Day 6-7: Finding my lost humility

This past week I demanded commitment from myself by keeping a meditation routine. I decided to take my practice more seriously. With this, I was able to expose myself more efficiently. Meditation is a daily grind that requires discipline. It is mobile, malleable, and adaptive. Though not comfortable, I was trying to integrate it into everything that I did. I failed a lot but made progress. It is a labor of love.

My seven-day practice was concluded with a harsh understanding. I revealed to myself that I lack humility. I have been operating, on repeat, through arrogance and pride. To me, pride is the most destructive sin. It damages the ones closest, even if the willed intent is to love them. Pride gives birth to selfishness and is nourished by the blind false self, it is the opposite of love. Pride only encourages more worship of the false-self by the unwillingness to get low enough to see something deeper than yourself. The challenge does not hide within thinking less of yourself but rather thinking of yourself less often. Pride is the by-product of putting ourselves on a "better than, worse than" scale. Humility is an art that needs to be practiced. We all need constructive reminders that there is so much more to life than "you."

Yesterday, I had to bring myself to the beginning of a resolution to this nature. This was a painful feeling. Attached to that pain was mourning, a natural way to move on. The only way I will get my hands untied is to first ache for the sin I have committed. Sometimes we must keep the pain to learn from it. I have never been able to change without first having said goodbye. Learn to kneel and you will see the divine face to face.

“Try to say that: “I don't know anything”. We used to call it “tabula rasa” in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, “I want to see”." - Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs