While my apprehension and appreciation of Hui Neng’s poem makes me a little uncomfortable with notions of “cleaning,” “polishing,” or “scrubbing,” I do find in my own practice of yoga that repetition is the mother of learning, and that habits leave depart from us with when we make small shifts. This is a further meaning of observances and ritual, to which I rarely refer as “hollow.”
“Spiritual training involves scrubbing out deeply ingrained habits, which takes time and reiteration. It is like trying to flatten a scroll that has been coiled for thousands of years. One pass of our hands across the surface won’t do it. We have to press it out again and again.”
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