Long term practice carves pathways in the being that previously did not exist. This is not always comfortable. This is not about chasing discomfort, or making yourself uncomfortable on purpose. Any practice (and the act of practice itself), done with heart and integrity will eventually cause friction. Heat. Cooking. Flames. Death. Rebirth.
This is feature and not a bug of daily practice. To quote Joshua Schrei…”If your practice is ALWAYS blissful, something is very wrong”.
Daily Practice Creates Friction.
Consistent daily practice of any kind, that actually has weight in terms of its impact on your experience, is going to generate friction. And this friction is in fact a feature and not a bug of consistent practice.
In some ways, there’s no way to escape it. And for that matter, if you are a serious practitioner, it is part of what you want to be happening.
Now, that doesn’t mean that every single practice needs to be harsh.
It doesn’t mean that every single practice needs to be difficult.
It doesn’t mean that they all need to be uncomfortable or that you need to kill yourself in the pursuit of some kind of ideal that someone has laid out for you.
But what it does mean is that if you are not engaging with a type of practice that is consistently asking you to take to the wet stone of your capacity, so to speak, and wear away at the dullness of the edge of your experience, then it’s likely that you are not really doing what you are seeking to be doing.
Because fundamentally, it is the rhythmic nature of consistent daily practice to carve a set of grooves and open channels into new experiences. And so as that happens, there is a shedding away of various layers of self that just need to go.
And as that happens, there are also new layers of self that are being born, and that practice is inherently a destructive and creative nature, that we are calling into our experience.
That’s going to be based in a type of friction.
And as you shift, so does your connection to:
- The world.
- The different channels.
- The different options.
- The different possibilities.
And….the different structures that you are creating in your life; through the various aspects of yourself in connection to the environment are changing.
And that means that the environment’s access to you and the environment’s relationship to you also changes.
See, it’s not just a one-way street. If you make certain changes in the options that you have available to you, then that also means that the options that the environment has available to you, also change. We do not live in a uni-directional vacuum.
So when you’re doing that, it’s akin to a type of sculpting and carving, a rubbing that requires you to embrace that, if you are to get the changes that you want.
Ramon’s substack, “The Bones of the Deep”, can be found here.
Feature photo by Raghav Modi via pexels.