Letter to a colleague

My time in the monastery has been spent trying to change the way I work. This has meant that each session is spent softening and reordering the focus of my mind to heart rather than head. This involves many sitting downs, bringing myself back to my new way when I feel myself slipping into that dreaded mould, which after all I created for myself (my responses to environmental pressure are my business and my choice) and which I am now endeavouring to change. This means that a 3 hour session may only involve 30 minutes of physical exercise, but at least I know that this 30 minutes is well intentioned. This was all stimulated by John saying to me, "If you carry on the way you are then I never want to see you again". Brutal but necessary. To start with I hated this new regime. My ethical sense (the mould itself) was constantly insisting I carry on the same as usual - hard work (we think / the hard / in). Now (after 4 years) it has been largely dropped and I really look forward to practice: the freshness and newness I find exciting and enheartening, unlike my old regime which would leave me physically exhausted and empty because it hadn't been coming from, and was neither going to, a place of health, heart and life.

There is a double aspect to this work: standing back to see and change the process of the process, and stepping right in, deeper and deeper, to become the living heart of the process. Eventually both happen naturally and together. It requires real maturity and equanimity to manage this. This is what I mean by intelligence. I remember Jeremy telling me that his piano teacher at the RCM, Yonty Solomon, in their first lesson together, started to work on his posture at the piano. "I've had a bad posture all these years", he said, "why has it taken until now for someone to tell me?" Because he wouldn't have had the maturity to either take it or work on it correctly any earlier I suspect. The fact is that there is constant instruction there all the time and we're either too dull or too busy or too frightened to feel it. The temptation is always to see the world through the fog of your own conditioning. Stepping out of this just long enough to catch a glimpe of the way things really are is all that is necessary. As my teacher once said, "My life has been a life of glimmers."

He had written the
fog as it billowed
  
before everything
made it new
  
free from
dreams and
  
exalted surges.
I feel I am truly a
  
great man.
I have been asleep.