Be Present

The whole point is to be present.  This is the goal in its entirety.  This is all I really need to focus on.  Good or bad, pleasant or painful, be present.

From my Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield I often see the parallels between a spiritual practice and recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous:  "With commitment we bring our full energy to follow a path and its discipline, such as prayer, through its inevitable difficulties and confusions.  In it we learn to trust The Fellowship, its principles, and ourselves in deeper and deeper ways.  We are asked over and over, to persist in its development, to stay with it, to give ourselves to it, to bring our full heart and energy to the practice.  The Dalai Lama says we can best tell if our practice is working by looking at its results after five, ten, or twenty years."

Now THAT'S commitment to the cause.  Risking the possibility that after twenty years something isn't working.

I mention often that I'm a terrible athlete.  I found that I was more successful in sports when I was simply in better shape than you were.  I didn't have to be more talented physically if I could outrun you.  After ten years of inactivity and a whole shit ton of Winston 100s and bags of weed I decided I'd start to run again.  I made it about a hundred yards before I began to believe I'd swallowed a package of razor blades.  My lungs were pretty much shredded.  The fact that I continued to run and eventually got to the point where I could run longer distances and more effortlessly at that was a testament to my faith that I could reverse some of the pulmonary damage I'd done over the last decade.  This is like A.A.  I tell new people that it really can be effective.  It really does work for a lot of people.  It's rarely a quick process and this is so frustrating that many - or even most - of us fall by the wayside before we get to a place of peace and contentment.