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I have been reflecting on the nature of practice-awakening. In the Buddhist tradition this refers to the process (both sudden and gradual) of realizing our fundamental wellbeing. This is a transformational practice. This is a healing practice. And it is mysterious. It doesn’t happen in the way that we expect.

Insights happen, and then are forgotten. Love is awakened and then seemingly covered over. Only to be rediscovered again. We can read the same teaching years later and feel like it opens a new level of depth, or is actually just what we needed to hear in that moment.

The ancients spoke of stabilizing our insights, of familiarizing ourselves with the love, peace and understanding that we are.

I am reading a book by Carol Gilligan called The Birth of Pleasure. In it Gilligan is using the myth of Psyche and Eros, to talk about the development of the psyche in women. She is also writing about relationship and the maturing of love. As I was reading I encountered a short paragraph where she introduced research between mothers and infants that revealed the relational attunement present at this early stage of our development. She spoke of how the research challenged assumptions of separation.

Their research was challenging an orthodoxy of separation (we are born alone, we die alone) by revealing a reality of relationship. Finding and losing and finding again. This is the rhythm of relationship, played over and over again in the games that delight babies and young children. It is the rhythm of love.—Carol Gilligan, Birth of Pleasure

When I read this, I heard dharma practice instructions. That is the thing about immersing in the dharma, we hear it, we see it—everywhere.

How many of us have this orthodoxy of separation ingrained in us? Who think thoughts or hold beliefs that—we are alone? We are separate from the rest of the world? That no one understands us? That we are unloveable or exiled in some way?

The dharma challenges this orthodoxy, by revealing a reality of relationship.

We can wake-up to the reality of interconnection, of non-separation.

Practice is that finding and losing and finding again. Its the rhythm of love that delighted us as children. Its something we know deeply.

We are never apart from it, but we get lost, as humans do. And then get found.

A coin that is lost in the river, is found in the river.—Zen Koan

We are that coin. Our true nature is that coin. And actually we are the river too, where nothing is ever lost. Its always right here.

In the Tibetan tradition you do practices a one-hundred-thousand times as part of the preliminary practices, called ngondro, this includes prayers, refuge practices, bows, atonement and offerings practices. I have a little taste of this from the studies I did at Tara Mandala. You keep a practice log, and you actually count.

Part of the theory being that once you do it thousands of times, its in you. Faith, determination and trust are born through the practice of return. We actualize the rhythm of love that we delighted in as children.

Isn’t it delightful to rediscover the refuge of our breath, to reconnect with the stability and openness of our original heart?

In the Zen tradition we have our own expression of this. Throughout the course of a retreat or a residential period, you will do 100s or 1000s of bows and hours of meditation. You will chant the same chants, participate in the same ceremonies, over and over again. Hogen used to say if you train at Great Vow Zen Monastery for at least 7 years—the dharma is in your bones. Ten or more years of dedicated lay practice that includes sesshin has a similar kind of embodied resonance.

Part of the point here is the repetition. If we lose and find ourselves one-hundred-thou