It all starts with formal practice: a well-defined time slot each day filled with the work. Until this is established the student is not really a student – more a hanger-on, a dilettante, an amateur. It doesn’t take long for formal practice to develop a life and reality of its own, an Internal life through which you connect daily to both teacher and teaching. It provides a connexion of softness and intimacy, which nourishes in a way nothing in external life can. Those too lazy or frightened to get into practice never understand what a teaching is, never get to appreciate that it is both a living and a loving entity.