Postponing Permission

I’ve been reflecting lately on this seemingly quiet but persistent habit I keep noticing in my own thought process and in others. It’s a submissive, baked-in pattern that feels shared among all of us - this tendency to postpone our own permission.

The permission to rest, to soften, to simply be here.

Not as a philosophy or some spiritual achievement on a loving-yourself ladder of progress, but as a basic human capacity.

A clear example shows up around the idea of retreats, spiritual quests, or pilgrimages.

Someone, and I include myself, travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to a monastery or a center, to an isolated or quiet stretch of land somewhere. There’s a schedule of silence, slow walking, maybe a heel-toe meditation across gravel paths. Phones are turned off. Long pauses appear between meals. Nothing particularly dramatic happens, and yet something inside immediately loosens.

It feels like a kind of scheduled permission simply to be.

The shoulders drop, the breath deepens, and the mind stops performing. Almost unconsciously, something inside shifts and says, Oh… now I’m allowed.

Allowed to not rush, to stop managing everyone else.

Allowed to not be useful for a while or to simply sit and watch the light move across the floor.

As if permission required travel, or stillness belonged to geography, or presence needed a teacher, or a compound, or some sacred container to authorize it.

Lately, though, I keep wondering why we’ve normalized that. Why we’ve quietly agreed that inner permission must be scheduled in advance, paid for, or granted by someone with robes or a title or a program.

Because when you really look at it, nothing that happens on those retreat grounds is actually unavailable at home.

The same heel-toe walk could happen across the kitchen floor. The same silence could unfold while the coffee brews. The same restoration could arise while sitting on the edge of the bed before the day begins.

Nothing special is required.

And yet, somehow, we don’t do it. We wait.

It feels less like a personal failing and more like something systemic, something baked into the way we’ve been trained to live. Productivity first. Worth is measured by output and rest is treated like a reward instead of a birthright.

Somewhere along the way we learned to override that almost monk-like instinct to savor - to sit still, to watch shadows move on a wall, to listen to wind through trees, to breathe without improving anything - and we replaced it with urgency.

We save our quiet for later. We save our presence for special occasions. We save our permission for some future version of ourselves who has finally earned it.

And maybe nothing new is required at all. Maybe no one is actually giving us anything. Maybe those sages on stages or facilitators simply remind us of what we forgot we were allowed to do.

The more inner permission we gift ourselves the more we clearly see that this resting, this seeming non-doing, isn’t the absence of action and it certainly isn’t neglecting our lives. It isn’t checking out. It’s more like resting inside the doing.

The dishes still get washed. The emails still get answered. The work still happens. But something loosens in the way it’s held. There’s less egoic management, less of that tight, suspicious energy that believes everything will fall apart unless I personally grip the wheel, as if life needs my anxiety in order to function.

So the actions remain, but the atmosphere changes.

There’s a quieter trust moving underneath it all, a sense that I don’t have to strive from the assumption of failure. I don’t have to brace myself against the day. I can simply participate.

I keep circling back to this lately, and oddly enough, a couple of films have been teaching me as much about it as any book or retreat ever has. Perfect Days and Train Dreams.

Both of them move at a pace that almost feels rebellious now. There’s nothing flashy. No dramatic crescendos - just ordinary life unfolding.

A man sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, watering plants, listening to music on an old cassette player while the light filters through the trees. Another man working, grieving, aging, mostly alone, the landscape doing most of the talking for him. Both of them refuse the medication of constant stimulus.

On paper it sounds like nothing, and yet you can’t look away.

Because they’re not trying to impress you. They’re not trying to fix anything. They’re just staying with what’s here: a bowl, a window, a memory, a loss. The beauty and the ache, side by side. And yet, reading so many social media comments that call it boring or say nothing happens, you start to see how the grooming of our minds for results and manufactured action leaves us unable to receive the film’s stunning gift.

And every time I rewatch them, I feel this quiet recognition, like… oh. This is it. This is the thing we keep flying across the world to try and feel.

Which makes me think of that simple line from the Tibetan teacher Longchenpa, written centuries ago:

“Do not look elsewhere. Do not try to improve what is already present. Simply rest in what is.”

It’s so plain, yet radical.

Don’t look elsewhere. Don’t improve. Just rest.

I notice how foreign that can feel, how quickly the mind wants to add effort, add striving, add a plan. But resting like this isn’t laziness or withdrawal. It isn’t checking out of life. It’s not a void. We still live. We still work. We still show up. We answer the emails. We cook the meals. We take care of the people we love.

It’s just that the doing starts to feel different. Less like managing everything with white knuckles, less like bracing for failure, and more like moving with something that already knows how to move.

Less egoic management. More participation.

So I practice this in the smallest, most unremarkable ways.

Setting the phone down and not immediately replacing it with something else. Standing at the sink and actually feeling the warm water. Listening to someone without planning what I’m going to say next. Letting five minutes stay empty without trying to justify them.

There’s nothing glamorous, nothing spiritual-looking, nothing you’d ever post about.

Just these quiet little permissions.

And perhaps the more we do them, the more it feels like life is a retreat and not something to escape from.

Not the plane ticket, or the monastery, or the special weekend, just here, in the kitchen, in the car, in the middle of a Tuesday.

Maybe the monk we imagine isn’t somewhere else at all.

Maybe they’re just reminding us of what we forgot we were allowed to do.

To slow down, soften, savor, simply be.

And now for some hysterical irony - Experience Quiet On The Inside, in Scottsdale, AZ, an immersive retreat from April 9–12 at the Franciscan Renewal Center, with an option to stay an extra day.

Yes, we’ll practice all of this together in like-minded community, with the clear intent to carry it home and weave it into our everyday lives.

A few spaces remain if you feel called to join.

https://www.nandidass.com/retreat