Ever drop the ball on an activity you practice regularly? A second language, an instrument....yoga?
As I watch the opening of the Olympic games and pick up the dangling thread of writing -- a practice that used to be a regular part of life -- I have been contemplating what it means to be in, and out of relationship with practice.
It's not the first time that I have fallen out of practice with something. When I was a girl, I was an aspiring pianist with regular weekly lessons and plenty of recitals. If I went for more than a day or two without practice, the buttery notes emerging from fluid fingers suddenly became clumsy, solid...dischordant. In those moments, piano playing was not at all 'like riding a bike'. Perhaps my strict German teacher, Guiti Adjuoudani, who wielded a knuckle tapping stick, played a hand in my anxiety around falling out of step.
As a young adult, my attention turned to running, and then yoga. I would take care not to let more than a day go by without practice. Practice was the thing that kept my monkey-mind sane; it regulated my heightened nervous system like a drug that allowed me to escape, at least temporarily, from self-destructive behaviors, and beliefs. Looking back, it is easy to see that I was mistaking 'practice' with something more akin to purgatory or addition; but in that moment, its what kept me alive.
There is no doubt that any practice requires a certain amount of discipline. In those days, though, it was more like firefighting. As a child, I lacked control - over my body, where an inflammatory auto-immune disease reigned supreme - and in my family of origin, where the flames of my parents' relationship was going up in smoke. Who would not want ot flee a fire? Practice, at least in part, was about gaining and maintaining control in a world where I otherwise had none. This control gave me purpose, and my life, meaning, during a time when I questioned both.
In my present reality, my understanding and relationship with practice has substantively changed. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when, or how this transformation happened. It may have happened less like a linear journey, and more like concentric circles of realisation closing in on how I percieved myself. Each loop led me to reveal to a deeper layer, until over time, I realised the old scaffolding I used to 'get by' in life was no longer working, no longer necessary.
Still, there is a common thread in how I experience practice, even if how I percieve the thread is fundamentally different. What I used to call discipline, determination or a fighting spirit, something I held in esteem as a kind of inner strength, I now experience to be more like a seed of attraction, a permission I give myself to lean in to something -- whether that is on a yoga mat, at a potter's wheel or simply being in the presence of another living being. For me, healthy practice is fundamentally about consent and presence. Consent means that I wholeheartedly say yes, without resistance; and presence allows me to engage fully without distraction.
It isn't always easy to snap my fingers and switch of my mind and all its stories and coping strategies, but a part of any practice is learning to concentrate, to focus. Practice has become about attuning to the relationship I'm in at any given moment.
Of course, it is impossible to mention practice without the word intention- what the purpose of that practice is. For the Olympiads, make no mistake, the intention is to win, and winning means taking home a gold metal. For me, winning means that I am a person unburdened by old beliefs experienced as self-inflicted suffering. My intention of practice is to feel at peace in my body and at ease with myself.
These days, I am learning to attend to most things with a softer hand. I am continually surprised at how good my body feels to be back on a yoga mat after taking pause from it for a few days, taking care to vary my physical and mental activities. I notice that my piano practice sounds sweeter having not touched the keys for some time; even my newfound interest in pottery seems to benefit from being hands off from the clay. And even more recently, I reconnected with a childhood friend after 24 years for one wonderful evening. Turns out, the practice of being in relationship is a lot like riding a bike, afterall.
Comments