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February 15 - February 19, 2025
practice: the repetition of an activity with the purposeful awareness and intention of accomplishing an intended goal.
our sense that “I can’t feel happiness until I reach my goal.” This “goal” always takes the form of someplace we have not yet reached, something we don’t yet have but will at some point, and then, we believe, all will be right in our life.
When we subtly shift toward both focusing on and finding joy in the process of achieving instead of having the goal, we have gained a new skill. And once mastered, it is magical and incredibly empowering.
Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life’s difficulties.
My successes and failures in music provided me with a point of reference to which I constantly compared my daily experiences. That
goal. I wanted to experience the self-discovery that one attains by picking a goal and steadily working toward it, regardless of the pitfalls and frustration.
Without an understanding of proper practice mechanics, and without an awareness of our own internal workings, we’re almost certain to use up the initial inspiration and motivation that propelled us into our endeavor, leaving us feeling we cannot reach the goal that had seemed so worth striving for just a short time earlier.
this mindset influences everything. It is the blank page on which we draw our lives. It determines not only what we draw but also what we are able to draw. It shapes every aspect of who we are, what we become, and how we see others. It is self-discipline and self-awareness. It gives us patience with ourselves, with others, and with life itself. It is certainly one of the most powerful and meaningful gifts we can give ourselves — and yes, only we can give this gift to ourselves.
the practicing mind is quiet. It lives in the present and has laser-like, pinpoint focus and accuracy. It obeys our precise directions, and all our energy moves through it. Because of this, we are calm and completely free of anxiety. We are where we should be at that moment, doing what we should be doing and completely aware of what we are experiencing. There is no wasted motion, physically or mentally.
So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice. Instead of observing their thoughts and using their thoughts to serve themselves, they are in their thoughts. If this weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing.
those people in the past were much more aware of their internal world than we are because they weren’t distracted by technology.
We think that our struggles today are known only to us, but they are timeless, and those who lived long before us faced the same internal struggles that we do.
of effort and fatigue. Which would you rather be? If you are not in control of your thoughts, then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you think in each moment, then you are the rider with no reins, with no power over where you are going. You cannot control what you are not aware of. Awareness must come first.
maintained my steady writing effort day to day. I saw its presence in the effort of trying to understand exactly what it was that I had learned and how to put that into words.
At its inception, I would not have been able to write “this” version of The Practicing Mind even if someone had sat me down and said, “I will pay your bills and look after your family. You just write.” It took the writing process and observing myself going through my days to learn
There was also this nagging sense that I had let myself down, plus a feeling that I was not really in control of my destiny because I wasn’t completing something that I had made a decision to do. Eventually, I would get to the point in this cycle where I lost all interest in the particular endeavor, and I would begin the search for the next thing that was going to fill the void in me, starting the whole process over again. My biggest asset was that I was aware of the fact that I followed this cycle when tackling any new endeavor. I noted this tendency, and I would quietly observe myself
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If you have never considered it, think about how everything we learn and master in life, from walking and tying our shoes to saving money and raising a child, is accomplished through a form of practice, something we repeat over and over again.
When we practice anything properly, the fact that we are engaging in a difficult learning process disappears, and, more important, the process dissolves into a period of inner calming that gives us a rest from the tension and anxiety that our “get it done yesterday” world pushes on us every day of our lives.
reason, it is important to recognize and be in control of the process and to learn to enjoy that part of life’s activity.
If you do not possess at least a minimal level of discipline and patience, your anxiety and frustration will soar.
out of sheer survival, I began to develop an ability to get lost in the process of doing something.
As difficult as the job was, its monotonous nature enabled me to spend my day alone with my thoughts. This afforded me the time to observe and evaluate what worked and what didn’t when coping with the nature of my trade.
A paradox of life: The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them.
The purpose of his question was to make us admit, out loud, whether or not we had found the discipline necessary to practice and habitualize the techniques that he had taught to us the previous week.
Compounding the problem was their anxiety, which was created by their awareness that by not practicing, they were not getting any closer to their intended goal. They
they would have needed to understand the mechanics of good practice. In other words, they would have needed to understand how proper mechanics would make their experience of the learning process efficient and free of stress and impatience.
We have a very unhealthy habit of making the product — our intended result — the goal, instead of the process of reaching that goal. This is evident in many activities in our everyday lives. We become fixated on our intended goal and completely miss out on the joy present in the process of achieving it. We erroneously think that there is a magical point that we will reach and then we will be happy. We look at the process of getting there as almost a necessary nuisance we have to go through in order to get to our goal.
If you grow up in a household where there is constant bickering and inappropriate behavior, you can learn that behavior without your knowledge. If that happens, then in order for you to change similar bickering behavior within yourself, you must first become aware of the personality tendencies you possess, and practice a different behavior repeatedly and deliberately with the intention of changing.
When you focus on the process, the desired product takes care of itself with fluid ease. When you focus on the product, you immediately begin to fight yourself and experience boredom, restlessness, frustration, and impatience with the process.
When you focus your mind on the present moment, on the process of what you are doing right now, you are always where you want to be and where you should be. All your energy goes into what you are doing. However, when you focus your mind on where you want to end up, you are never where you are, and you exhaust your energy with unrelated thoughts instead of putting it into what you are doing.
In order to focus on the present, we must give up, at least temporarily, our attach...
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When you shift your goal from the product you are trying to achieve to the process of achieving it, a wonderful phenomenon occurs: all pressure drops away. This happens because, when your goal is to pay attention to only what you are doing right now, as long as you are doing just that, you are reaching your goal in each and every moment.
leap in how you approach anything that requires your effort. When you truly shift into putting your attention on what you are doing right now and remain continually aware that you are doing so, you begin to feel calm, refreshed, and in control. Your mind slows down because you are asking it to think only of one thing at a time. The inner chatter drops away. Focusing
We are everywhere but where we are, and we are usually doing too many things at once.
This doesn’t mean that you must lose touch with what you are aiming for. You continue to use the final goal as a rudder to steer your practice session, but not as an indicator of how you are doing.
Where we fall down in this activity is when we drop out of this present-minded approach and become attached to the outcome of our attempts.
We look at the outcome of each attempt with emotional indifference. We accept it as it is, with no judgment involved.
Remember, judgment redirects and wastes our energy. One could argue that we must judge the outcome of each attempt to make a decision about how to proceed, but this is not true.
By not staying in the process, our minds dash all over the place all day long, the horses running free with no one at the reins. We think too many thoughts at once, most of them the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. We are impatient with life, and anxious.
we begin to develop a bottom-line belief that states, “Results are everything,” regardless of how we achieve them.
We are obsessed with getting everything immediately.
When we focus our energy on the process of attaining something, whether it be an object or a skill, and through patience and discipline we achieve it, we experience a joy that is just not present when something comes too quickly or easily.
when we reminisce about something we tried to acquire, the process is what comes to mind, not the object itself. We remember our mastery of our undisciplined nature, the patience and perseverance that we developed, and the joy and satisfaction we experienced then. What we remember is timeless, because we experience it all over again.
As we attempt to understand ourselves and our struggles with life’s endeavors, we may find peace in the observation of a flower. Ask yourself: At what point in a flower’s life, from seed to full bloom, does it reach perfection?
Most of the anxiety we experience in life comes from our feeling that there is an end point of perfection in everything that we involve ourselves with. Whatever or wherever that perfection may be, we are not. We continually examine, consciously or unconsciously, everything in our lives, compare it to what we feel is ideal, and then judge where we are in relation to that ideal.
All these personal images of perfection dissolve quickly into a newer image: a faster time, a more difficult piece, a lower score, more money.
The problem with these ideal images is that they may not be realistic or even attainable, and in general they have nothing to do with true happiness.
You can learn a lot about yourself by watching the commercials that come on during your favorite programming. You can be sure the advertiser has spent a lot of money finding out which personality profile watches a particular type of program before deciding which shows to sponsor.
How we arrive at these ideal images of perfection, though, is not as important as becoming aware of how they distort our perspective of where we are on the road to happiness. If these images are used for inspiration, they can be very beneficial; but if they are used as a measuring device, they can become our downfall.
If you don’t believe that you do this, look more closely at yourself. We all do. That is why advertising works so well. It preys upon our sense that “all is not right until I get to such and such a point.” Whether that point is owning a particular item or reaching a particular status is not important. What is necessary in overcoming this nature is to become aware that we have the potential to perceive life in this manner and to know that our culture reinforces our tendencies toward it.
