Allow Your Practice to Breathe

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See, everything in nature breathes. And this is also true for your practice. Everything that we encounter in nature is cycling in some form or another. And it moves from expansion to contraction, and back to expansion again, in an ever ongoing ebb and flow.

Everything is moving between this polarity of stimulation and recovery… of pulsation.

And so if our practices are not aligned with this, we are not taking advantage of an innate and inherent rhythm that can support us throughout our life. And in our practice. If, for example, you are creating an artificial pattern, by doing the same amount of work every single day consistently, then you may be very consistent. But you're not really taking full advantage of what's here to support you to create more easeful, ongoing, sustainable progress.

So if you set up a pattern or a habit of running 30 miles every single day, then yeah, you might be really consistent. But at the same time, you are creating a situation for yourself, that is going to be a lot harder, and it's going to wear you down a lot more over the long run.

Whereas if you allow yourself to have a minimum that you will run and a maximum that you will run, while, also recognizing that you might have to break through sessions when you're fully recovered and bust through plateaus and so your minimum might grow and your maximum might grow as well. Then you create yourself a situation that allows for much more easeful progress to occur.

So while I do not suggest being less devoted, I do in some way suggest being less consistent, being more cyclical, allowing for the practice to shrink at times, while keeping it connected with a minimum and then allowing it to expand, and at other times and allowing for that to be organic and intuitive.

On days where you just have more energy, you allow for the practice to grow. On days where you don't have as much energy you allow for the practice to shrink. And this might move in micro scales from let's say, a week to macro scales of let's say, even a month or a year. It just depends on the vantage point that you're trying to look at, but allow your practice to breathe.