My deepest why for practicing

In the courtyard of the Ananda Palo Alto community, back in the day.

I’ve been receiving an increasing number of out-of-the-blue comments from people hoping to hear me play flute more often.

I’m also getting a lot of encouraging feedback about my recent, more regular practice sessions.

Then — to top it all off — I just “happened” to stumble on an old blog post from August 2019, in which I shared something I wrote way back in the early 2000’s, when I was new to Ananda:

“What I want more than anything is to be able to simply be the vehicle for music to course through. I want to be the pipeline and the music the water. And I want to be a wide-open, pure, smooth, silvery pipeline for the sacred water to flow through, not a rusty, corroded, constricted, obstructed pipeline that blocks the flow.”

I can still remember that the inspiration behind writing those thoughts was to more deeply understand (and communicate to others) WHY we need to practice and improve and aspire toward perfection.

Not to impress or to compete or to gratify our ego. But to be an ever more pure channel (or vehicle) for the Divine Flow and, through our ever-deepening attunement, to eventually merge into oneness with that flow of the Divine.