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Transcript
Aside from the specific benefits that you get from a particular practice, there is a core benefit from engaging with daily practice of any type as a whole, and that is the cultivation of willpower. Now, the will is one of the few things that you can actually say that you own.
There are a lot of things in this world that we simply steward, that we borrow and that we simply walk with through life. The will is one of the core aspects that you could say is yours because it allows you to choose to engage what you want to engage. It allows you to move something forward when you want to move something forward, it allows you to stop and to create space when you need to stop and create space. And the will is something that can be cultivated. Many people in today's modern world do not have willpower.
They have very little of what we might call will, and that's why you often encounter people who say, I'm going to do X, or I want to do Z, or I want to engage with Y, and they never do. And it's as if there's always this block, they'll speak it out, and yet nothing happens. No action is taken.
This is not to discuss timing action for you in a way that makes sense. That might mean that you say, I want to do something, and it might take you a little bit longer to get there than somebody else, but you still get there. That's just how you may work at this particular stage in life.
No, I speak of people who make intentions all the time and never carry through with it. And there's this graveyard of intentions spoken and unspoken, left in their wake in a life that never gets actually lived.
And if we are able to cultivate the will, that is one of the tools that we possess as a being, as a presence that allows us to actually bring what we desire, what we envision into fruition. And so because the will can be cultivated, it is like anything else, it can be trained, it can be worked with, and the capacity of the will can increase over time.
But to do that, you need to exercise will. You can do that in many different ways. However, a consistent daily practice not only anchors you into the benefits of that particular practice that you are doing, regardless of what aspect of your selfhood it seems to touch, but it also asks you to consistently engage with will because when you show up and you feel that drag and that resistance to engaging with a particular practice, (that is in a sense normal for many of us who are practitioners) and you allow yourself to just move past that, you are cultivating willpower. And so that is a reason to engage with daily practice.