Once you have committed to a particular path, I suggest that you look for the simplest way forward. You should make things accessible and approachable in your religious community and in your personal practice, rather than more complicated.
Keep it simple. The life of the spirit is actually very basic and easy. We often don’t appreciate that. In the beginning, our spiritual path may strike us as very simple and perfectly clear. But then, after we have been practicing it for a few years, we sometimes find ourselves going backward, and moving away from that initial simplicity. The spiritual breakthrough we experience may simply consist in rediscovering what we had seen in the beginning.
Spiritual discovery is not a matter of finding wisdom out there somewhere. It is a matter of discovering what already exists within us. Like cleaning the surface of a stone inscription, the more you clean it, the more the original carving becomes apparent. We are like that stone. With spiritual practice, instead of gaining something we did not have before, we gradually make ourselves clearer to ourselves.
“Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become. Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself… ” ― Paramahansa Yogananda
You might spend your whole life in pursuit of only food and clothing, with great effort and without regard for suffering or harmful deeds, but when you die you can’t take even a single thing with you. Consider this well. The clothing and alms needed to keep you alive are all you need. You might dine on the finest meal of delicious meat and alcohol, but it all turns into something impure the very next morning, And there is nothing more to it than that. So be content with life-sustaining provisions and simple clothes, And be a loser when it comes to food, clothing and conversation.
It is often seen that human beings can endure problems quite well, but cannot endure success. When we are successful and have everything we desire, it can easily go to our heads. There is a great danger of losing our common sense and becoming careless and arrogant. As it is said, “Nothing corrupts a person more than power.” Very powerful people sometimes become so proud that they no longer care about their actions or about the effect they have on others. Losing any sense of right and wrong, they create severe problems for themselves and everyone else. Even if we have all the success we could dream of—fame, wealth, and so on—we must understand that these things have no real substance. Attachment does not come from having things, but from the way our mind reacts to them. It is fine to participate in good circumstances, provided we can see that they have no real essence. They may come and they may go. When seeing this, we will not become so attached. Even if we lose our wealth we will not be badly affected, and while it is there we will enjoy it without being senseless and arrogant.
– Ringu Tulku
from the book “Daring Steps: Traversing The Path Of The Buddha”
The quintessential teaching of the Buddha — the nature of mind — is difficult to understand, not because it is complicated but because of its unbearably naked quality. One common method for deciphering the truth is through commentaries, analysis, arguments, and research. But the more we try to decipher this simplicity through academic studies and intellectual analysis, the more we get sidetracked, deterred, or worse, we end up constructing very convincing concepts that we mistake for the simplicity itself. Therefore, one must work hard to accumulate merit. Accumulating merit is the one and only way to cultivate trust in simplicity. But many of us have to first convince ourselves that accumulation of merit works.
Zen Flash 
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