Accounting for Failure
Even with the best plan, failure is possible. You can do everything right and get an undesired result; you can do everything wrong and have it somehow work. So even with a well-made path, there is not just a chance you will fall off it: you will fall off it at least once.
You have lived your life without consciously thinking of it as a path. This training makes you look at the life you have lived and the life you want in order to define one. Although the path comes from your life, it is still new in your life, and anything new has a learning curve. Living on a path is no different.
Read this, and then design a failure guide for your own path. Having one is a real comfort to anyone who is new to it.
Failure is success, success is failure
A learning curve means failing and trying again. To learn a free throw you miss most of them first. To learn a bike you fall off it. Failure is not a setback and it is not proof that something is not working; failure and success are both part of being on the path. Life and death are two sides of a coin; rest and exercise are two sides of a coin. I would go as far as saying failure is success and success is failure.
The practical point: you must be relaxed in your failure. I teach meditation as relaxed focus. With a relaxed mind, notice the air at your nostrils. When you get distracted, notice, and come back. When you get distracted again, come back again. If I stressed at every lost moment of focus ("why do I suck at this?") I would not be able to keep meditating, and eventually I would quit. Plans will not always come true. All you need to do is come back to the path.
Repentance
We account for failure, but we cannot keep failing and doing nothing about it.
"Repentance" sounds like a grave sin and a greater power. It is not that. It is my attempt at translating 참회, which literally reads "repent-repent." Nothing was done wrong; we simply take the time to look at why we lost focus, why we fell off the path.
Without an accounting practice like this, nothing holds you to the path during a long stretch of not feeling like walking it. The path can make complete sense to your head while your heart holds reservations. That gap, and our old karma, make a new path hard to settle into. So every time you notice you have fallen off, use the guide below. I do this every morning in my prayer.
Repentance guide
Write down the answers.
People fall off the path for three reasons: they do not actually believe the path is good for them, they are not aware they are off it, and they rationalize.
Belief in the path
Why do we not do what is good for us? Because good and bad exist on separate planes and we experience both at once. Exercise is the simplest example: everyone can see it is good, and the sofa is comfortable. Any action costs the comfort of inaction.
To truly believe in your path you have to see its good even at the cost of its bad. Waking at 5 AM costs sleeping in. Bowing 108 times costs comfort. Meditation costs the other things I could be doing. Each has a greater payoff than what it costs, and that belief is what keeps me moving. Questions 1 to 3 are there to help you define which actions you need to keep in mind.
Unmindfulness
When we wake with a hangover and recollect the night, when we snap at someone and come to our senses, we regret things we did without being fully there. When you do not follow the path because you do not believe in it, that shows up as procrastination: you know you should and you do not. Unmindfulness is more insidious. You do not even know you are not doing it.
And unmindfulness accrues cost. Forget to pay a loan for months and you pay it all at once, with interest and penalty, and by then lamenting is too late. So we need an activity that pays the down payment up front. Cultivate mindfulness however you like (meditation, yoga, whatever works); but separately, you need a specific action as the consequence of unmindfulness. It seems like punishment. It is not about absolute right and wrong; it is intentional growth. Question 5 asks for this action. Mine: every time I slept past 5 AM, one extra bow per minute I stayed in bed. Every time I left a cabinet open after I told my wife I would close it, ten extra bows in the morning.
Rationalization
The mind rationalizes in its own favor. A non-smoker cannot see why anyone smokes; a smoker who is struggling to quit asks whether life is worth living without small pleasures. There is a Korean saying: there is no grave without excuses. The mind always finds one, because it preserves itself.
However convincing the rationalization is, that is all it is. It is not a true reason to do or not do anything. There are people who act on their path with exactly your excuses in hand. This will sting: look at your answer to question 4 and tell yourself, "this is not a reason to be off the path." Say it twice more. Let go of the urge to rationalize, accept that you went off the path because you did, and starting now, walk it again.