One calendar year is about to morph into the next, a time when people traditionally look for those personal behaviors they’d like to stop doing, and, perhaps, what they’d like to begin.
If you’ve been reading these Bread Crumbs or other similar materials, and have been considering Buddhist ideas and notions or engaging in practices, perhaps you’re considering clarifying or enriching your Dharma curriculum in the new year.
Or perhaps not . . . not due to a lack of curiosity or desire to do so, but because you’ve got some persistent doubt or resistance that you’ll be able to stick with it, to get anything personally meaningful out of it.
You know . . . it sounds good, but it’ll just end being another one of those well-meaning, soon-to-fall-apart New Years’ resolutions.
***
If you’re not interested in deepening or enriching your practice, that is completely OK; sensibilities differ, and we are all at different points on the path.
However, if you sense a readiness but simply feel fear or reluctance, or for some unnamable reason that you just can’t, consider this:
Rationalizing failure is ignorance’s right-hand man.
Its job is to protect us from the shame we would feel if we truly faced what ‘pansies’ we are for not doing that which we feel we are drawn to do . . .
that which we would genuinely benefit from doing.
If this resonates with you . . . and you’re ready to move beyond your hesitation, the first step is quite simple . . . and very much a wonderfully quantum jump.
It begins with a simple pushing aside, and then awakening to what lies behind the manipulative curtain of our ignorance.
~Neither grief or a broken heart, or fear, precludes us from doing this.