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Sooner or later almost every devotee arrives at the same complaint. The routine is intact, the name is being taken, and there is no longer anything behind it. The early warmth has gone, the practice has become mechanical, and the honest question is whether continuing something so hollow is worth the time. He hears this constantly and his answer does not vary.

Continue. That is the instruction, and he gives it without softening it into anything more comfortable. The dryness is not evidence that the practice has stopped working, and it is certainly not evidence that you have been rejected. It is the ordinary weather of a long practice, and the people who came through it are simply the ones who did not stop during it.

His reasoning goes to what feeling actually is. Emotion is a response, and responses are unreliable by construction: they depend on sleep, health, the month you are having, what happened at work. If feeling is treated as the qualification for practising, the practice inherits every fluctuation of your mood and eventually stops, because moods reliably stop.

He also points out something uncomfortable about the dry period. A practice continued while it feels wonderful proves very little. Anyone will continue something that is currently pleasant. The stretch where nothing is coming back is the first point at which what you are doing stops being an exchange, and he is fairly direct that this is when it starts to count.

The failure he wants to prevent is not the dryness itself but the audit that people run during it. Devotees begin checking each session for evidence of progress, find none, and conclude they are doing it wrong. The checking is the difficulty. Attention spent measuring the practice is attention not spent in it, and a practice under constant assessment cannot settle.

What it asks of you is stubbornness rather than technique. Keep the routine exactly as it was on the days it felt good, do not shorten it because it now feels like nothing, and stop asking yourself whether it is working. If feeling returns it will return unannounced and usually when you have stopped looking for it, which is the pattern nearly everybody who has come through this describes.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.