Where does our ability to do spiritual practice every day come from and what sustains it? Why is it good to practice everyday and what results from constancy to daily practice? A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
I wanted to talk a little bit about constancy. Constancy is a great power. What we’re being constant to—in our various ways—is our own nature, our real nature. We’re being constant to the deepest longing of our heart. So that’s the source of constancy.
The source of constancy is not willpower. The source of it is not, “I said I would do this, so I’m going to do it.” The source of real constancy is recognizing what you really want and being true to it.
Now, that has a lot of expressions, and some of those expressions might feel tedious at times or might need us to exercise something we could call willpower sometimes. But the actual source of constancy is this recognition of what goodness is, of what you want.
The major form of constancy that we practice is doing our practice every day. That has some really interesting effects, that form of constancy. One of the things I’ve said a lot of times is that a good practice is the one that you do. In being constant in our practice and doing our practice every day, without fail, there’s no sense that some days we do well, and other days we don’t do well.
The doing well is in being constant. In being constant to our real desire even when, on particular days, or in particular moments, we might feel a lot of resistance. Just because we feel resistance doesn’t mean we can’t also feel our real desire. That’s what makes resistance occur. It’s when our real desire meets some other kind of pattern. So, the first, middle, and last effect of constancy in a relative sense is that it wears away other patterns.
