Why so serious?

Taking our practice seriously does not mean to become serious ourselves. Becoming serious about our practice and being serious in practising entails a subtle, and often subdued, but significant difference in that one is representative of our relationship with our practice, and the other is an image of ourselves we project into our practice.

To have a practice, to which we give time and dedication from our precious lives, is a gradual development of a relationship between us and the practice. The more it becomes part of our life, the more it enriches and benefits our experience of life, the more we continue to practise and evolve in our practice, and that self-promoting process eventually becomes the serious quality of our practice – it means we consider it a valuable part of our total life, and something we prioritise over other endeavours.

A serious practitioner can seem like a total buffoon or be utterly stoic and behave in all kinds of ways, and appear in any number of ways as viewed from outside – that, however, is only an appearance.

The same way being serious while we practise is an appearance we might be tempted to put on to ostensibly enhance our own perception of the practice, and mostly play with our own psychology. We might do that to convince ourselves that we take the practice seriously, regardless of what our actual relationship with it is, or if we even have one. You see, when we really do have a relationship with our practice, there is no need to be serious at all, because we would just practice and that’s it. No need to call it serious or not serious – no matter how it appears, or how we talk or don’t talk about our practice, we will always remain serious about it, as the relationship is developing and growing.

In essence, the seriousness of our practice is only the value we place in it and the benefit we are able to bring into our lives through it. Appearances remain ever irrelevant to the real devotion we exhibit and the actual benefit we receive.

The fewer preconceptions about being serious we have and the less time we spend trying to present ourselves to others or to ourselves (most often), the more attention, connection and sincerity to our practice we will be able to truly devote, and those are always a solid foundation for a good, meaningful and enjoyable relationship that will develop beautifully over time.

Devotion is much closer when we maintain this relationship with our practice and make sure its basis remains always truthful and real.

If we really are serious, our practice will be really fun.

If we take ourselves really seriously, our practice will eventually become a joke.

We can smile either way.