Keeping the Practice Fresh

As mindfulness practitioners on the path of practice, I reckon all of us experience moments, days or periods of time when our desire and/or ability to practice wanes in energy. I can’t imagine any practitioner over the long-haul of practice not going through slumps of zeal or interest from time to time. 

This post is inspired by the question a dear friend of mine asked me recently: How do you keep your practice fresh? It’s a really good question, and a good topic for regular self-reflection I think. 

Anything routine has the capacity to become dull and lifeless, if we don’t regularly invest in nourishing the spirit. Goodness knows more of us are prone to being head-driven than heart-centered. But it’s precisely the heart that needs to be in play, if we are to keep our spiritual practice active, fresh, and strong. Otherwise there’s a solid chance we’ll lose steam at some point, and maybe quit our practice altogether. Or perhaps even worse: we’ll keep practicing but it will be a bore, bother, and chore. I don’t know guys. I think going through the motions auto-pilot style might be worse than an end move. 

True-to-form, here is a list (cuz I love making lists) of some of the ways I keep the spirit of my practice fresh:

Adding Our Name To The List

I’ll get straight to it. Involving our self in the practice of self-care doesn’t mean we need to stop what we’re doing in terms of offering direct supportive care to others. It’s not an either-or situation. Self-care is about adding our own name to the list of those we’re choosing to tend to. Also, while it is easy and very common to regard self-care with being detrimentally selfish or painfully self-absorbed, these are distinctly very different things. Self-care is not synonymous with any of the following: ego-inflation; self-aggrandizing; selfishness; narcissism; cockiness; being full of oneself; self-indulgence; or navel gazing. True self-care is an expression of self-awareness and deep understanding, motivated by a genuine desire to show up & care well for others.

In my current way of thinking, self-care involves these 5 aspects: 

• Tending well to our physiological needs
• Prioritizing nourishing enjoyable activities 
• Seeking input/support when it’s needed
• Actively practicing self-befriending
• Connecting with something bigger

Before I break each of these aspects down, I’d like to make a case for why self-care is important.  If we imagine our self as a vehicle, self-care is about filling our tank so we can keep going and doing what we do. We all need gas in the car in order to keep on keeping on. Where this overly simplistic analogy falls apart is that unlike an actual vehicle, the lower our tank gets, the harder it is to fill back up. Additionally, when we consistently operate on low fuel – which so many of us do – trouble brews, spreads, and grows. Many of us have learned how to adapt to chronic shortages of fuel in the tank of our mind/body/heart system, to the detriment of our own well-being. Important note: Don’t hold on too tightly to the whole us being a vehicle thing. We’re human beings, not machines. I just want to make that clear. 

Since we are in a near constant state of energy output, in order to function optimally, we need a steady stream of energy input. When our output is continually greater than our input, we are likely to feel rundown on a regular basis. If we don’t have enough fuel coming back in to restore what we’re expending, we will eventually be depleted, exhausted, maxed out or find ourselves broken down.

There are a number of ways that energy flows out of us as humans. While it’s relatively easy to see that physical activities expend energy, there are many subtle ways that energy leaks out or is drawn out that we often aren’t aware of. For example, we expend a great deal of our limited precious energy when we spend time ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, spinning around in obsessive over-thinking, and criticizing our self. We expend energy when we compare our self to others, when we are overly concerned about what others think about us, and when we hinge our self-worth on external factors. And we expend energy when we watch TV shows or movies that water seeds of fear, anxiety, jealousy, anger, regret, self-loathing, self-doubt, and despair in our consciousness.  

Thankfully, there are also a plethora of ways that energy can flow back into us as well. It’s worth a brief mention here too that there are different types of fuel sources available to us, some of which are more beneficial than others. There are certain common attempts many of us make in the interest of self-care through means that leave a gunky residue behind, such as watching a steady stream of rom-coms or crime shows (both of which I deem to be equally corrosive to the human spirit; although, rom-coms might be the worst offender – just one gal’s strong opinion), drinking alcohol, using drugs, obsessively shopping, regularly indulging in junk food, or scrolling and swiping endlessly. In all of these cases, we have unmet needs that we’re trying to satisfy through certain actions. Trouble is, they are not in our best interest, and ultimately leave us feeling more restless and disconnected in the end. Practices involved with true self-care are healthy, sustainable and more sustaining sources of fuel – and also among the cleanest burning. 

Musings on Joy

Joy is a topic I return to often here on my blog. When it comes to cultivating and strengthening my own spiritual practice, Joy is one of my top 5 favorite hits. 

Partly because I am currently participating in a free online summit entitled Living A Joyful Life, and partly because investing in joy as an active, intentional practice is a mainstay thread in my life, here I am yet again to wax on about my current musings. 

At the surface, joy is simply a fleeting feeling of pleasure. The feeling rises and falls and that’s that. It comes and it goes. At first inspection, it’s easy to regard joy as trivial, trite, maybe even juvenile. In any case, it’s not important enough to put on our regular to-do list. From a Buddhist lens, we may be tempted to see joy as akin to grasping temporary highs or chasing sensual desires, which untether us from being present in the here and now. And many of us see joy as being the mark of an unserious, unconcerned, under-developed individual. Since joy can get a bad rap, and be subject to rudimentary understanding, I enjoy the task of re-branding what it is and has the potential to become. 

Joy is a fleeting feeling. Yes, absolutely. However, when the feeling of joy is nourished & developed, it has the capacity to grow into a foundational quality of being. While I’m hesitant to share the following progression, because I don’t want to give the impression that the process of cultivating joy is necessarily this linear, it was what I personally experienced on my path of cultivating joy. 

What the Heck I’m Doing Here

I’m currently and temporarily residing at Deer Park Monastery (DP), where my husband Mike and I have been visiting annually for the past 10-years for varying lengths of time. We arrived just before Thanksgiving this time around, and we plan to depart and head home in mid-March. Every visit here is a little different. I’m different; the monastery is different; the world is different. Did I mention everything is of the nature to change? 

I find it helpful to spend a little time reflecting on why it is I continue to feel drawn to coming here, and what it is I’m doing when I’m here. It’s important to me to understand why I do what I do, if for no other reason than to check in with myself to make sure my actions are in line with the direction I want to travel in.

Here are a few specific things I’m practicing here at DP, which I find especially nourishing & beneficial:

Simplifying. As you might surmise, monastery living is simple living. The small rooms we stay in meet our basic needs but are nothing fancy. Some might even say the indoor accommodations are in desperate need of attention and upgrading. Our meals are nutritious, filling, and mostly pallet pleasing but vary little in their content. When we stay at the monastery, we stay at the monastery. It’s not like a hotel where we come and go and take day trips around the area. When we’re here, we’re invested in following the schedule, being part of the community, and engaging with the practices that are part of our spiritual tradition. DP is a rich fertile learning environment for practicing simplification. This is a place that offers limited distractions, promotes wholesome usages of time, and centers on acting in accordance with mindful conduct, thoughts, and speech. DP is good training ground on how to cut out the chaff and connect with the heart of what really matters.

Two Mottoes

Two mottoes I navigate my life by are as follows:

There is no such thing as an insignificant moment

&

No one thing is for everyone

There is no such thing as an insignificant moment means that there is no moment so small that it does not create an impact or have an affect, on our self and/or others. Everything we do, say, and think – and everything we don’t do, say, and think – matters and makes a difference. 

One of the things we all have in common is that with every action we engage in, we are crafting and creating our life. The same is true for all of us: How we think about the world is how we experience the world, and what we do today sets the stage for our tomorrow.

We are all being continuously influenced by other people. Whether directly or indirectly; by those who immediately surround us or by those who live far away; whether alive or dead, each and every one of us influences each and everyone else. For better and for worse, and everything in between, we truly are in this thing together. And by “this thing,” I mean our inheritance as humans. In addition to being responsible for the care & wellness of our own self, we are responsible for the care & wellness of everyone else (which is precisely why self-care is so important). 

Between Disaster & Rainbows

One extreme: The world is a freakin disaster and everyone is awful!! 

Another extreme: The world is rainbows & unicorns and everyone is awesomely amazing!!

As practitioners on the path of Buddhist or mindfulness-inspired practice, our aim is to find ways to traverse the middle ground in between extreme ways of thinking and acting. To do this, we must learn how to borrow a little bit from the spirit of each side. Not the amped up, super intense, live-or-die version of each side, but the spirit of what each side represents. 

When it comes to our generalized view of the world and other people, hanging out in either extreme leads to a distorted relationship with the nature of reality. In the one extreme, we tend to be angry a lot of the time. Increasingly smaller and smaller things irritate the heck out of us and everyone gets on our nerves. In the other extreme, we tend to be pretty fragile. We shut down around the most minor discomforts and can go to pieces when confronted by hard news happening in the world. In both cases, it’s a rough way to live. 

To find the middle ground here, we need to be informed by the outskirts of each side. The intelligence that each one genuinely has, before it enters the dangerous and divisive territory of polarization that each one can venture toward when left unchecked. In short, this balance might be summarized as such: 

To recognize and be in touch with the very real sufferings of the world, while actively engaging with the very real forms of goodness and beauty that exist. 

It takes time and effort to find where our own individual balance lies between seeing the world as a nightmare of atrocities and a world full of glitter & kittens. Partly because this balance will look different for each one of us. So we need to be willing and open enough to do some personal investigation to figure out what our own balance looks like. We also need to allow ourselves the grace & space to make mistakes and do some trial & error experimentation, which is both so not easy and also pretty darn uncomfortable. 

Many of us are really quick to label things as being mutually exclusive. We feel as though we need to choose one thing to the exclusion of the other thing. Many of us are really not good with putting things into context; considering nuance; or repositioning ourselves to see things from other perspectives and viewpoints. 

Some possible practices that might help us to navigate more in the middle of whatever road we’re traveling on: