It's still hard. After all these years, after so much evidence for how much a deep and abiding connection with this energy improves the quality of my life, I still have a hard time with faith.
Having a hard time with faith, means quite simply, having a hard time; because faith is the foundational power of practice. If you don't believe you won't come back to it. If you don't believe, you get distracted by delusion and the constant dullness and emptiness of ordinary consciousness.
The other night I was watching Richard Dawkins on Jon Stewart. To him, faith without evidence is dangerous. And I can't say I disagree with him. I do believe in scientific method. And by and large in Zhan Zhuang, masters seem to stay away from visualization, and practices that might prime you to see of feel things that aren't there.
But I do have evidence. I have the evidence of how this vitality feels as it grows. I have evidence of how it seems to unleash my creativity, my confidence, and shape my instincts. I have evidence in the peaceful reprieve it offers every time I'm drawn back into the cycle of trauma in my painful, despairing childhood. I have evidence, in the power and strength it fills me with when I run. I have evidence in how it shapes my effortless movement.
I have evidence. And I have little doubt that one day we will have the instruments to measure this energy. But right now the only and best evidence is our body.
My problem, perhaps, is that I want the evidence to be external. I want to see money, and success, and the markers of happiness that society sees.
And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Except that the search for these markers of success can often distract us from the magnetic energy of the interior world.
Ideally, these normal markers of success would flow from a regular practice.
So, I offer now the rest of my life as an experiment. I maintain a practice for at least an hour, ideally two hours a day, and then see how and if I can direct the energy I cultivate into the exterior world.
Not for six months for the next thirty years.
I do this for my happiness. For Ben's happiness. For my parents and my brother. And for the happiness of all.
