1
Where do I set the boundaries in a public journal? How intimate can I allow it to be without feeling I have exposed myself – especially given that my most transformative experiences are bound up with personal relationship? My practices affect my life. They overflow into it, and my life flows back. So if I can’t write with complete intimacy, how useful is it to write here at all?

2
Why do I always end up driving myself ... and then have to let it all run through my fingers, unravelling, unravelling? How do I practise with discipline and yet not wind myself up until I’m bound to the spool?

I understood something new this morning: I am afraid that if I do all these practices, if I get up at 4am every day, if I study Sanskrit and eat properly ... I will become a sort of superwoman – will become the person who lately I feel is sometimes projected onto me by people who know me only by my surfaces. And in becoming this person I will not expand but lose something of myself: my chaotic, ecstatic, out-of-control, passionate, tumultuous part.

On a rational level, I know there’s a problem with my understanding here, because what is the function of practices if not to make us more human? And when we become more human we don’t become more generic but more specifically ourselves. I have witnessed this. Superwoman is a pseud ... and yet on a visceral level she still packs a punch.

When I’ve got mired in inertia I’ve always understood this to be on some level a corrective, a counterbalance to the iron fist I sometimes run myself with. I wonder now if inertia can also be a way to sabotage myself, because on a subtle level I am afraid of what I may become. I invite myself to feel into these questions, but end up tangled in mental speculation.

3
I could say that I have hit resistance to the ngondro again, except that I don’t know whether this is resistance or genuine doubt. I skimmed through the Guru Yoga text and wondered whether I could ever sincerely profess such faith in the Kagyu lineage. There are areas of Tibetan Buddhism that don’t reflect my experience of reality, others where I simply don’t know what is real and probably never will. I could just drink down all my doubts with a large glass of water, but I don’t want to do that. I’d rather hold a space for all my unknowing, but the ngondro is directing me towards a particular view. Yes, it’s true that mahamudra demands that I ask questions, that I carry out my own investigation, but with the objective of arriving at a conclusion that is preconceived. I think I will probably never be able to espouse one belief system wholly and solely. My reality is hanging somewhere between many varieties of truth, like the big speckled spiders on the lemonbalm, who suspend the guy ropes of their webs from many different stems.