Teachings can be most profound, but those who listen may not understand. Never mind. Don’t be perplexed over profundity or lack of it. Just do the practice wholeheartedly, and you can arrive at real understanding—it will bring you to the place the teachings talk about.

Ajahn Chah, Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away: Teachings on Impermanence and the End of Suffering, from an extract in Tricycle magazine

So often on the contemplative path we read different teachings, different people’s accounts of their own journeying, and we wonder, “Am I doing this right? Is there another way I should be walking? Would that work better?” and if we’re not careful we can find ourselves skittering off down another byway, wondering why nothing seems to work for us like it seems to for everyone else.

Really there is no problem. It has taken me years to realise this, but there is no teaching to find, no teacher to follow. There is just the practice. Teachings are good in themselves, but no teacher can teach anything more or less than she has come to experience herself. All she could do was practice, and it is all we can do ourselves.

Just sitting seems too easy. It isn’t. It is the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do; but it is also the simplest, and the loveliest. All the words come down to this: just get on with it.