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So I want to invite you to not have an excessive loyalty to the predetermined idea of what you're going to do when you show up to practice.
A lot of us we might have a mental notion of what we're going to do, and or even a schedule, and a program that says do X, Y, and Z on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And that can be useful, especially if you need that to get a practice going.
However, if we devote our energy and our time specifically to discipline as a whole, we end up creating a much harsher relationship with our practice and is unnecessary. What we can do is devote ourselves to showing up consistently on a particular day at a particular time.
And then be willing to completely change what we have to do on that day, in the moment based off of what your body is telling you. So for example, one of the easiest ways to know if your system is telling you that this practice is not going to work out the way that you would hope is that immediately you start to feel more tired when you start to do something.
And or it just feels like a slog that this feels like it's going to take true willpower to get through. Now you can if there is a larger arc in why you're doing this simply grit through it. However, if you want to be more nuanced and skillful instead of trying to break through the barrier, try to flow around it.
What else can you do within the context of your practice that will feed into the same qualities and or support the trajectory that you are trying to get? The thing is that if we force this onto our system in the moment, it's going to slow down progress in the long term, because the recovery demands of what you're doing are going to be higher.
The reality of is that your body your organism, or system is an infinitely variable, complex, open ended system that is consistently responding to any number of internal and outside forces.
So one of the easiest ways to measure all of that is how you are feeling in the moment and more specifically, how your body is responding in the moment to a particular practice.