The Paradox of Practice ⚔️
A moving meditation for you on this rainy day in NYC today. I wanted to share the full excerpt, which I love love love so much (taken from the book Integral Life Practice by Ken Wilber, et al), as it serves as a lighthouse for me on my journey.
~*~
Practice requires courage, because, like birth or death, it is a transformative ordeal.
If we persist, it will eventually destroy us as it redefines our personal identity.
Real evolution is both wonderful and terrible.
Although we long to discover and fulfill our life purpose, we are also afraid of finding what we're looking for.
We don't want it to shake us up too much.
We fear threats to our familiar and secure ways of relating to life.
We probably already suspected the truth -- that growing to fulfill our total potential would be harrowing.
Yet we have no choice if we don't want to be imprisoned in an identity that is too small for us.
Eventually we must venture forth. We must leave what is familiar, sacrifice our sense of security, and endure a life-or-death journey.
We must endure the cold seasons that temper and strengthen our soul, as well as the hot seasons that forge the alloy at our core.
Thus, crucial passages in this journey must be traveled alone, sometimes in extreme discomfort, with no assurance of safety.
They require us to find new grit, endurance, commitment, and creativity.
Though not fulfilling in a conventional way, the practice journey is real -- and profoundly alive.
We are the ones who must set out on this journey, but it's one from which we can never return.
If we're lucky, it will be completed by someone who transcends and includes all that we are, by someone greater than we are, and yet is utterly and authentically our very self.
The journey can be completed only by the uncompromised human being we each have the unique potential to become.
~*~
You might wonder, what the heck does this have to do with training Kali? Isn't it just about deeper ancestral and body connection? There are those things, and there's always so much more training.
An embodied practice will both unravel you and rebuild you -- from your physical body to all your previously held beliefs. It will show you your enmeshment with your ancestors and your complete sovereignty as an unique human being. It will show you that you can fight harder than you thought possible, and that there is also wisdom in surrendering. It will ask you to embrace contradiction and paradox at all stages of the journey.
At every moment, you might feel both like you've got this and that you have no idea what you're doing. But if you are engaged in the practice, then you are no longer on the sidelines studying a map -- you are walking the territory of your life. Better to be on this heroine's adventure, no matter the obstacles you encounter, because at least you know you're fully alive.