Admittedly, I chase peak experiences like a pro. I want it intense. Sometimes it seems like I don’t really mind suffering, as long as I walk out with a good story. I am not above any of that. I also know it to be a total trap. Part of a spell cast over us all about how life should be, what makes things meaningful or important. A spell that tells us our bodies should be eternally beautiful, that if we don’t want to rip the person’s clothes off in every instant we’re not in love, that anything that doesn’t bring methamphetamine high isn’t real. It informs our story about how love should feel, how our work in the world should feel, how our daily life should feel, and where we should invest our energy.
In contrast to my peak-chasing, most of my practice is boring. So fucking boring. I sit to meditate and watch my stupid mind play the same VHS it’s been watching for decades. I chant the same chants. I move through the same sequence of asana. I perform the same rituals day in and day out. Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m married to practice, and it is as mundane as any twenty-year marriage could be. And I realize that yes, there is habit; yes, there is another layer of me feeding another layer of my identity as Little Miss Sadhak; yes, there is the magical hope that it will unfetter me from the shit-shackles of samsara. But, at the core there is love. The kind of love that is the base of any marriage that lasts; the willingness to keep showing up, the faith that you are investing in something of value, the tolerance of the mundane, and the commitment to having reverence for all of it. Allowing it not to be fireworks, allowing it to just quietly live and breathe beside you, to hold you up and to transform you in ways so innocuous you barely perceive them.
Slow and steady doesn’t sell. But without a steady, stable practice, nine million peak experiences in medicine ceremonies, meditation retreats, or workshops like mine, won’t be able to really cause lasting change.
We are all practicing, consciously or unconsciously. Whatever you do repeatedly becomes your practice. And whatever you practice you become an expert in. Scrolling Instagram (which I do way too much) is a practice in diffusing our attention. We practice being half in, giving our bodies but not our hearts, numbing out, distracting ourselves. We practice being bored, dropping what we have in the hope of something better. We practice for life that we wouldn’t want.
This photo of me mid-process; throat covered in lep, sleep deprived, starved, and so alive, is what I show – the peaks. For every one of these peaks, I’ve got about 600 hours of nodding off in meditation, bored and distracted while chanting a Kavacam, having a war with myself to get on the mat. I had a year’s worth of preparation for this process and will have two years of integration. An hour and a half sit a day. Ain’t nobody taking pictures of that, but that is where the magic actually happens. Those moments where I enter the same portal as every other day, and in that mundane and unspectacular there is love. Everyone wants fireworks, but what is it to stoke the same fire relentlessly? To tend to it; let it warm your house, cook your food, dry your clothes. What is it to find the sacred in the mundane? What is it to practice commitment?
