Sitting this morning, I struggled with the sitting itself, struggled again with the intention to sit daily, struggled with the commitment to the practice. I notice my resistance was strong, as usual. I took a deeper look at the resistance. (This morning, I also started with a good feeling of wanting to share the sitting, this Thanksgiving morning, with my sangha friends.)
My resistance was manifest when I noticed I wanted get onto ‘the other things’. Those other things. For example, I reflected on the conditions of my life right now. One condition is my opportunity and practice of creating travel and travel excursions. I reflected on the irony of resisting this awareness practice at home daily, and wonder if the travel and the travel prep is an ego-inspired way to resist doing this practice here daily And of course on other mornings when I may be elsewhere, what’s the likelihood I will sit to do this practice? The resistance to sitting practice will obtain no matter where I am located. What is the big deal with ‘elsewhere’?
This awareness practice offers me a possibility of habit change —> slowly altering the habit of reflexive thought, the habit of reactive thought. The ‘way in’ being the ‘way out’ from those store seeds of consciousness’ which form the basis of my afflictive emotions.
Noticing the resistance, acknowledging it as ‘one of the guests’, as Rumi may describe it, and welcoming it. Staying with the resistance as a way forward. It will change and transform, as all things do.
lines below are from https://bitterootpatience.blogspot.com/p/like-dragon-in-water-what-can-we-when.html
What can we do when our monkey minds pull us off the cushion? Simple, says Sensei Pat Enkyo O'Hara: Just practice.
Sensei Pat Enkyo O'Hara
...
And so it can be with our practice. Seeing our practice as our life, we just let go and do it. We just practice a steadiness in our daily meditation. Without expectations of any kind, we just practice, day in and day out, through the high points and the low. “I really doubt this practice is helping me. Okay, still, it is time to sit, right through this doubt.” Or, “Oh, I didn’t sit all week! Okay, right now I’ll sit for twenty minutes.” And each time we come back to our practice, we experience it as more inherent to our life. Maezumi Roshi, based in Los Angeles, would often use the Spanish expression for “little by little” to indicate this patient quality of practice: “Being one with the practice, you are transformed, poco a poco.”
This understanding of our practice is expressed by the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen teacher Dogen, when he says that our meditation practice “is not step-by-step meditation; it is simply the dharma gate of peace and joy. It is the practice-enlightenment of the Ultimate Way....When you grasp this, you are like a dragon in water, or a tiger in the mountains.” ▼
