Why We Practice - Very short essay

Because of where I find myself in the waking up process right now, I am fascinated with seeing the things that knock me into the fantasy land of unnecessary past or future thought. Those "things" are entertaining as hell to see and they have this "squishy" quality - every time I see one, it morphs into something else the next time. For example, I have noticed that I have a visceral resistance to setting my ass down and doing my practice in the morning sometimes. I can feel it in my body, a charged restlessness. That's normal for me and I accept it with, like I mentioned, a bit of humor. The squishy part comes with the reasons my hyperactive mind comes up with for not wanting to practice. These can be chores, puttering, basic laziness, it's too nice out, it's too not nice out, I should text Sammi, I should, I should, I SHOULD, etc.) THE REASONS ARE SO COMPELLING SOMETIMES. But really, unless the cat is on fire (again) or I truly overslept and have stuff to do that are important to my soul AND that are time sensitive to this world, the centering practices that anchor and help charge my moment-to-moment practice of seeing the natural tides of my funky mind the rest of the day are too valuable to pass on. And here’s the point: the things that try to take me from my practice are some of the same things that knock me from my Practice of just Being present in every moment. This gives my little morning ceremony even MORE value. If I didn’t have that, the things that knock me off my moments wouldn’t be as visible to me. Here’s why: a practice gives a point in time to value on a soulful level. That’s like baiting ego because ego generally HATES soulful things. So we stick the bait out (“Hey ego, guess what? I meditate at 530am every day and I LIKE it!”), and ego takes the bait every time. Then we watch dispassionately what arises, recognize how that happens ALL FREAKING DAY in different ways and then go back to breath in our practice with a little smile. This gives us strength to deal with the daily stuff because we’ve seen it before, we know where ego wants to hide and we know it’s as simple as returning to the breath because we did it that morning in practice. Other times, ego will shift on us. It will suddenly LOVE soulful things and start to see itself as holy and WAY righteous. That one manifests as judgment of others and self-pissedoffedness (not in Webster’s dictionary), and many other individualized ways we can observe. Isn’t it a gas? I think it is. As Jeb Barton once told me, seeing all this is “serious play!” OK, time to go organize the garage. J