Part 3 - Life in Awareness

The Paradox of Practice

In most parts of life, practice helps us improve. We learn an instrument, a language, a craft, and through repetition we become more capable. So it is natural that we bring the same assumption into the inner dimension.

We think awareness must also be earned. We imagine that after enough meditation, something decisive will finally happen. If not meditation, then perhaps enough yoga. If not yoga, then enough discipline. And if nothing has opened yet, perhaps simply enough years will finally bring us there.

But awareness does not belong to that kind of world. It is not the result of practice, it is already here.

Practice can make us more available. Meditation may steady attention and help the nervous system settle. Yoga may open the body where life has been held too tightly. Prayer can reach places that thought alone cannot touch. Silence and time in nature may return us to what is simple. In these ways, practice can reduce the inner noise that keeps us occupied and weaken the grip of compulsive thought.

But it does not create presence or manufacture being. Awareness is not placed at the end of a long road and handed to us once we have proved ourselves worthy. The opening is always now. And that is a paradox. What is timeless cannot be reached through time.

Someone may sit in meditation for twenty years and remain identified with the one who is meditating. Another may become completely open in a single moment and recognise the same living presence the mystics spoke of. The difference is not one person’s greater achievement. What is recognised has never been absent.

When you practise, are you working with yourself, or with an image of yourself?

This is why the idea of a spiritual future can become a hindrance. The mind is perfectly able to turn even the deepest longing into another project, another ambition, another identity.

It says: one day I will arrive. And by doing so, it unnoticeably moves life somewhere else.

What helps your practice remain alive rather than becoming something you merely repeat?

The moment practice hardens into self-image, something begins to drift. The practitioner becomes more important than the seeing. Freshness gives way to routine. What was alive becomes mechanical.

A real practice is not there to decorate the person. Its purpose is to return us to direct experience and to what is already here without our effort having to produce it.

Over time, sincere practice often becomes simpler. There is usually less performance in it, and less strain. There is less need to appear advanced, and more willingness to be honest. The whole movement becomes more intimate and more real.

We are not practising in order to become spiritually impressive. We are learning to notice what obscures awareness. We are allowing inner coherence to settle more naturally into the body and into daily life. We are becoming less easily carried away by thought. Yet the essential fact does not change. Awareness is present before practice begins. It remains throughout the practice. And it is still here when the practice ends.

So perhaps the deepest gift of practice is not that it takes us somewhere else, but that it helps us stop overlooking what has always been here. Then meditation is no longer a ladder to a future state. It is a meeting. Yoga is no longer a performance. It is participation. Stillness is no longer a task. It is recognition. From there, the whole path feels different.

We may practise every day, with sincerity and depth, while seeing clearly that the goal is not waiting somewhere in the future.

And when this is understood, practice is no longer driven by lack. It becomes a natural expression of care for what is true.

The doorway is here now. Always here now.