Well, I set up this blog a few days ago but seem to be reluctant to post anything on it. So ... blog, here goes ...

A lot of my resistance around the ngondro has dissolved – at least temporarily – and I'm riding on the momentum of the practices. It's like rushing downstream over the rapids. True, there are still a few lumps of ice bumping up against the raft, but mostly there is this fluid, easy energy. No, I don't expect it will stay like this – that's the nature of impermanence. And sweet though it is to coast on the river, I don't really want to carry on floating; it could become a bit facile. While maybe I can be a little too attached to difficulty, there's a lot of real merit in the obstacles that make me storm and vow to stop practising, because they force me to crawl through difficult holes, and getting stuck and snagged on the brambles is what enables me to understand what's real and where I am deluding myself.

Over the past few months, as I've sat and practised and danced and lived, I've been engaged in observing my own resistance - to everything, on some level. And at some point, while sitting yesterday, I suddenly became aware of the ludicrousness of it – of myself resisting myself, which is what it all boils down to. Because I'm not only the resister – who I identify with – but also whatever I resist against. I think that I am resisting an instruction or a teaching or a norm or an expectation ... But there is no compulsion in the instruction or the teaching or the norm or the expectation. The sense of compulsion is created by my mind, which wants to resist and yet at the same time feels it is being coerced to obey – and which, in some small part of itself, also wants to obey. I create a tyrant, a dogmatist, split myself in two and then rebel against him. The solution is to flow with things a bit more, to be looser, to break down the sharp edges, to allow in shifts and changes and movement. If I unlace the tyrant's corsets, he will dance with the rebel.