flexible practice

  I am thinking about this metaphor, "Not biting off more you can chew", and how this is applicable to me. Just after meditation tonight, I had a conversation with the leader about the notion of making Chan (and spiritual practice) truly one's own. It's not so easy as following a formula, and the conversation constellated around this idea that each person will have a very different spiritual struggle which can't be replaced using a pat answer or formula. When there are simply no formulas.
   It may be tempting to say that only the very strong or focused person can embark on a spiritual practice, but this can lead to a very nihilistic attitude. A somewhat different attitude might be to do whatever is most suitable for a calm mind, and not to attach to fixed notions of what a spiritual practice is  supposed to mean or be. I think this flexible way of looking at  spiritual life can make it much more playful, and allows for greater risks than thinking that there is only one way up a mountain.
    Is spiritual practice an 'art', in this sense? I believe so, but I also think that some amount of commitment is required to engage in practice. If one's practice is too loose, it becomes no different from ordinary and everyday attachment, where a person gets hooked on the same story lines: she or he did this to me, I don't like this, etc. To keep going in this way is to lead to suffering, regardless of whether one accepts these thoughts or not. But on the other hand, a very tight practice can be quite exhausting, and it looses the point that what we are seeking is already very deeply present; it doesn't really require an object of any kind.