YOUR LIFE IS YOUR PRACTICE
In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don't try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation,
for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, "...When I reach pension age, I'm going to retire and receive a pension, and I'm going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I'm going to enjoy myself. I' ll live a life of solitude and then I' ll really meditate." Things never happen that way. —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Transcending Madness
As a dharma practitioner with a career as well as commitments to care for others, I felt for years that there was seldom time to do solitary retreat. This was something that was continuously on my short list of the most important things to do. Frustrated, I became determined to find a way. Then, when I lived at Gampo Abbey, a Shambhala Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, I experienced both practice and work within the same day, every day. This was our way of life there. So here was an answer! I