have to do this email.” You run to your computer, turn it on and spend the next 4 hours trying to get your computer to work. This is just how things work.

Magic is actually very down to earth. It’s a part of our lives. It’s going on all the time, we just don’t see it. But when you actually take care of yourself, work with yourself and create openness in your life, life will respond by cooperating. And when you are unwilling to relate with yourself at the beginning of your day, your life is going to give you a hard time.

I got stuck on my first book, Buddhist Saints In India. If I wrote another book like that it would kill me. It was an unbelievable labor. I got stuck in the middle. So I started practicing more, I started doing long retreats. And the book started flowing. The more I practiced, the more the book happened. In a sense, when I meditated I was getting something good done.

I realized that the way you accomplish things in life—whether with family or going to work—is through practice. One hour of work with the practice behind you is worth two days when the practice isn’t there. Things just don’t work well—there’s too much neurosis in it. When I don’t feel busy, things I have to do fall into place. Going through my day with a sense of relaxation, I connect with people. I appreciate the outdoors when I walk to my car. I see the sky.

I encourage you to take a chance: put practice at the top of the list. Don’t make that call if it isn’t something that actually needs to happen—so many of the things we do is to make people like us. “I have to make this call or so-and-so is going to be upset.” I have a pretty good idea that if you do that you will find that there is plenty of time to practice, no matter how busy you are. Busy people will look at your life and go, “I don’t see how you can do it!”

Here’s a teaching that Chögyam Trungpa gave that has changed the way a lot of people look at their work lives: learn how to invite space into your worklife. The space itself will actually accomplish most of what you need to do. In the form of helpful people turning up, auspicious coincidences… And in so doing, you are not only opening up your self, you are opening up the world. It becomes a dance. It’s no longer your job to sit there for 10 hours doing your thing, it’s to respond to the way the world wants things to happen. It’s de-centralized.

In Buddhism, this is one of the paramitas: exertion. Exertion is tuning into the natural energy of the world. And when you tune in, you don’t get tired. You become joyful. That you are part of a huge cosmic dance that is unfolding, moment by moment. And you have to change your ideas of what you thought should happen. It requires flexibility on our part!

Busy-ness. It’s the most commonly mentioned obstacle that everyone faces, and I know for me it’s #1. So I thought it would be worthwhile spending a little time with it. I invite you to take a fresh look at your life. Relate to the fear that comes up when we are not busy. Am I still worthy? It’s that Calvinist thing, underlying our culture. But try letting go and lo and behold it’s a better human life, and much more beneficial for other people.

I hope I didn’t upset anybody by saying these things, but I can’t beat around the bush with you. I need to just lay things out as they come up.

The above is adapted from a talk Dr. Reggie Ray gave as part of his Meditating with the Body retreat. 

Originally posted on The Elephant Journal