Your life is your spiritual path. Don’t be quick to abandon it for bigger and better experiences. You are getting exactly the experiences you need to grow. If your growth seems to be slow or uneventful for you, it is because you have not fully embraced the situations and relationships at hand. To know the self is to allow everything, to embrace the totality of who we are—all that we think and feel, all that we fear, all that we love.

The idea is to welcome every thought, feeling and sensation that arises in meditation practice, as the perfectly imperfect cycle that it truly is. Dr. Lorin Roche outlines this cycle through the 8 R’s of meditation: Rest, relax, release, review, repair, restore, rehearse, remember.

Fast food, fast fashion, fast everything. We have so much free time now. What do we use that time for, though? Do we use it to live life meaningfully, or do we stuff it full of other tasks? Why do things have to be fast all the time? Just last week I got so frustrated over having to wait an additional minute for the traffic barrier to be raised. Maybe we should explore our heritage of slowness.

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

I believe also that our lack of resting has stolen our imagination and our ability to be inventive and subversive and to imagine and to have hope. And to me, that’s true oppression. To me, once you have taken away a person’s ability to see their way out of a situation, to see a new way, to imagine a new world, to see something different, to invent, you pretty much have them. And I think we’re at that right now.