There’s a chapter in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism called ‘The Hard Way’. In it Chögyam Trungpa talks about the ‘false heroism’ that we think is the hard way – or the way we should be doing it – but is really another way of feeding the ego with spiritual-ness. It’s the way that we romanticise our practices and ourselves as practitioners, the way we accumulate them, as if by doing so we garner some kind of spiritual merit. My practices have been founded on false heroism in the past, and there’s still a lot of it tangled up with the useful stuff. There’s definitely a lot of false heroism involved in my motivation for doing the ngondro, and that’s part of why it doesn’t feel right.

We can carry this sort of false heroism to great extremes, getting ourselves into completely austere situations. If the teaching with which we are engaged recommends standing on our heads for 24 hours a day, we do it. We purify ourselves, perform austerities, and we feel extremely cleansed, reformed, virtuous. Perhaps there seems to be nothing wrong with it at the time.

Accumulating merit plays on my tendencies to obsession and compulsion. I’ve danced a long slow waltz with these, but I’m heading for the ballroom door now. The ngondro pulls me back into the dance. I’m not finding this helpful.

It’s the practices of the body that truly resonate with me, that have the greatest power to shift me. For years I’ve felt as if I need to ‘graduate’ to practices that are more cerebral, as if some evolution is required. But in 45 years I haven’t evolved away from my body, only more deeply into it, and I’m starting to give faith to my sense that for me there is no evolution in that direction, that the practices of the body offer me everything I need.