| | In my experience progress is at the same time important and tremendously difficult, almost pointless, to measure. Important because I want to have markers and my mind wants to think I'm attaining something while I do all this work. Pointless because progress is so very difficult to measure over short intervals of time, and by that I mean anything less than three to six months, maybe even years. My practice has never been exactly like what anyone else describes here or in books I've read, and it seems to me that since practice is so irrevocably tied to who "I" am that sort of makes sense. I've learned that much of what I experience is very subtle and sometimes not recognizable for a very long time. Just when I think I've made progress I seem to backslide, then "advance" a bit more, the backslide again.
It's been my opinion since finding it that this site is very valuable, not so much as a way to measure my exact progress but rather as a way to help me realize that my practice is wholly dependent on me and me alone, and to enable communications with my fellow, and similarly often confused, beings. I get very confused about progress a lot of the time for various reasons, ego being a very powerful one, so I try hard not to get carried away with measuring because it can distract me from my actual practice.
And that is probably a whole lot of nothing. |