Part of practice, part of any real learning, is failing. There is nobody that can learn something flawlessly, not even geniuses. You don’t pick up a violin and suddenly start playing. It takes time, practice, and repeated mistakes.

 

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Every mistake is a gift because it tells you where there is a possibility of improvement. You need to learn through your own experiences. That includes success and failure.

 

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The key to practice is knowing how to recover from the failures; knowing how to get knocked down, roll over with the force of being knocked down, and come back up on your feet, again and again and again.

 

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That’s practice. It’s that process that finally brings us to a point of breaking through. That, in and of itself, is enlightenment. That’s what it means to be human.

 

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“Not minding the mud” is our practice.

Extracted from The Old Woman of  Taishan