Practice changes how we attend to the world and what we see.
We learn to attune to subtlety, and in doing so we notice more of what is already happening inside and around us. Some things leap into relief and others fade into irrelevance.
For example, one day you start meditating. You learn to pay attention to the changing nature of things, whilst recognising your tendency to conceptualise your experience. This takes time and patience—in short, practice.
“I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.”
—Alfred Korzybski
I’ve read, achieved and learned a lot over the years. But it is my ongoing practices that have had by far the biggest impact on my life.
We readily accept that mastery in music, sport & art comes from years of practice, but still balk at applying the same method to our inner life.
There are practices—small, inward gestures—that help us return, not to some ideal self, but to the unadorned reality of our experience.
Mindfulness, at its heart, is an invitation to notice how you’re holding yourself in any moment, in any action.
With time, a gap opens. You notice the pull toward reactivity—the impulse to rush, to distract, to grasp—and in that noticing, you find some space.
Where once you might have moved irritably through the world, treating others as obstacles, now you catch yourself. You feel the rising tension, but you no longer merge with it. You remain near to yourself.
A few days ago, I started a story log, as part of learning to tell better stories. Or rather, tell stories better.
Here’s how Matthew Dicks describes it in his book, Storyworthy:
At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. … What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day?
Curiosity is stress relief
Yesterday, I talked about widening the view.
This is a simple pointer for escaping the tunnel vision of beliefs. You’ll see similar practices promoted by modalities such as the Alexander Technique.
Earlier this week, I found another way of widening the view.
As I worked myself up into a stress about how much I had to do, I saw something else happening—my sense of possibility was narrowing. This is not something I’d noticed before. Neither had I realised that the increase in stress and decrease in possibility were inversely correlated.
Widen the view
A big part of coaching is helping people make their belief systems explicit.
They want one thing to happen, but they end up doing something else.
Somewhere in between, the wires are getting crossed. This is usually where the belief lives.
It might be something like: “I’ll look stupid”, “It’s never worked before” or “I’ll get found out.”
Challenging the worldview of the belief is one way to proceed. A coach might help trace its operating assumptions and ask if they’re really true.
The practice works, you’re just not following it
You’re exhausted.
You heard meditation might give you some peace. Your therapist nods frantically when you tell them you’re giving it a go.
The practice is to “let things be as they are, moment to moment.”
You try it but it “doesn’t work.” You’re still exhausted and conflicted! So you get up early.
This is pretty common. And it’s not just because the practice is hard: it’s because you’re not doing the practice.
Small hinges, big doors
Yesterday I wrote about tending to your state, over trying to force actions.
It’s not such an either-or. Tending to state is just more indirect: you sacrifice some precision but trust that the breadth of effects will benefit you.
Take walking for example.
Walking daily primes the heart, reducing blood pressure and coronary disease risk. It helps regulate glucose and insulin; lubricates joints and builds bone density; boosts immune function and stimulates memory; lowers cortisol and tames anxiety; and sparks divergent thinking and creative insights.
Deploy your writings every day
Software engineers can quickly become anxious about deploying new changes.
Each successive deployment brings the risk of something blowing up and blame falling on them. Better to hold off for now.
There is an effective and counter-intuitive solution to this: get them to deploy more often.
A rare event that causes high stress becomes a frequent event that becomes more familiar. Avoiding the scary thing only makes it loom larger, whereas leaning into it forces you to confront the issue and make improvements as you go.
Orientations
I have meditated and written down my reflections for nearly 15 years. Some of the most useful scribblings have been the pointers I’ve left myself—my orientations to the highest truths, or what Rob Burbea called “ways of seeing that free.”
Contemplation often brings profound yet tantalising insights. One moment it all makes sense, and the next day you feel robbed. Yet, certain words and phrases can “bind” the insight and deliver us back to the understanding. The process of putting words to these experiences is often downplayed, with some justification: it’s easy to reify our insights and so divorce ourselves from what is actually happening now. But the power of the right words offered in the right mindset is not dissimilar to an incantation, and we must practice wisdom for it remain alive.