Journey

Came across this post by Cheryl Wright and would like to share it with you.  Gardening as Cheryl describes is the perfect analogy to what it means to live your life as a practice: the exercise and pursuit of a consciously created life.

Here’s some of Cheryl’s post:

Cultivate Your Life

Gardening is a lot of work but reaps great rewards. Use these four gardening tasks to cultivate your life. 1. Identify and remove the weeds that are flourishing, clogging your life pores, complicating your relationships and smothering your dreams.
2. Water your life with quiet time to pray, meditate, read, plan, dream and enjoy your favourite leisure activities.
3. Wait patiently for your work to bear fruit and expectations to materialise.
4. Wonder at the beauty that adorns your life.

There’s no way we can put off taking care of our lives and not experience the backlash. Treat your life as you would a garden and you will enjoy the beauty of a well-cultivated life.
I’m no gardener by any stretch of the imagination, but I am fascinated with the similarities between a garden and our lives. While we could put the smallest gardening effort on hold without any serious consequences, there’s no way we can put off taking care of our lives and not experience the backlash. So, like a conscientious gardener we need to cultivate our lives to reap the best fruits and enjoy the beauty.
Rainy days may keep you from heading outside with straw hat and gardening tools. But they are the perfect days to sit inside and do some work on your life. So grab your favourite drink and snack, curl up with your journalling tools and cultivate your life.

Weed
Sometimes it seems they pop up overnight. Unlike some plants that struggle to survive, lose the battle, shrivel and die, garden weeds are indomitable. They anchor themselves in any kind of soil and withstand extreme weather conditions.
Life weeds such as feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities at home and at work, financial problems, difficult relationships, health concerns and so on, rear their ugly heads and choke the good and positive things in our lives.
Some life weeds have tap roots; they burrow straight down and deep. They pierce and break our hearts. Others with fibrous roots fan out and filter through the network of our lives infecting and poisoning all that is good and positive.
They create havoc in every situation and relationship, turning our lives upside down and inside out. They loom above other minor life weeds and force us to set aside legitimate concerns so we can cater to their demands for our undivided attention.
Life weeds sprout and flourish anywhere. They cling to us like parasites. They suck us dry and leave us listless and passive in our own lives.
With a discerning eye and a prayerful heart identify the weeds that are flourishing, clogging your life pores, complicating your relationships and smothering your dreams. Don’t deal only with what is on the surface. Dig to the roots of the weeds in your life and get rid of them to allow the free entry and flow of all that is good and beautiful.

Water
We know of course that too much water can drown even moisture-loving plants. So we are often advised to water our gardens regularly with a moderate supply to keep the soil moist and the plants healthy and alive.
When we get lost in the rush of daily living, it is easy to allow our personal lives to languish in the neglect caused by whatever turmoil may be commanding our attention or the heat of busyness and burnout.
It is honourable that we take care of our responsibilities to our families, our jobs and other areas as well. However, when we don’t pay attention to our personal lives: health, leisure activities, our dreams and other personal interests, we are delinquent gardeners of the lives we’ve been given.
We water our lives when we take time to nurture ourselves with quiet time to pray, meditate, read, plan, dream and lose ourselves in the activities that we enjoy.
Are you drowning your life with too much of a good thing or killing your life slowly by leaving it to languish, dehydrated and starved of crucial life-saving nutrients?

Wait & Wonder

Visit the link above to read the full post.

There’s the great and not-so-great (sorry famous) religions, there’s mysticism, shamanism,the new age movement, quantum physics, positive thinking etc., etc. (Smarter people can list much more.)

Educating myself about as many of the above and unmentioned as I can reasonably handle is part of my life practice. So when my friend Julia invited me to come learn about Kabbalah at a free introduction seminar I jumped at the opportunity.

My focus here is not about Kabbalah, a subject that has great interest for me, but about my observation of the people in attendance.

(If you’re fortunate enough to live or be in New York city and are at all curious to learn about Kaballah, consider visiting the Kabbalah center on E 48th between 3rd and Lexington.)

I arrived late and was greeted by a very attractive cadre of Kabbalah volunteers several of whom guided me to the already packed seminar room. As I took my place in the very back I could scan my surroundings.

To my untrained eye, the room bore some resemblance to a place of worship with pew like benches and a very high ceiling. (The presenter later stressed that Kabbalah is NOT a religion.) The walls of the room were intersperced with columns (I should take an architectural class) that jutted out a few inches. They were remarkable because of the black painted design that adorned them that gave a not-so-subtle indication that we were in a room devoted to something very ancient and wise.

And …there were the people. Not the very young or very old, but every stripe in between.

Standing room only. Maybe they thought Madonna was giving the seminar, but I think these folks were genuinely curious to learn about a new interest, or find answers, or both. There were definitely a lot of people looking for solutions to their life issues as evidenced by the questions asked.

This surprised me a bit. I mean, … given all of the other “more famous” disciplines/religions/philosophies you would expect that people had enough answers to your run of the mill “How can I be happy and fulfilled?” questions.

But apparently not.

After the main presentation about this very esoteric and profound subject the questions began. It was clear that several people wanted immediate answers to their life issues. And it occurred to me that they were looking for the cliché “quick fix” that would make their life better NOW! or at least asap.

We’re all so trained to keep looking for THE answer. People are stuck in the thinking that there’s something they can do or know that will give them the life they can’t seem to get. Once they find IT they will live happily ever after.

The religion they were born into isn’t working for them, all the self-help books and courses seem to help, but … no cigar. The Secret was exciting, but the focussing and the believing is not working. They still don’t have the life they want. They’re still not happy.

So lets try Kabbalah. Maybe this will be it?

Kabbalah undoubtedly will provide answers to many people. So my point is not to rain on Kabbalah or any other system of knowledge. My point is that until people get that there is no quick fix, and no ONE thing (answer) to do or know that will unlock the key to happiness and a great life, their experience of life will be less than it could be. (How’s that for a safety statement).

Life is about the choices you make every day, it’s about bringing what you’ve learned from Kabbalah, or Buddhism or Tony Robbins or (fill in your belief) into your daily life, day in and day out. Bringing attention to your thinking and actions based on the best available knowledge at your disposal with an eye on where you want to go.

So by all means do or study what calls to you. Incorporate the best of everything into your life. This way your experience will get steadily better, but still with downs to accompany the ups.

And that’s one crucial “answer” that sadly is left out of today’s Western conversations. The downs, the falls, the breakdowns and heartaches are part of life. They are crucial to our life experience as teachers and reference points to living our lives fully and on purpose. Trying to eliminate them from this life is NOT POSSIBLE, or even desirable.

George Leonard has a book called “Mastery” that is essentially about living your life as a practice, and in it he talks about the nature of developing mastery in any chosen endeavor. According to Leonard, you develop in fits and spurts characterized by periods of apparent no-growth or “plateaus” as Leonard calls them. This I think is a fundamental concept that must be fully understood and integrated into a life practitioner. It is simply not possible to experience constant progression when you’re growing. It is the nature of growth and development to have periods where you experience no-growth or even decline.

Leonard points out that this doesn’t mean that you’re not growing, but rather that it takes some time before the growth you are undergoing manifests itself.

Therefore the challenge for the life practitioner is to learn to accept and even love the periods where you’re practicing, where you’re taking the actions. There is no attachment to the outcome, only a love of the practice. This for Leonard is true mastery, not the accomplishment that comes from it. It’s just the nature of life that when you practice for the love of it, the accomplishments just seem to come along with it.

Going through the personal growth or self-help sections of books stores or looking at the course titles at places like the learning Annex, I’m struck at the ridiculous promises being made. “Master relationships/money/career.” “How to earn a fortune in real estate, how to make her beg for more.” The list goes on and on.

Not to say that you couldn’t earn a fortune in real estate, or make her beg for me, it’s just that these promises imply that there’s some ultimate point that you can reach. Do you really think that if you make her beg for more once, you’ll always be able to make her beg for more?

You could make a great argument that this is the case, that you could reach some “best” point, especially if it’s a personal best, and I would agree. My point is that it’s not helpful to focus on ultimate points, especially when the road to them is “made simple” or “for dummies”.

Why I don’t like the marketing of programs or experiences as “mastery” is that they encourage an unworkable relationship with the concept of mastery. They make us think that the road to it [mastery] is easy [with their help], and that once attained you’ll have it forever.

Congratulations you’re a master, Master. Now what?

Ask Tiger Woods what happens to his mastery when he stops playing. You don’t need the famous masters to test this out, take a look at anyone you consider a master and notice that they are constantly engaged with the thing that you think they are a master at.

Now the funny thing is that one of the best books out there about living your life as a practice is entitled “Mastery:the keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment.” The book is by George Leonard who together with Michael Murphy founded Integral Transformative Practice or ITP. Mr. Leonard’s concept of Mastery is spot on with many of the essential elements of what I mean by living your life as a practice. And as such I’m right on with his concept of Mastery. Check out George’s book. It’s a quick read and I would say very helpful if you want to take on living your life as a practice, or as a Master.