Sacred Diligence

 

 If you can wash your hands, you can wash your mind. If you can achieve good dental health practices, you can achieve good mental health practices. Either we are on some kind of path, or creating one as we walk along through each day in life. This walk, which we all walk, is exceedingly narrow. The only way any of us can maintain a posture of uprightness is to begin doing it.
      

       “Doing it” means that nothing will change until we bring some of the ideas from virtual psychic reality into our physical reality, and then practice, practice, practice … and trust to let it unfold. Such practice is known as sacred diligence. At some point in our practice,  we will be introduced to the seemingly paradoxical Risen concept, “Do not,” as eventually we will be able to stop doing because we have accepted the transformational power of acceptance and can then let life flow. But for now we will start with small and caring steps. Many religious texts also say “Do not” in various ways and then menacingly add “… and don’t do it again.” The Risen assure us that we can do it again and as much as we want in order to realize that we no longer need to do it. The experience is totally ours to have and not for anyone else to tell us how to have or have not.

       Sacred diligence means to practice every day in some way—to maintain and sustain, nourish and grow the transforming energy, achieving results one can objectively see and even measure in a way that is personally meaningful to the practitioner. Ceasing practice creates the feeling of an empty space within us, and while we may not all be rocket scientists, certainly many of us can remember what we were taught about Nature’s opinion of a vacuum. For those who don’t remember, this means that ceasing spiritual practice creates a spiritual emptiness that very quickly fills up with the rubbish of lower vibrating things, such as junk food, gossip and less-than-positive media, addictive behaviors and toxic relationships. Such burdensome debris not only invites depression but also ignites easily by fear and quickly consumes what little peace we might have achieved. Sacred diligence allows us to achieve the lightness necessary to rise and stay above the sticky chaos, to get out of the town dump and into the celestial city. Which place of habitation would you choose?

   Diligence does not mean making a practice difficult or increasingly challenging. The word diligence has as its base meaning a blend of several illuminating concepts—to value highly; to esteem; to prize; to love; to aspire to; be content with; to appreciate. Thus openness, acceptance, and ease are the behaviors that are motivated by the particular energy of spiritual diligence.