Practice successes. Practice successes. Hmm... Let's hear from our two leading panelists on this topic:

Panelist #1
Practices successes - you have to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me. We're supposed to be writing about practice successes? Well, first of all, you would have to have A PRACTICE!! That would be a good place to start. Meditating once a day, going to the occasional workshop or group discussion, being on the occasional reflective listening conference call - you call that a practice?! I DON'T. I call that PRETENDING. I call that "Wannabe Zen student" or "Wannabe Cheri Huber." In other words, you're not a Zen student, you don't have a practice, and the idea of "successes" (PLURAL!?!) is just ludicrous. I think you should give it up right now. Everybody else has given up, and you should, too. Let's see what Webster has to say about it - success: favorable or desired outcome. Hmm. Would we call being lost in our minds suffering for days and weeks on end a FAVORABLE OUTCOME?! Hardly. Come on, let's face it, this practice is not for you. It's too hard, you can't do it, something's just not right about it. We need to just drop it and move on. We can find something that works - this is not for us.

Panelist #2
Hmm. Practice successes. Practice successes. Well, the first one - I'M STILL HERE!!!!! Yay! And that, literally, nearly sums up the practice successes. To paraphrase Confucuis: "It doesn't matter how fast you go as long as you do not stop." And that's what I've been doing - one step at a time, one breath at a time. Some part of me has been having a very rough time with practice (and with life!) recently. I hit a big ditch. I didn't know which way was up. I was suffering a lot. Everything seemed wrong - me, life, my family, everything. The sensations in my body told me that SOMETHING WAS VERY WRONG. Fortunately, I had had those intense sensations on another occasion, and I had lived through them. So maybe, it occurred to me, I might live through these also. For me, it's a very intense tightness in my lower abdomen. It makes me wonder if I have food poisoning. Breathing into it seems to do nothing for it. I also get a real tightness in the throat. For me, that's the double-whammy of conditioning - tight abdomen and tight throat. Those two, together with non-stop obsessive thoughts about doom-and-gloom, create a hell-on-earth for me.

However. HOWEVER. The tentacles of practice run deep in my life - probably a little too deep for conditioning. I am very involved in life: with my local sangha, with volunteering to support Living Compassion in a number of areas, and with my family. So, much as some part of me would like to just "up and walk away" from it all - it's easier said than done. I could, of course, but it would cause a great deal of upset and, I'm sure, a great deal of suffering. So I breathe. And I breathe some more. And I sit. And I LEAN ON  PRACTICE. I have come too far to go back. The point of no return is somewhere far in the rearview mirror. So whatever comes up in life is looked at through the lens of practice. How am I causing myself to suffer? What am I believing about how life should be instead of the way it is? And I have found, as I do this, "the wisdom of no escape" (the title of a book by Pema Chodron). I have made some big commitments in my life in the past few years - I have said yes to life in ways that are outside (sometimes well outside) my comfort zone. As a result of this, I find myself in a place of "no escape." I really need to end suffering - there is no other option. I need to end suffering. And so that is what I focus on, to the best of my ability, moment by moment by moment. "In this way, I do most deeply vow to train myself."

Deep gassho to practice, and to all who make it possible.