At the beginning of 2019, I committed to watching the process by which I was talked out of doing the practice activities that would be beneficial for my spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical well-being. I saw how several of my clearly defined commitments would, one by one, fall by the wayside despite being reminded daily by my computer and phone. So it was to be the year of a conscious compassionate exploration of how I begin doing the activities that I love enthusiastically only to wake up one, two weeks, maybe a month later to the realization that I’d “forgotten” about doing those helpful exercises!

The guidance I was given was to make a recording before going to bed that identified what I’d like to get done and, even more important, “how” I’d like to be while doing that, and then, to commit to listening to that recording again the next morning. For extra credit, I was to watch for the ways/places ego works to distract me.

The “extra credit” portion of the guidance was an important key.

Here is what I saw: When there’s a lapse in the commitment or activities that I want to accomplish, ego doesn’t want me to record or listen. There’s a dullness, a flatness, a lack of energy (aka ego) that takes over. Recording and listening doesn’t even enter the mind. So even that can fall by the wayside. So there’s the loop — ego is instrumental in distracting me from my activities, and then keeps me from the one thing that it knows will help me disidentify — Recording and Listening. 

Ego’s hope is that with enough of that, I’m going to get discouraged. I’m going to start feeling so bad and so hopeless that I’ll quit. To stop this loop, the Mentor and I have decided that we would Record and Listen anyway — regardless of what was or was not accomplished during the day or how I’m feeling at the end of it. 

Recording and listening became a “non-negotiable.” 

I am seeing just how helpful this is in focusing my attention to where I want it to be— not to where conditioning wants to lead me. Recording and Listening helps me to turn towards the Mentor. When ego “pops” in with self-hating abuse, I am HERE where I choose to be.

Gassho

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