On Beginning Again

Almost everyone I sit with arrives carrying the same quiet shame, and it is rarely the one they came to talk about. It is the shame of having begun before — and stopped. The journals that went three weeks. The morning practice that survived until the first hard morning. The version of themselves they met once, on a good retreat, and then mislaid somewhere back in ordinary life.

We treat this as evidence of some flaw. I have come to see it as evidence of being alive. Nothing that grows does so in a straight line. The tide does not fail when it goes out; the breath does not fail on the exhale. They are simply doing the other half of the only thing they know how to do.

So the practice I care most about is not starting, which is easy and a little intoxicating, and not finishing, which mostly does not exist. It is returning. The small, unglamorous, slightly embarrassing act of coming back — to the cushion, to the breath, to the person you meant to be — after you have, once again, wandered off.

You have not fallen off the path. The returning is the path.