The default image of a serious practitioner involves withdrawal. A monastery, a retreat centre, an ashram — somewhere quiet, with the ordinary demands of life removed.
That image does real damage, because almost nobody reading this can go anywhere. There’s a job, there are people who need things, there’s a mortgage that doesn’t pause for anyone’s spiritual development. Set against the withdrawal ideal, a practice squeezed into the gaps looks like a compromised version of the real thing.
It isn’t. And tantra, more than most traditions, is explicit about this.
Tantra never required you to leave
Many contemplative traditions are fundamentally renunciate. The path runs through stepping out of ordinary life, and the further out you step, the further along you are. Family, work and worldly obligation are, in that framing, obstacles — things that pull you back.
A substantial part of the tantric tradition took a different position. The householder — the person with a family, an occupation, property, obligations — was a recognised category of practitioner, not a category of person who hadn’t got round to renouncing yet.
The logic follows from the tradition’s central principle. If nothing is excluded from the path, then the domestic isn’t excluded either. Your kitchen is not less real than a cave. The argument doesn’t need to be made gently or apologetically; it’s structural.
The obstacles are the curriculum
Here’s the part that reframes most people’s frustration.
You can’t get through twenty minutes without being interrupted. You’re too tired at the end of the day to do anything properly. You get irritated by someone who needs you when you have nothing left to give.
Those aren’t failures of circumstance. They’re the material.
Presence is easy in ideal conditions. Anyone can be calm in a silent room with nothing required of them. What’s difficult — and therefore what actually trains the capacity — is staying present when a child interrupts for the fourth time, when you’re running late, when someone you love is being unreasonable and you can feel yourself about to become unreasonable back.
A retreat gives you perfect conditions. Your Tuesday evening gives you real ones. Capacity built under real conditions is the kind that’s available when you need it.
The honest trade-off
I won’t pretend there’s no cost.
You will not go as deep as fast. Depth needs long uninterrupted stretches, and if you have small children you do not have long uninterrupted stretches. Anyone telling you that five minutes between school runs is equivalent to a ten-day retreat is selling something.
But the reverse is also true, and it’s less often said: depth reached in ideal conditions frequently doesn’t survive contact with ordinary ones. People come back from intensive experiences genuinely changed and find the change gone by the second week, because it was built in an environment that no longer exists.
Householder practice is shallower and considerably more durable. It’s built in the conditions it has to function in, so there’s no transfer problem. Slower, lower ceiling, far better retention.
That’s the actual trade, stated plainly.
What it looks like in practice
Not a dedicated hour. That’s the mistake most people make — they design a practice for a life they don’t have, fail to sustain it, and conclude they lack discipline.
The workable version attaches practice to thresholds that already exist in your day. The moments of transition you’re already passing through:
The two minutes in the car before you go into the house. The wait while the kettle boils. The stairs. The moment your hand is on the front door handle. The pause after the last person has gone to bed.
These already happen. You don’t need to find time for them, only to stop filling them with your phone.
A threshold practice is short and complete in itself — three breaths, feet on the floor, one deliberate exhale before you walk into whatever’s next. Done consistently, it does something a single long session doesn’t: it puts a gap between states, so you stop carrying the day into the evening and the evening into the night.
On the guilt
Many people with families feel that time taken for practice is stolen from someone.
The useful reframe is not that you deserve it, though you might. It’s that what you’re like when you’re with them is substantially determined by what state your nervous system is in, and that state is what the practice works on.
Five minutes that make you less reactive for three hours isn’t time taken from your family. It’s most of what they actually get from you.
I wouldn’t overclaim here — practice won’t make you a good parent or fix a difficult marriage. But the arithmetic on reactivity is real, and most people have it backwards.
This week: one threshold
Choose a single transition you already pass through every day. Just one. The front door is the best candidate for most people.
Each time you reach it, before going through: stop, feel your feet, take three slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale. Then go in.
Thirty seconds. No new time required, nothing rearranged, nobody deprived of anything.
Do it for a month and notice what’s different about the first ten minutes after you get home. That’s not a lesser version of the practice. For a householder, it’s the practice — and it was always designed to be available to you.
Most of the people I work with have jobs and families and no spare hour. The practice gets built around that, not in spite of it.
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