It's time now to get serious about insight.
A few years back I did the Tergar workshop in cultivating wisdom. Since then, I've been cycling back through my compassion and mind calming practices, but the time has come to re-visit insight. I've been feeling stuck and I need a framework for getting back into the stream of vitality I seem to have lost.
This all started last week with an exercise I did on turning beloved activities into big, wildly improbable goals. I love meditation, so the improbable goal I set for myself was to do a 10 day retreat in Montabello. Improbable because I don't think Ben is ready to live alone for 10 days. But I wrote it down anyways, and within a few days I was thinking about what it was I wanted from this retreat. I re-read this great article in the New York Times by my friend Jeff Warren, about his own crazy experience starting and failing a month long one-on-one retreat with Daniel Ingram in Alabama, the Anxiety of the Long Distance Meditator. And then I started reading Daniel Ingram's book of hardcore stream entry exercises. I did some for a few days, but then it hit me. I've already done this. I re-read some of my entries from my Tergar workshop and remembered what an awesome time that was. How it lead to achieving other goals, like landing an agent. Why not go back to what I know. Insight is insight. I've had it before I can recover it again.
So I'm off. Six months back on the path of wisdom. I will, of course, keep you posted.
