Small "hack" with weekly reflection

I was just doing my weekly reflection, and I thought I'd share a very simple practice that I do with my Monk Manual.

Each month on the monthly pages, there is a prompt "One question I'd like to answer this month?"

A question is inherently a creative act, because it opens up awareness and insight into an area of our life/world we otherwise may not have access to. This question helps turn us towards our life and helps us engage with an expectation that the process of our life is indeed teaching us something valuable and important.

By just setting the question each month you are already doing a good work in providing your subconscious something to work through on your behalf. I like to go a step further.

The hack (which isn't really a hack) is this. Rather than just set the question each month - rewrite it in your bullet space on the weekly pages - and then during your reflection each week of the month answer it. Not in a performative I have to get this right sort of way, but rather a way truth feels correct to me right now around this question.

Sometimes we come to the answer best by walking around it week after week.

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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

―Rainer Maria Rilke

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