It’s harder to dance when I turn up thinking I have energy than when I turn up thinking I don’t. When I think I don’t, I have small expectations and therefore I’m closer to surrender. The low-energy idea is humble; it looks only for a crust, and so the dance grows itself organically. The high-energy idea is freighted with expectation and desire ... for ecstasy, for catharsis ... which translates into striving and leads me away from the dance that cannot be created but can only reveal itself.

I somehow wobbled back onto the ngöndro path. Partly, as soon as I gave myself permission not to do it, I wanted to do it; partly, my energy returned (I wrote the last entry after flu) and it seemed possible to keep all the plates spinning once again. At the same time I retain a sense of the validity of all my objections. The reality is it’s neither one thing entirely, nor the other, and so I’m racketing along veering sometimes one way, sometimes in the other direction. Still, more or less I’m remaining on the road.

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.

Once again, I arrive at a sticking point with the ngöndro. I feel as if I should have done it twenty years ago, rather than now, when the form of my practices is dissolving. And this dissolving feels right. For many, many years I’ve been loyal to forms, to the letter of the law of my practices. Now I’m letting everything fall apart a bit. I’m letting all the rules unravel round the edges. I’m allowing things to breathe, expand, sigh, settle. I’m dispersing, feeling my way, letting the stones fall out differently. The ngöndro feels like a starting practice. It feels like the boat that launches you. It feels like the daily dozen which, in one form or another, I’ve done for dozens and dozens of days. It feels like the means of establishing a self-discipline, whereas I’m letting my hand fall open and the string run loosely across my palm.

And what keeps me prostrating and chanting is mostly just this damn idiot determination to finish because I’ve started. It doesn’t feel skillful; it feels like a machine that is out of control, like a piston that is driving me, and I don’t seem to be quite able to find the ‘off’ switch. Inside me is a jumped-up tyrant with a big stick always driving me on. And although I’ve often challenged the tyrant, and laughed at his stick, I’ve never quite pushed him off his throne. Why?