Perseverance
"When the eyes look inwards, because we are focusing on a small area with concentration, we can see more clearly. The question is how long will we persevere with these understandings. Because the big challenge of practice is not just practicing and persisting in practice but, when we understand something, sticking tenaciously to what we've understood. It's difficult, because we want to walk the path earnestly, but also to keep on doing what we feel like doing.
"Yet when we value certain ways and want to adhere to them, going in the other direction simultaneously doesn't work anymore. So the question is how to convince our personality to do what she values and not what she wants; how to stick to the deeper inner directive? It isn't simple because something pulls us back to our old habits.
"And yet it is possible in the framework of practice. Practice is like a laboratory where we build up our attentive listening, our perseverance and our ability to persevere in heeding what we hear. In spite of the need to run away we bring our mind again and again to our breath. Even if we feel like fantasizing about what it's really like to be spiritual, we continue to be busy with the squaring of the pelvis in paravrittatrikonasana. True, we're not really dealing with deep moral issues when we insist on rooting the foot to the ground and connecting to the center, but we are continuously listening to the body and insisting on being precise and on being present. And so, within the practice, we build a little tenacious, persevering person within us.
"And it is just possible, that with time, this tenacious little person will be able to persevere where she couldn't persevere before."
