Training in Compassion 16: Five Virtues: Repetition

To train ourselves in compassion calls for growing the five virtues:

• Determination,
• Repetition,
• Owning Your Nobility,
• Reproaching Your Demons, and
• Aspiring to the Impossible.

Today we focus on repetition.

Familiarization is the key. To get out of an old way of being, get deeply familiar with a new way. We take our own point of view so much for granted. The world may not be as we think it is. In fact, it is virtually certain that it is not.

There's nothing wrong with habits as such. Habits can be very helpful in carrying us through without having to invest the energy for figuring out from scratch what to do in every situation. Habits help us conserve energy for times when we will need it. But our habitual way of seeing things, in many instances, large and small, is often distorted, too narrow – limiting our possibilities and our love.

This is why spiritual practice takes time, effort, support, and lots of repetition, repetition, repetition. Little by little our way of seeing the world and ourselves can shift. With effort, the mind can be trained. So choose your spiritual practice, and stick with it. Support your path with daily journaling, study, and meditation. Add further supporting practices such as mealtime grace, keeping sabbath, and getting enough sleep. Stick with these practices -- familiarize yourself with them so thoroughly that they become second nature.

New pathways in the brain are built through familiarization with a new approach. Repetition gradually establishes a new habit that is not, like the old ones, unconscious -- but instead is a habit you have thought about and chosen to cultivate for reasons that come out of your best motivations. It's a matter of brain-washing yourself, but in a good way: washing out an otherwise musty brain, freshening it up.

Left alone with its unconscious habits, the mind goes down predictably dull and often disadvantageous pathways. Just as physical exercise, over and over, changes the body, spiritual exercise, over and over, changes the brain and keeps it toned. Repetition is the true soul of spirituality.

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