Cultivating a Path

A path is a way. The original name for Christianity was simply the Way. Buddhism is called the Middle Way.  Tao (which can't be literally translated) is often called the Path or Way or Road.

We're always on a path. Looking backward we can see that our past experience is the path we've been on so far. At some point, many of us, looking back, come to a place where we want to choose the way forward more wisely than we chose in the past. We want to cultivate a saner, wiser, richer path.

One of the sweetest realizations in life is that this can be done.

What follows is a string of insights into what it is to value and cultivate a mindful path, a spiritual path. It's from Stephen Batchelor's, Living With The Devil.


A foot path is a space because it offers no resistance to placing one foot in front of the other. Its space allows one to move without hindrance. Space is thus a metaphor of freedom. Instead of seeing a path as a thing on which one walks, imagine it as the space between things that allows one the freedom to walk. If the English language did not condemn us to separate the path from the act of walking, we could speak of such free movement as "pathing."

A compulsion is any mental or emotional state that, on breaking into consciousness, disturbs and captivates us.

Compulsions obstruct the path by monopolizing consciousness.... To escape their grip does not entail suppressing them but creating a space in which we are freed to let them go and they are freed to disappear.

Thus emptiness is a path. It is that open and unfettered space that frees us to respond from a liberating perspective rather than react from a fixed position.

A path is created by clarifying one's aims and removing what gets in the way of their realization. It is carved from commitment and opened up by letting go. It entails both doing something and allowing something to happen. A path is both a task and a gift.

(Creating a path) is guided by an intuitive yearning for what we value most deeply; its space is the openness we are able to tolerate within our own hearts and minds; it is sustained by the network of friendships that inspire us to keep going.

The survival of a path is achieved not by preserving it but by walking it--even when you have not clear idea where it will lead.