There is an implied demand in any spiritual work--you must leave the world you know behind to make room for the world to come. Lots of work. Lots of effort. Very difficult and time consuming. Very painful.
Except.
Discomfort is one thing. Discomfort is a necessary stage of development while the body, mind, and spirit are adapting to some new way of doing things; think of the discomfort in strenuous exercise, in hiking at high altitudes, in changing the diet, in learning something new. There is a stretching going on--a reconfiguration. Learning a new landscape. More often than not, and especially when it is accepted and not judged, discomfort is an indicator that growth is happening.
Pain is something else. In the body, pain is an indicator that something is going wrong. In the mind and spirit, pain is an indicator that you've gone to a place which is in one way or another beyond your present abilities to deal with. You've stretched as far as you can stretch, and now you're at your breaking point.
In previous lives, I have made the conscious decision to leave things behind. And it never works. There is, of course, value in abstaining from something seen as important; coffee in the morning, some recreational activity, the occasional meal--all things that can shock a person out of the habitual groove they inhabit and make room for some new thing. But in explicitly renouncing something, I've learned that you are setting yourself up for failure; you are creating an opening for the mind and body, comfortable in their routines, to find new and exciting ways to justify breaking this taboo you've just put in place. So what can a person do?
Just this: create, where you can, and maintain room for your practice. Practice your practice, and trust the process. As time goes on, the things that held you begin to relax their grip and the things that you hold begin to be less important. In giving up alcohol forcefully, I repeatedly became a difficult person to be around; it wasn't time and I was forcing things. I was creating an environment of suffering and using it as performance art. That pain became a part of what I saw myself as. And, every time, I went back to it. Same for meat eating, same for sex, same for various entertainments and activites that I at one time or another saw as bad somehow. Always going back when I strained past my breaking point.
But you know what? In the past month I've consumed alcohol on two occasions, and meat on three that I can think of. I've watched a movie, too, and it's fine. I've felt myself desiring a romantic relationship again, and that's fine too. I'm not denying the reality of desire anymore. I'm not fighting my own humanness and its attendent impulses to food and drink and distraction and companionship. I'm just sitting with the desires and watching them. giving them their space and continuing on my way. And, whenever I see an identity beginning to coalesce around some taboo I've put in place or behavior I'm engaging in, I know it's time to break it.
I typically don't eat grain or meat, but when my roommate brought me a bowl of pho I ate it, and gratefully. It's okay. Is this time the last time I'll walk across that line? Maybe, maybe not. But I am at this point conscious that the choice I want to make is not necessarily the choice I need to make, and I am free to decide one way or another in a given moment. As I grow and continually choose the path of simplicity, the idea of renunciation as it is normally understood becomes more foreign; after I eat, I wash my bowl and put it up. As my context changes from moment to moment, there is no need to either hold onto or throw away the things I needed before. Keeping the mind open and clear, I can see that in any given moment I have what I need, and I am learning to tell when there is enough.
And that's enough.