Yes, let’s tear it all down, like an overgrown garden. How many books full of life-changing ideas have you read and passed over, impatient for a quicker fix, less commitment? And what deeper, slower, truly transformative practice are you missing by shopping around like this? Chögyam Trungpa calls it ‘Spiritual Materialism’. Not in a harsh way there is a more friendly kind of crossness that can come from a no-nonsense friend who loves you completely and is not going to indulge in a repeat of your bullshit right now – I got cross like that, with a laugh and a glare. I got cross with myself for doing it again this week. It gives me the burst of momentum I often need to get out of a hole and moving again, but it’s a superficial way of behaving that runs the risk of nothing ever really sticking, nothing ever really changing. I’ll read it, nodding, “yes, yes, that’s it.” I’ll explore its ideas with religious zeal for a day or two, a week at most, and then I’ll get swept up in something or other, too distracted to keep practising its message, until the next time I feel that pull of “not right, not right” and then off I’ll go again, looking for another, different answer, another light to follow. “What will fix this?” I’ll leap on a book with a promising title, hungry and attentive. When I am sad or lost or confused or frustrated, I look for answers. Why do I DO that? And is doing it helping me, really? I’ve noticed I often tend to make blogs exploring these aspects of myself, perhaps as a way of making them even more visible, pinning them down so they can’t scuttle back into the dark and start pulling at my strings in secret again. I can drag it out into the sunlight and walk around it. I am always grateful when I spot a pattern in myself: some behaviour or thought that I have been inadvertently repeating so often that I’ve stopped noticing that I do it at all.

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