In Practice, we often talk about the importance of keeping a commitment, however small—an often-used example being patting the nose three times first thing in the morning. It took having my own direct experience, though, to really get what a powerful practice it could be working with one tiny thing like that.
It came out of a desire to do some drawing in nature last spring as the weather was starting to get nice. It was not the first time I’d had that inspiration and I knew I needed some support, so I enlisted the help of a Zen Awareness Coach. Toward the end of this six-week session, I came up with a commitment to do one small drawing a day. The length of time spent on the commitment was to be in the “under five-minute” range.
Right away, I could tell I was onto something good. Ego argued that the commitment was infinitesimally small and unrelated to a desire to draw and paint large pictures out in nature all day long—a joke, really! But my intuition was that there was something big in that small thing. Also, I enjoyed that short minute or two when I allowed my eyes to rest on something I loved and got completely absorbed tracing the shapes with my pencil. I enjoyed it so much that when my coaching session was over, I took advantage of the "Keeping Commitments" Buddy Program to help me keep up that small commitment for the next three months.
It was not long before I began to realize the full significance of what I was doing. I was practicing. I was practicing getting past ego resistance. I would hear:
“It is too difficult--overwhelming!—to represent the complexity of those fir boughs and clumps of leaves with a pencil tip.”
I found that, when I did the job of paying attention, Life had a way of working this out.
I heard:
“It will be unbearably painful to open the valve of creativity that has been shut off by conditioning for all these years!”
I discovered it was not.
I heard lots of things, for many months, but it never stopped me from doing the quick “drawing a day” since it was such a small commitment and I had promised to do it. And in that way, the practice was reinforced. I was strengthening the muscle. Each time I picked up a pencil and did that little drawing, I practiced not letting the voices stop me.
It was not long before I had a sketchbook full of drawings, and I looked at them with joy and pleasure, for each one was a memento of those few minutes when I had listened to Life’s call instead of ego’s usual blare. I had proof that one tiny thing could add up to something much bigger. And that something turned out to be transformational. I learned how important the process is, and now knew how to practice the process. I learned how keeping one tiny commitment could transform a life.
In gasshō,
Emily