"We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness."
~ Chögyam Trungpa (The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation)
Managed to meditate once a day on both 1st and 2nd of February.
Been thinking a lot about some of the things that led me back to meditation.
At the end of the day, we are alone in our practice. No one can help us except ourselves. A spiritual practice is about taking responsibility for ourselves. You practice, good for you. You don't practice, that's your own problem too.
If we're practicing just so we can call ourselves a "spiritual" person and feel good about ourselves, or to show off to others - then it is nothing more than the ego playing games on us. You don't go anywhere if you're practicing only for some external validation.
But let's say you come to your practice alone. No matter how hard you work on it, nobody cares. No one believes you will ever change no matter how much you practice - but you just keep working. You finally give up hope of people praising you, or liking you for working hard. You abandon all hope of ever mending your relationships through your practice. You are all alone in your practice.
I think that is when it really matters - when you practice for practice's sake.
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