{"id":422,"date":"2010-04-20T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/begin-again\/"},"modified":"2010-04-20T20:02:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T20:02:00","slug":"begin-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/begin-again.html","title":{"rendered":"Begin Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>What do you do when you realize your spiritual practice has gotten sidetracked, again?  I think the Buddhists have the best answer:  you acknowledge it, you release it, and you begin again.<\/p>\n<p>It helps if you can make some small but tangible changes, now.<\/p>\n<p>Change the music in the car CD player.  Start one of the books you\u2019ve been meaning to read.  Think about what you\u2019re eating.  Sit.  Walk.  Sleep.<\/p>\n<p>I may not have been able to prevent getting sidetracked, getting distracted, having to deal with unpleasant situations and people in the mundane world.  But what I wanted before is still what I want.  I can give up, or I can begin again.<\/p>\n<p>I begin again.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do you do when you realize your spiritual practice has gotten sidetracked, again? I think the Buddhists have the best answer: you acknowledge it, you release it, and you begin again. It helps if you can make some small but tangible changes, now. Change the music in the car CD player. Start one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Begin Again<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What do you do when you realize your spiritual practice has gotten sidetracked, again? 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