Stay True To Yourself By Staying True To Your Practice

Hey everybody.

My message to you tonight is to stay true to yourself by staying true to your practice.

That the best way to stay true to yourself is to stay true to your practice.

By practice I mean that time,

Three minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is in the morning,

Where you're present to life,

Where you're accountable to your thoughts and your feelings,

And where you're thoughtful about the actions that you're going to be taking in your day.

When I hear that phrase,

Be true to yourself or to thy own self be true,

I get it.

I think it's so important,

But I don't always know what it means.

I have so many selves,

So many feelings,

So many concerns,

So much going on,

That the great gift of spiritual practice in the morning is as much as it's designed to clear the mind.

Before I can clear the mind,

I have to have some level of awareness of what's there,

Some experience of being able to possess my thoughts and feelings instead of allowing myself to continuously be possessed and controlled by them.

And it doesn't matter if I'm feeling great or feeling awful.

When I have that awareness,

This is the feeling.

This is the feeling that is up for me.

It's then that I can honor the medium that it is and begin to walk through it.

It's when I can say,

This is the thought,

Or these are the thoughts that I'm having,

That I can move through the medium,

Sense their resonance with my heart or not,

And let them go or carry it forward.

And ultimately,

In that morning spiritual practice,

I can get to that greater level awareness that helps me to recognize,

Even though I'm not thankful for this thing going on in my life,

I'm overall grateful for the whole of my life.

That even though I may be facing a challenge at this particular time,

I'm able to remember that sense of the truth of my character,

The value of my virtues,

And I can,

Instead of moving in the direction of fighting with something that I don't want,

Reassert and glimpse that vision again of where I want to go so I can head in that direction.

There's a piece that has been with me since I was,

I don't know,

15,

16 years old when I read it for the first time from Shunryu Suzuki,

And I'm just going to read it to you because it's always been just very meaningful for me,

And it's kind of hard to explain.

But he says,

When I was at monastery in Japan,

Everyone was just doing what he should do.

That is all.

It is the same as waking up in the morning.

We have to get up.

At monastery,

When we had to sit,

We sat.

When we had to bow to Buddha,

We bowed to Buddha.

That is all.

And when we were practicing,

We did not feel anything special.

We did not even feel that we were leading a monastic life.

For us,

The monastic life was the usual life,

And the people who came from the city were unusual people.

When we saw them,

We felt,

Oh,

Some unusual people have come.

But once I had left the monastery and been away for some time,

Coming back was different.

I heard the various sounds of practice,

The bells and the monks reciting the Sutra,

And I had a deep feeling.

There were tears flowing out of my eyes,

Nose,

And mouth.

It is the people who are outside of the monastery who feel its atmosphere.

Those who are practicing actually do not feel anything.

I think this is true for everything,

And I think this is true for everything as well.

Stay true to yourself by staying true to your practice means that there will be days where it feels like you're just going through the motions,

That everything is mundane.

But there will also be days when you look at not only the extraordinary in this very moment,

But the extraordinary that was present in the mundane as well.

And it is then that you'll be glad that you will have stayed true to your practice,

Because if you will find it is the golden thread that's lifted you through all of life.

And perhaps as a closing today,

And I shared this in our Back to Basics series,

I can show up to my spiritual practice day after day and sometimes feel disconnected from Source or from God,

And really caught up in the stuff of my life,

Thinking about work here at Mile High,

Or thinking about the bank account,

Or thinking about my kids and what we're going to be doing.

And I can get so caught up in that I can forget that feeling essence of God.

In other words,

I'm encountering my manufactured understanding of God instead of having that true valid experience.

And from time to time it sounds a little scary,

But it's not.

I think the best thing to do is to close our eyes,

And when that image of work comes up,

Just allow it to disintegrate.

When your image of your kids or loved ones come out,

Not literally,

But just allow them to disintegrate.

When you're thinking about money and stuff,

Just allow it to disintegrate and see if what doesn't arise in its place is a profound sense of connection,

Purpose,

And sacredness in a connection with the Divine.

When we let everything go,

We don't invent God,

But a newfound sense of the Divine reveals itself already here.

And in this sense of connection,

This vibrancy,

This vitality,

Now I can return God-inspired to my work.

God-anointed in my relationship with my kids.

God-enlightened in approaching money and finances.

This thing that I was seeking most,

This energy of the sacred,

This inspiration,

It was there all along,

But I had to let go of all the scenes and the limited thinking about them to be reinvigorated with the Spirit.

Stay true to yourself by staying true to your practice.

It won't let you down.