While we are living in the grip of thoughts and their resultant actions, it’s like being in a dream and not knowing it. Then we cause less suffering if we make those thoughts and actions consist of Dharma practice.
But these practices are not simply for distraction, or for maintaining cultural traditions, so don’t let’s get lost in mindless repetition or pointless ritual. Each practice has a point, which is to Awaken us from all suffering. When we become Awake in that way, we can drop the Dharma diet, or use it to inspire others.
Pieces of Five 
Dear Five Thank you for this piece and previous pieces. I decided, on reading some inspiring piece of writing a while back, that I would practice gratitude each day….it would be good for me, lift my mood….. So how to do it? I would remember to say a prayer each time I meditated in the morning, or even on first waking up, to say “thank you” for all the experiences that seem to be bringing even the tiniest joy and to try and say “thank you” for things that feel not so easy, or maybe even difficult….they’ll be for my own good. So what happened was: I did that a few times, and the gratitude practice very, very quickly started to feel dead in my world of depression. “Trying” to feel something at a certain time was not working. Keep on taking the tablets, then. A bit later I listened to an interview of a man called Christopher Wesselingh, who explained he had had the strong insight that the Earth is alive, is a Bodhisattva, and is alongside us, much as Thich Nhat Hanh describes the Earth to be. They were just a few simple words that he wrote. Fine. This is what many of us “believe” already and in my Environmentalist days I had really sussed that out. I knew about global warming, and the trees breathing out oxygen, and the interpenetration of habitats, and acid rain….. But something about hearing it in Christopher’s interview kindled it a bit differently. Christopher reminded me of something. I re-read our Guru Rinpoche:song “…in the fluidness of water” and so on. I remembered back to Environmentalist days, when I was protesting, standing around with placards etc. That was always emotional, that sense of concern, but back then I was feeling somehow that the Earth was fragile, precious, breakable. How terrifying!! Something feels different nowadays. It is ME that feels fragile, precious, breakable! My mortality has swung into the frame!!! BUT it isn’t terrifying. As I go walking, looking at the clouds, trees and so on, watch the grandchildren running in the field, knitted together from the Earth’s elements, gratitude is inside my pleasure… they are the Earth’s, nothing can belong to us. And my breakableness is brought into perspective and doesn’t seem important. It is inevitable. What a brilliant word. IN-EVITABLE. Everything that can be touched, eaten, breathed, handled, seen, heard, cuddled, blasted to bits, EVERYTHING comes from the Earth and it will go back to the Earth. “INEVITABLE” will crawl back into the Earth, just like the words that crawled out of Moominpapa’s Waste paper basket when he screwed up his piece of writing and threw it there……. All our words are eaten by the Earth. We hear sounds only because the Earth is encircled by an atmosphere that her plants have created. The Earth makes her own music. My depression is still here, but I have been helped to notice a subtle connection. A greater presence is behind the gold and the smell of a loved one’s hair, and the very chemicals of our emotions. Earth is in us, and we are in her, absolutely all of us. We are connected!!! The practice of gratitude feels a bit shaky, and more like a sort of “UHHHH?” inside me. But it is tottering about inside me, alongside me, this “gratitude-that-doesn’t-feel-dead”. What can be so vast as to manifest all this?
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Wow, that is a teaching in itself! Isn’t it wonderful how we are inspired by each others’ inspiration?
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