Save the Date! 2012 Fall Retreat
St. Mary's Sewanee
September 12-16
Join us for the 2012 Luminous Mind Retreat at St. Mary's in Sewanee, TN. The retreat will be held in noble silence, Wednesday evening through Sunday noon. Teacher and other details to be determined. Stay tuned!
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Practice Tip from Ken McLeod
Practice tip -- time is not the problem
Practice takes time.
You can't make attention. You can only create the conditions in which it grows.
You can't make awareness. It's already there, but it's distorted by patterns of perception and emotional reaction.
It takes time for attention to grow. It takes time for new ways to evolve. It takes time to see differently.
The seeing happens in an instant, but it happens only when attention has grown and the conditions are right.
You can't speed this up any more than you can make a tree grow faster.
Time isn't the problem. It's a matter of priorities.
Make practice part of your life and organize everything else around it.
If you try to squeeze practice into your life, other demands squeeze it out. Inevitably.
There is no killer app, no magic pill, no silver bullet.
Bigger, better, faster doesn't work here.
Forget about being efficient. Be effective.
Clear away the weeds, work the soil and plant seeds. Then tend to them as they grow.
Each time you sit down to practice, take a few minutes to feel in your heart why this is important to you.
Nurture that seed, and all else follows.
Quotation
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years.
The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'
-- John F. Kennedy
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