“You become what you practice.”
— Jordan Peterson
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One of my favourite characters in meditation and the inner path is Bodhidharma, an Indian Buddhist monk.
Bodhidharma was a real 200% Life-er.
Not just an “inner monk,” he had practical skills too – helping teach the Chinese Shaolin monks to defend themselves from bandits.
I would have loved to see the faces of the bad guys when they returned next raiding season to discover the former pushovers weren’t going to take the attacks sitting down any more. Ha!
But mainly I love him for his intensity and uncompromising nature.
He’s often shown with this huge, wide eyed stare –
Partially because he’s so intense and committed to presence and Truth,
And partially because, as the story goes, during a nine year “final push” commitment to sit and meditate facing a wall to gain enlightenment,
He got so annoyed with himself falling asleep that he tore his eyelids off in order to stay awake.
(!)
The other cool/mad story from this is that his eyelids dropped to the ground where they took root and became the tea plant.
So when you’re sipping your cuppa, you’re getting a little extra boost of awareness courtesy of our man Bodhidharma.
Maybe give a little thanks when you sit with your next brew, huh?
Absurd (and untrue) I know, but it makes me smile and be inspired –
That kind of commitment to the pursuit of what we want is powerful.
But the other thing that makes me grateful is now knowing that this kind of viciousness to get what you want is not required.
It’s easy to think that way. I used to be prone to that with over the top discipline and force, but no longer.
And thank the good lord for that.
The truth is, as the mighty Buddha once mentioned, it’s all about the middle path.
The middle path —
Just like the strings of a guitar are useless too loose and too tight,
It is the same with our practice, and life.
Too vicious and tight, and we’re just practicing control and judgement. There’s no allowing; no surrender, no patience, no acceptance.
Too slack and loose, and we’re just practicing mindlessness and allowing our negative habits to run roughshod.
Both ways mean we stay in the Matrix: reactive, dependent, conditioned and conditional, imprisoned. Like monkeys on a chain, we’re pulled every which way and that.
Your practice – whatever that maybe – is finding that balance between curious and alive awareness and effortlessness.
But we have this paradox where two seeming opposites which are true.
On the one hand, as Viktor Frankl, survivor of Nazi concentration camps and major mover in the world of psychotherapy, noted about struggle:
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“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
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On the other, you have someone like the writer Ray Bradbury noting,
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“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and let others move forward with it.”
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(And Bradbury was no slouch. He published more than 30 celebrated books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, screenplays and plays.)
It’s a grand balance to find; supremely useful in all of life.
In finding this kind of middle path between letting go and striving in your practice, you find freedom from attachment. You find the ability to relax and let go; you find joy and contentment; you find the ability to focus at will on whatever you want.
Commit to a worthy goal – such as mastering your mind – and relax your way into focus and presence.
Find the middle path.
And go well,
Arjuna