Training

Nowhere special to go,

nothing special to do.

When an obstacle comes,

see what it can teach you.

All your life is learning.

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What if every delay, every misstep, and every irritation was part of your training? The world isn’t a distraction from your practice—it is your practice. Every moment is instruction, if you know how to receive it.

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We all want to be better than we are. Every desire we have aims at something we think will give us pleasure or save us from pain or make us happier. But no matter how many desires we attain, the cycle never seems to end. It seems that each day presents us with endless obstacles.

Here is a different take: Every perceived obstacle is really a point of instruction.

What if life were not a battle but a school, a dojo, a training hall? What if we imagine that we are all monks training to be masters and that our current personalities were disguises that protect us from prying eyes as we go about our learning? We put on our regular clothes, take the familiar route, do our work—and we approach it all as training. Every labor, every delay, every misstep is part of an unbroken lesson. The dojo’s walls are invisible and capacious enough for every moment.

Most of us, even actual monks, tend to think of “practice” as separate from life. We have to go to retreat, find quiet spaces, read sacred texts, do spiritual exercises. But this makes it into a separate space that we enter and exit. Our regular lives are an interruption that lasts longer than the practice. But what if there was no separation? What if the training were completely portable and constantly active? A work conversation, a long wait in line, a fleeting moment of beauty, distressing news of politically motivated cruelty—what if all of them were exercises in our practice hall?

Seeing clearly means letting reality be our curriculum; the frontier between “training” and “life” dissolves.

Every moment can transform us. Showing patience with an annoying client, exhibiting grace when someone starts an argument, standing up to a bully when all our instincts are to retreat, regrouping when our plans unravel overnight—all of these are our daily exercises.

The mind prefers a tidy classroom, but the heart pumps harder on uneven ground. By trimming the edges of our instinctive responses, one by one, we reshape the soul’s habits. When we resist a moment, when we think, “This shouldn’t be happening,” we take ourselves outside the training hall. When we receive each moment, when we think, “This too is part of the training,” we stay inside.

Here is a simple method for staying inside the hall:

• Pause when irritation rises.
• Name the event without judgment.
• Ask: “What is this here to teach me?”

This is not ignoring confrontation; it is refusing to waste it. We are not trying to behave perfectly. We are simply refusing to be absent. One hour lived this way can teach us more than years lived outside the hall.

Tomorrow we will wake again as the monk in disguise. The work will be the same: notice, receive, integrate. The hall is always open, the training never ends, the lessons are always present. The only question is whether we will be present enough to learn them.