Daily Practices
This article appears courtesy of Healing Headquarters www.healinghq.com.
We are what we do. Where you will be in 10 years depends on the way you spend your time now. If you want to be a potter, a dancer, a writer or a singer, and you spend your days working at an office and then fall on the couch burnt out at the end of each day – you are never going to reach that goal. If you do not write, paint, sing, dance, or make jewelry today, you never will. Mastery of a skill is reached by doing that action repetitively, over a long period of time.
Likewise, if you have character qualities you would like to develop and manifest in your life, you had better be practicing them now. You would like to be viewed as a patient person, yet you lose your temper every time you’re in traffic? You would like to cultivate control of your mind, yet you never meditate? You would like to perform something creatively, and instead you criticize it as an academic? Guess what? You will only ever end up doing what you are currently doing. Unless what you are currently doing is what you want to end up doing, you might want to consider bringing some new activities into your daily life!
The way to have the life you dream of is to do those actions every day. Sit in meditation five minutes a day. Dance every day for one hour. Practice deep breathing each time you’re standing in a line. Sing one song at a public event in your community this year. Work part-time and use the money to pay for the lessons you really want. You get the picture? You need to do what you want to be.
Most of the time, we are prevented from doing what we want to be by thoughts – “I can’t,” “I’m not good enough,” “people will laugh at me,” “I don’t have time,” and so on. Well, that certainly will be true for you if you listen to those thoughts. You will never do what you want to do, and you will never be who you want to be. You can waste an entire lifetime holding on to an unmanifested dream – most of the world lives this way. But you had better believe that the role models you see – artists, athletes, travelers, explorers, adventurers – anyone who is extremely good at what they do and successful for it, have gotten there by doing it as a practice, daily.
It is a myth that you will someday “be discovered” as an actor, or that you will suddenly at some point in the future “find time” to do what you always put off. That simply is not true. If you do not make time to do what you love and long for, and discipline yourself to do it daily, you will never achieve the life you desire.
Daily practices are those things that lead you to your long-term goals. They are completely individualistic and deeply personal. What is it you want to be remembered for? What is your unique contribution to the world? What aspects of your inner self do you want to express outwardly in the world? Do you want to:
- Overcome a disability?
- Paint a mural?
- Serve others as a healer?
- Act on Broadway?
- Win a writer’s award?
- Get ordained?
- Teach in a classroom?
- Visit Botswana?
- Draw manga comics?
- Be in a film?
- Learn to speak Spanish?
- Find your way out of this reality?
Then you need to take action on these dreams in the world, by laying out for yourself the small, daily actions that will lead you to success in the area you choose.
There are many life coaches out there, all of which will tell you the same thing: if you want to achieve a large, long-term goal, then you need to set in motion small daily practices that will lead you to that goal over time. There is the old adage – “Rome was not built in one day.” In other words, you will achieve your goals by first naming them, then deciding what training and skills you need to achieve them, and then practicing those skills every day. In time, you will be a Master of the thing you seek.
Your daily practices will be wildly different from your neighbor’s, depending on what your long-term goals are. If you have a practice of meditating every day, and your neighbor has a practice of watching 4 hours a day of television and commercials, you are going to end up two very different people!
Here are some examples of daily practices that lead to greater consciousness:
- Sitting, standing, walking or mindfulness meditation;
- Journaling every morning upon waking;
- Practicing yoga, qigong, martial arts or another form of spiritual bodywork;
- Spending time alone in Nature;
- Eating local organic produce;
- Eating organic herbs and powerfood supplements (try goji berries, acai, cacao, maca, colloidal gold, green powders and green juices, blue-green algae, and coconut water);
- Recycling;
- Listening to others with the intent to understand their needs;
- Refusing to entertain negative thoughts;
- Giving affection;
- Offering prayers of gratitude, instead of asking for things;
- Observing the cycles of the moon; and,
- Practicing an art form to perfect it.
Many people spend their days without any intention at all – weeks, months even years fly by without them ever having made a decision! Living life that way is like setting out in a sailboat on the ocean and then not steering the ship. Hoping you might just bump into an island and hoping it will be somewhere you like, that has food, and so on. You might just as easily get caught in a storm, run aground on coral, and starve to death alone.
While some people are drifting along, just reacting to life as it “happens” to them, others let everyone else make their life decisions. Perhaps she is pursuing the career that her mother wanted, or he is not going for the goal that his wife disapproves of, or you are not striking out on your own to pursue that burning question inside you because you are afraid of what he /she / they will think of you.
Please create and use a map. Take responsibility for your life and steer that boat you’ve been given.
To practice an activity daily is to become more sensitive to the nuances of life itself. Greater sensitivity leads to greater awareness of the interactions going on all around and within you, leading eventually to an understanding of our seamless integration with the whole system, and a deep relaxing of the rather anxious and frustrated sense of ‘self’. But—please don’t just take my word for it. Give it a try.
For more information, check out the Resource Guide.