There is something in contemplative practice that many people don’t really talk about, and it’s that you have to show up.
You need to do the Domei practices consistently and deliberately, often when you do not want to.
Each day you sit with the plant, you return to your breath, and when your mind wanders, you bring your attention back to the moment with kindness.
This requires effort, and without it, nothing is going to happen. Transformation will not occur, and neither is it guaranteed.
In our culture, it’s so easy to buy the book on whatever change we’re trying to make. So easy to sign up to that online course, all with the best intentions that we’re going to complete it. And then we don’t.
The book has a couple of pages that are read, a few of the course videos get watched, and that’s it. We shelve them, usually with an excuse about why we did not follow through. Did not back ourselves.
I see this a lot with my own foraging books. People come to my in-person foraging courses. They own all my books, and they have not done anything with them.
These lovely people will make up stories about why they have not followed through.
Yet showing up to practice requires discipline and intention. Discipline is not something exerted from outside yourself. It is a personal discipline, an agreement you have with yourself.
When we practise regularly, it’s a way of backing ourselves. Too often we show up and think we’re doing the practice, when instead we spend the whole time in our own heads, working hard, being present, and going nowhere.
The obstacle in this moment is the trying. And so we post photos of ourselves on social media meditating under a tree, giving the impression we are being ‘spiritual’.
The very fact that we’re posting those photos tells me the practice has become a performance.
Thirty-five years into this work, and the best I can offer is that the effort we bring to the practice is the container, empty like a beautiful Japanese teacup.
Sometimes grace is what fills it. You do not earn grace. It emerges through the application of showing up.
It either arrives or it doesn’t. The beautiful teacup is the space that our disciplined practice has cleared. Showing up is down to you. What happens when you arrive is not.
And so you prepare the ground by returning each day to the practice. Yet you cannot make it rain and you cannot demand that your teacup is filled.
What changes over time as we do this is our relationship to trying.
Early on, effort – that discipline – feels like the practice itself. You’re gripping it, monitoring what happens, assessing whether it’s working. Later, if you stay with it, that grip will loosen – not because you’ve stopped caring, but because you’ve stopped confusing effort and discipline with practice.
You show up on a regular basis, and over time you soften, and you let whatever wants to arrive, arrive.
The gap between those two things – the showing up and the softening – is where the actual practice lives.