There are two things. One's inside you and one's outside you. The one outside you is a Kalyanamitta, a good, wise spiritual friend. If you want to grow back in the West, you need support, you need friends. On your own, it's hard. It's hard enough as a couple (as we mentioned in the earlier question about the couple). It's hard enough when you are a couple who meditates, but it's even harder on your own. You need friends. Your going to need support. Kalyanamitta is the Pali word for a good, kind, wise spiritual friend. Our old students in Berlin - many of of you have heard me say this - have had a sitting group together for, I think, 13 years now. Every week, they've been meeting at someone's house for 13 years. When they come and do the retreat, they are so much more settled, so much more content than the average old students who come here. It's remarkable what help they give to each other.
Now, I said one's outside, one's inside. The thing that's inside is the "Interest". You have to maintain your interest in the practice. If you get more interested in the news, in the movies, in the football games, this or that, what's going to happen to your meditation practice? What's going to happen to your growth? You have to maintain interest in your meditation practice. Often, the interest comes from stimulation from that Kalyanamitta. But you also have to work more on stimulating yourself. Read some more about the practice if you want. Listen to the Dhamma talks of your teachers. If you don't have Kalyanamittas who live close by, you can e-mail or Skype. It's free.
There are many ways to maintain your interest. You have to stimulate interest. If you're feeling a bit down, a good Dhamma friend somewhere around the world might be feeling up. What happens to you when you meet someone who's up and you're down? You get up, don't you? Or you pull the other person down. Can we use good kind friends to help stimulate ourselves and our interest, and can we also interest ourselves?
Rosemary and I have a number of Dhamma, Buddhist books on our bookshelf. We've read basically all of them. But every once in a while, we just grab one, we pull it out, and we open to any page. Rosemary grabbed a book and opened to a random page just the other day. She found an interesting quote I think she used yesterday in one of the Q and A's. And it's nice to think, "Aww, this is where that quote was from." She got excited that she found something that we've known about for years, but weren't sure where it was in the Scriptures. So all of a sudden, there was a perk of interest and we talked about the quote for 5 or 10 minutes, out of the blue, just because she happened to grab the book and just flip to any page.
Do the same thing. You can use our Knowledgebase that we have, as well. Stick it into your computer. It now has 683 questions and answers. Some of these questions that you've asked today hopefully will be in there in a few years from now. Sit down with the knowledgebase. You can be bored, you can be depressed, right? Before, we had a question from a person who sometimes feels depressed. Okay, you can find "depressed" in the index. You open up the entries. If you're still not interested, click "topics" and look at the few hundred topics. I don't know how many topics there are, but I think there might be about 700. Choose any one at random. Just close your eyes, move the mouse, click on it, and see what you get. Then see what happens. You may find your interest gets sparked straight away. Give it a go and see for yourself.