there you have it

Apprentice I can see all my ‘bad’ habits happening quite frequently. Several times a day, in fact. It is excessively annoying and exhausting sometimes. This can go on and on and I deal with it. Eventually I become disheartened and can get into a funk. Is there any way to avoid all of this? Or do I just ‘keep going’?

Ngakma Shardröl It sounds like the difficulty here is being a victim of your own harsh judgement. We often have the idea that we need to be really strict with ourselves or else we’ll succumb to the wages of sin, etc. As you will know from interacting with your children, judgement must be tempered with mercy. It’s somehow easier to do this for our loved ones than for ourselves but it’s the same thing. It isn’t useful to beat yourself up for ‘mistakes’, ‘neuroses’ or whatever you think it is. We all make mistakes; we all have neuroses. The essence of a tantrika is that he or she is a person who is working on realising non-duality – for the benefit of everyone & everything everywhere. That doesn’t mean there is no failure, setbacks, backsliding & all the rest of it. The point is that we continue. We don’t do ourselves any good by getting annoyed because we have not yet reached the goal. In fact that just makes things more difficult. The split involved in ‘you’ judging ‘yourself’ is actually the antithesis of the state of mind you are seeking. So the idea is to allow yourself to relax into kindness & spaciousness – toward yourself as well as others. Liberation is our natural condition – we don’t need to flog ourselves into it. In fact we can’t. We can only relax into what is already there. If we are too impatient & critical, if we are always judging ourselves & looking for signs of ‘progress’, that is the opposite of being relaxed. It is a question of learning to trust spaciousness. We don’t have to control everything. We can allow ourselves to enjoy the moment in the confidence that our beginningless enlightenment will come through of itself if there is space for it to do so. The way we get used to allowing space is through the practice of shi-nè.

There you have it.