It's been a month since returning from retreat and teachings in the East. Anticipation of the return home has always given rise to concerns about retaining and growing the understandings and practices gained in retreat. How can I sustain the momentum when reimmersed in my day-to-day environment? How can I maintain the same level of mental stability and its accompanying well being? How can I hold and expand the truths and realizations discovered on retreat that seem so essential to a sustained life of health, happiness, and wholeness?

It seems a bit more steady and sustained this time. I sense this is related to the growth of faith. We are told that there are three aspects of faith: a faith arising from intellectual certainty, a faith arising from an intuitive clarity, and a longing faith that arises from the meeting of the first two aspects of faith. The first, an intellectual certainty, comes from life experience, study, and teachings. It is a certainty that a sustained and profound well being can only be found through the still mind and open heart, and that this pursuit is the most meaningful activity of human life. From this certainty arises a non-intellectual intuitive faith that knows this same truth from a deeper non-conceptual source. And from the meeting of this conceptual and intuitive clarity arises the third aspect of faith, a yearning faith which motivates us from within to work with diligence to attain the full promise of our human possibility.

The motivation based on a growing faith encourages us to abandon unwholesome behaviors that create both mental and physiological havoc, to abandon our lifelong pursuit of mundane, momentary and self-betraying pleasures, and to stop automatically chasing every thought, emotion, and image that moves through our mind. We choose to cultivate healthy behaviors, a still, mindful and clear mind, and an open heart. And we choose a mentor, a set of teachings, and a supportive community to help us on our path.

This movement from outside to inside, from a conventional health to a vast and profound well being is a progressive shift, a transformative change that begins inside. Although limiting, old ways of thinking about and seeking health and healing are quite tenacious. It's taken time to overcome these conditioned thought pattterns and convince this habituated mind that there is more to health than I have imagined, more to health than biological balance, and further, that it is possible to gain this more expansive health in this lifetime through my own efforts. It has also taken time to find the right teachers and teachings. But slowly I'm getting it and that is why this return has been far more seamless than previous ones.

There is not much time between the years others are caring for our early development and then again the years when others are caring for us towards the end of our life. There is only a brief time to make our life precious and meaningful by pursuing the most meaningtful possibility of human life - the floruishing of health, happiness, and wholeness. I've been fortunate to have the time to dilgently pursue a larger health. I know that this is not so for everyone. Yet, as I have grown in faith, study, and practice I have also found far more time to devote to this pursuit as I've happily given up a host of trivial and meaningless activities, entertainments, and surface social conversations which in the end amount to nothing.

More than ever before, even as a beginner, I can begin to feel the changes within. I can feel the early intimations of a sustained and hardy health, happiness, and wholeness. No practitioners or outer remedies here - just study and practice.