“I know they make fun of me, but actually all these years people have thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing and I can change it at any time… I am sure of myself as a person.”
-Dolly Parton

Yesterday was a very full day. It wasn’t supported by my decision to sleep in later than usual. Clearly, though, I needed the time, and if I am going to be honest (and why would I be anything but honest) if I had made an entry yesterday in the blog and podcast it would have been forced. So today I am inspired, and that makes for a better experience all around.

“Studying many scriptures is pointless if one does not practice the wisdom contained within them.”
-The Dhammapada

Today is a beautiful and unexpected day. Well… every day is, really. We’ve just convinced ourselves to live in expectation. It’s more comfortable to do that.

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance.”
-Immanuel Kant

I have been on a particular journey of pressing against the establishment for more than a year. I have been pressing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable among some of my peers. I am a firm believer that as long as we remain in our safe zone, wrapped in comfort, we do not expand our sensibilities which lead to growth. For many years, at the beginning of my journey in ministry, I was an adherent to the dictates set forth by the greater governing organization. I say this with tongue slightly in cheek because I think I was viewed as rebellious.

“This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not.”
-Adyashanti

Today I had this come up during meditation, “Are we liberated by or trapped in our spiritual practices?” I think the question is related to yesterday’s blog and podcast on allowing our practice to become rote. When practice becomes rote it eliminates effectiveness, and we cease to benefit from the growth. That is the time when I believe we are trapped. There are many other ways, I think, that we become trapped.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
-Rumi

In alignment with the concept of spiritual bypass I covered yesterday, there is another detrimental aspect of the spiritual life that can begin to take hold… if we are not paying attention.

I have been in spiritual centers and around many people who seem to forget sometimes that it is feeling that is the fuel for creation.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
-Carl Jung

Last week, I completed five days of presenting some of the spiritual practices we utilize in this teaching. It was a good reminder to me that I deeply believe this approach to the experience of life has value and works to establish a new way of being.