monday practice: ginger snaps
Lately I've been thinking a lot about practice. It's just been this perfect confluence of inputs lately -- one part the whole Anusaga; an equal, if not greater, part reading -- and so I've been stirring these questions of what I practice around and around in the bowl of my mind. I'm feeling particularly lucky that on top of the book I just finished, there have been so very many blogs and posts recently reminding us, exhorting us, to just practice. Just unroll our mats, take our seats, inhabit our steady practice and breathe, making like Sri Pattabhi Jois:
Practice and all is coming.
I hold this truth to be self-evident: Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice is perfect.
A favorite blog this week was from the School of Yoga, the new home of Christina Frosolono Sell, Darren Rhodes and now Noah Maze. In Please Practice, Bridgette writes:
Time to get back to the mat. Roll out our mats alone, with friends, with strangers. Doesn’t matter where, with who or what we call it. But, for the love of God, please practice.
I've been getting a lot of reading and writing done in the past couple of months, as I live through my second herniated disc and as I've not been practicing on my mat. This continues to be such an adjustment, really, since for years now I've devoted hours and hours each week to being in class, to taking my place with my friends and teachers, to sitting , moving, breathing and laughing together. It's amazing how much more shit you can get done when you're not in 5 classes a week + travel time, how much more clarity I can sustain about my larger goals and plans when I'm at home so much, doing a very different practice.
Even though for the past 9 years my most visible practice has been that of asana, physical yoga is not the only thing to which I've been devoting myself. And now that my mobility is impaired and I'm in pain, bam, I'm so much more aware of my other areas of practice -- thank goodness for those. Who says yoga is all the body, anyway?
Towards the end of Martha Beck's latest book Finding Your Way in a Wild, New World, she includes a section on the 10,000 hours, aka Tracking Your True Nature. You know this idea, the one that Malcolm Gladwell popularized a few years ago, that true mastery of anything requires the investment of on the order of 10,000 hours. A neurological study Martha references, of the brains of truly adept music students vs. regular ho-hum students, revealed absolutely no biological basis for this difference in skill -- the only difference is practice. Passionate, deep practice for years and years and years: 6 hours a day for 5 years, 3 hours a day for 10 years, 1 1/2 hours a day for 20 years, 12 hours a day for 2 1/2 years. I think I've written about this before, since it's an idea that entrances me.
I love that the book includes exercises, invitations for me to write in the margins and fill in the blanks. I knew, from the start, that this was a book I'd be keeping, never surrendering, so have been annotating all along. And behold, the opportunity to think about, then write down Things I've Deep-Practiced for Ten Thousand Hours. Oooooh, a List. You know how much I love those! Even better: the point is that the items on the list constitute "hot tracks" left by your true nature -- these are "part of your art, the way your true nature expresses itself in the world of Form." Looking at where you have invested 10,000 hours of your time gives you crucial clues to what you love, what drives you, what you've been practicing. Who you are.
Because yeah, what you practice is who you are. As I wrote last week, what you do is who you are. Your practices make you in this steady accretion, like corals secreting layers and layers of skeleton, all the while building the reef of You.
What, you ask, have I been practicing all these years? Check it out:
I know, I know, I'm kind of a scribbler, so in case you can't read it, it's pretty simple 1) yoga; 2) writing; 3) reading; 4) hiking, walking, being in the woods. 5 - 8 (not pictured) go like this: loving, watching, learning from dogs; gardening; social media; and finally, animals, animals, animals. Of course yoga is #1 on the list, since it's the item commonly referred to as a practice and it's the area where I seem to apply my nerdy counting skills the most, keeping a running tally in my calendar of how many hours a week I've been on my mat. When I'm on my mat, that is.
But the rest, really: those, except for social media, are all things I've been deep-practicing for ages -- being obsessed with nature, with dogs, with animals, with being in the woods, with going to the zoo and staring at tigers, feeling the lion's grumble in every fiber of my being. The gardening is an extension of this same essential passion: to be outside, to be inside the workings of the outside, to recognize the pattern that's on my insides, too. That's what I practice. That's what I am.
And that's the point. What I am is what I should be doing. Not just as hobbies but as the essential work of my life. The good news is that I feel as though for the first time ever, in a way I've been growing toward for years and years, I'm doing it. Finally. Even though it takes getting up at 4:30am (Fuck Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time!) in order to have enough time to read and write and hike and think before the job-day begins, I'm doing it. Finally, finally, I'm doing what I've known I needed to do all along, the thing that Paul Greenberg told me, long before he was the author of the James Beard Award winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish, when we both worked for the same non-profit mentioned a few days ago. Sitting in our shared apartment kitchen in Sarajevo in 1998, in his suit and tie, early early in the morning, at his laptop, cup of instant coffee at his side, he said, when I commented on his discipline, on his devotion to his practice, despite the work-day ahead of us: "Writers write."
Amen, brother. That they do.
Also lately, though it's not on the list above, making cookies. It's possible I've spent a total of 10,000 hours in my lifetime making cookies, experimenting with recipes and flavor combinations and ensuring a steady supply of this sweet dietary staple in the house. It's such a friendly little food, the cookie -- the perfect delivery system for just the right amount of delight. And, in times of trial, of challenge, of misery and death, oh really, the cookie is just right. So I've been practicing that a lot lately, too.
What's most wonderful for me right now, even as I am benched and unable to play yoga with my friends, is how much I can re-direct that time and energy into my other practices, and the way I feel them growing in strength as a result. How satisfying to devote the non-asana time to words, to the blog, to the newsletter, to the idea of the book, feeding all that fuel to the flames of a different practice.
Flames fueled by deep-practice. And always cookies.
I wonder what you practice, what you have devoted 10,000 hours to, what it says about who you are. Think about it, write it down, comment below. If it helps you to make cookies first, like it does me, then go for it. If not, I've got enough to share over here, and anyway, come tomorrow, I'll bake more.
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