Spiritual teachers talk about the way regular practice reaps its rewards, and that you have to persevere through periods where the meditation, or whatever the practice is, seems to be just a chore with no obvious benefit.

Julia Cameron in The Writer’s Way and Gail Sher in One Continuous Mistake suggest that a discipline of regular writing – a little every day – is the spiritual practice for writers and that the same law applies. Keep at it!

If blogging offers a similar sense of freedom combined with the risks of exhibitionism and vulnerability that naturism offers, then keeping up a blog seems a little like being told you have to do a little streak every day.

Is that all it is? Was Thoreau and company on to something with their idea of using and sharing journals for spiritual cultivation or does this just cater to our egos? The spiritual discipline with this it seems to me is the challenge to go beyond our innate human desire to display, to seduce, to persuade and to make that shift so that we are responding to what I hope are our deeper urges – to give, to share, to entertain!

I used to be snooty about the concept of entertainment until I read the Buddhist Alan Watts talking about his mission to entertain, and the week later at an OBOD Druid camp Prof. Ronald Hutton stated that he was there to entertain us. (Which he did hugely – you can hear him on the Druid podcast – episode 4 – link top right).

How different would our world have been if spiritual leaders had told us, from the dawn of time, that they had come to entertain us. If you’re laughing it’s very hard to pull a trigger.