Trusting The Journey
Time flies, as they say. Someone who came to the practice group recently asked how long I have been leading it. I randomly answered 4 years as I knew it was well before the pandemic that I started. Well, it turned out it was 2017 I started what I named, “Lunch Time Practice for Busy Women” on Fridays at InsightLA center in Santa Monica. When InsightLA started hosting a daily drop-in practice group, I opened my group to be for everyone. When we were shut down 3 years ago, I pivoted immediately to Zoom room. That’s 6 years all together!
It also means that I’ve been writing these “journals” for that long. This may be the one thing I have been doing consistently for this long. I started writing some random personal thoughts as a way of letting people know about my practice group. Rather than sending a simple reminder about it, I thought I’d share something that’s on my mind. Even though I often feel like just rambling about nothing, it’s a good practice for me to write as I hardly journal these days (another topic).
Meanwhile, life keeps unfolding. I was on a track to deepen my Buddhist practice and was enrolled in the Community Dharma Leadership (CDL) program at Spirit Rock. Then my CDL cohort was disbanded because the pandemic made it impossible for them to continue. I was very disappointed but also relieved as I was feeling overwhelmed with so much happening in the world in general. Then I joined the Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy program with the community of Insight Meditation Center (IMC) in Redwood City. I was so enthused about the program, yet only two months into the program my life was disrupted by the news that my mother was in her last days. Having to navigate the travel restriction during the state of emergency in Japan and dealing with my mother’s affairs was a lot to hold.
All this to tell you the truth. I’ve been hanging onto my practice by a thin thread of my weekly practice group and the daily morning practice with IMC on YouTube, which I often sleep through. I have not been participating in Dharma related courses nor teaching Dharma offering. After 6 years of weekly offering, handful of people including a few who had been coming in person still show up every week which gives me so much joy. While I do desire to practice more deeply as I love the teachings so much, my life is full and that’s just how it is today. One of my teachers, Gil Fronsdal, once said to me “Trust the Dharma.” It’s about trusting the journey itself.