piritual practice is not serious—but it’s also not casual. Every time you indulge the ego, whether it be by focusing on “what’s wrong and not enough” or by distracting yourself from your true heart through passivity, you put yourself in jeopardy of perpetuating suffering.

The voices just want your attention. It doesn’t matter if the content of your attention is on what you want or what you don’t want. Or visibly suffering over whether you’re doing practice right or invisibly suffering by not caring whether you’re doing practice right—both are ignorance, delusion and the ego.

So instead of being driven, you are now passive. Just another swing in the duality game.

I know the temptation. When I discovered Zen and saw how collecting, buying things, and obsessing over materialistic things was causing me to suffer I decided not to buy anything. The answer seemed obvious. I was not going to collect or obsess over materialistic things. I was only going to obsess about spiritual things. I heard voices in my head that said: “Those spiritual things are what truly matter.” So I found myself on the opposite side of the duality. “More enlightened” than those other people who were so materialistic (just like I was minutes ago), trying to change others, wanting to be isolated from the “ignorant world,” and suffering now more than ever before.

What I failed to notice, and something I didn’t see until I began training in a Zen monastery, was how the ego and the voices tricked me into suffering over new content. So the content before was “stuff.” Instead of seeing the process, which was the HOW of stuff—the inner obsession—the voices just said, “Okay, no problem, we can have you suffer over ‘no stuff’ just as easily if that’s what you prefer.” And off to the races I went! I didn’t buy things, I didn’t go out, I didn’t talk to others—I had a new way of life in the rules and the new confines of my enlightened ego!

I didn’t see that “the HOW” was the obsession. The content was “stuff” or “no stuff.” But suffering is always found in the HOW. Just as presence is always found in the HOW.

For those of you who are being twisted into knots about what acceptance and presence looks like in your life—whether that be in your relationships, studying, working, health, careers, appearance, communications, etc. please take this one tip with you: HOW you do these matters tremendously more than WHAT you do in these matters. True, HOW you do them will inform WHAT you do, but that will be a by-product of presence. Just as HOW you do from the ego will produce a by-product of suffering.

My final words: Pay attention, believe nothing and take nothing personally. Watch HOW the ego dictates “the rules” of spiritual practice to you. Watch HOW it gives you the “right answers” to say. Watch HOW it judges you, your practice, others, and their practice. Watch HOW it creates more suffering in your life than freedom.

If this is your HOW, know that you can always choose another HOW.

Use it to help you see.

And choose presence as your HOW.