Too much need for ‘perfection’, when the real perfection is underlying it all – all that I consider not up to scratch. Or not even that ... it’s more that it’s meshed within it – within the blowsy roses and the half-wild garden and the green plastic chairs with the scratches and the dull-grey summer day. It’s pressing through to the surface of everything that doesn’t try and doesn’t care a bit. It has nothing to do with my ‘standards’. It has nothing to do with what I think I have to do to prove that I am who I think I want to impersonate. None of that really has anything to do with perfection. Yes, I put a lot of energy into impersonating a yoga teacher, and then everyone adds their projections and the illusion is complete, but it’s only ever that: an illusion. And none of it has anything to do with perfection – nothing at all.

As soon as I made the link with Samye Dzong – offered the lunchtime meditation sessions and they accepted – I realised how much I want not to be a part of the one institution – any one institution – or even to be a student of the one teacher. What I want is to be the yogi up in the mountains, growing my dreadlocks and living in a cave. Actually, ‘want’ doesn’t come into it; it’s just a predisposition. I can try to counter it, but I’m going against my own grain. I seek practices that cut me loose and expose me to my own wildness, that lead me up the creek without a paddle and abandon me there. Of course, ultimately, all practices lead you up that creek, even when it looks as if there’s a big institutional safety net or a teacher holding your hand. And, yes, at the same time there’s a need for surrender of the will, and on a dualistic level that appears to be at odds with self-determination and the mandate – the absolute mandate – to follow your own path, your own, but only on a dualistic level.

I’m into my summer teaching schedule, which means that tomorrow I have all day to roll around in – aside from getting Rowan to school and home again.

The desire to eliminate extrinsics from my life – things, stimulation ... all the unnecessary distractions. But this isn’t it really. All those external things are just a cypher for the real necessity, which is to simplify myself – to empty myself – because the real nature of myself is emptiness. So I suppose the desire is actually just to become consonant with the reality of what I am. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Thomas Merton. This sounds like something he might have written.

Too much ‘me’. I’m so centred around what I want and what I feel, and (whether I get what I want or not) it’s oppressive. This has nothing to do with a kind of nursery virtuousness, like ‘share your toys’, or the quid pro quo ‘do unto others ...’, which are just other attitudes of the ego. This is a more radical internal shift. In this culture, me-ness is so normative that my own has been almost transparent, but it’s starting to thicken and darken and become visible to me: the ego curdling. There’s a kind of pursuit that appears ‘spiritual’, and maybe it’s appropriate when you’re young, but if it doesn’t exhaust itself, you never wind down into stillness, equanimity. Everything is contained in the grain of this moment. More and more, I experience this directly.

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s journals. He gets good as he reaches middle years. Before that, he’s a bit histrionic and florid – which is really only what I would expect. I expect it because it’s just what I see in myself. To find it in someone else’s journey, at a point where I’m starting to let go of some of the internal melodrama, is clarifying. His struggle around the desire (is it?) or vocation (is it?) for hermitage resonates with me. I understand the need to whittle everything down to the absolute minimum, and then also the doubt whether this isn’t just a new form of self-indulgence – literally, the indulging of the self rather than its whittling down, which is what I really ought to be about.

Actually, this clarified something else for me. There’s talk around me at the moment about ways of living in community, and I’ve wondered why I don’t feel the attraction. Now I see that it’s because I’m moving in the opposite direction. People come into community usually in order to simplify, but what generally happens is that a new layer of complication gets added. And then I can’t help experiencing community as institution, which always turns my blood cold. I began adulthood in a kind of aloneness that was actually alienation. It was a product of fear and incapacity. I was so lonely I didn’t even know to call it that. The intervening years have been like living in a bag of pebbles. All kinds of sharp edges got knocked off and rough surfaces were rubbed smooth. I learnt to relate to people in deeper and deeper ways. Now, if I think of solitude, it feels like a place not just of peace and silence but also of deep connection. Hermitage? I don’t know. But definitely as I move out of the child-rearing phase I’m looking to make more space for practising, contemplating, being. Already I’m eliminating as much activity and stimulation as I can bear to be without. Sometimes I feel like that artist who stitched his eyelids together, because he said that by the age of 30 he’d already seen more than he could process in the entire rest of his life.

Because I didn’t have Rowan until I was 36, I feel, in a way, a bit out of synch with myself. I’m of an age where I might otherwise be moving into the third asrama, whereas actually Rowan is only nine, and it will be a while before I can head for the forest. Really, though, it’s impossible to be out of synch with yourself. Everything is unfolding in the only possible way. To say it’s the ‘best’ way or the ‘perfect’ way would be to miss the point. It’s just the way it’s unfolding.

Found myself on the Circle Line today. Suddenly, just an undertone, the old smell of the Underground, jolting me back 20 years, to the city I lived in then, which is a completely different city from the one I live in now. That one was ... How to nail it? It was so urban, and I was so out on all my surfaces, without a centre. Now there’s a lot more grass, and so much that seemed to matter then – because it was holding me together like a battery of steel pins – really doesn’t matter at all.

There’s a lot of doingness in the ngondro. I have to do 100,000 prostrations and 100,000 mantras and etc, etc ... a lot of things. In a way, it’s a young person’s practice, and I wish I’d got myself enough together to do it a long time ago. In mid-life, the desire for doing is falling away and I’m increasingly subsiding into being, so I feel a bit out of kilter with all these accumulations of actions. I certainly don’t need to prove to myself that I have the self-discipline to accumulate them. Yes, I’m squeezing the last little blob of toothpaste out of the tube with the ngondro. Which is to say, there won’t be any more big heroic practices for me.