Common Bottlenecks of The “Serious Practitioner”
How Constraints & Limiting Factors Can Stifle Our Progress in Practice
The Metaphysics of Constraint
All living creatures must live within the confines of varying constraints, including you. There are forces within all our experiences that narrow, limit, hold, and contain. This can be felt in everything from the protective effect of the atmosphere to the perpetual pull of gravity, to the genetics we were born with, to the limited energy we have on any given day. Limitations, boundary fields, and membranes span from the level of the galaxy to the scale of cellular life, and beyond. Those of us who cannot settle comfortably into this cozy realization are doomed.
Okay, maybe not “doomed”, but it does tend to create a rift in our being that is difficult to recenter without acknowledging the contractive forces of reality as much as the expansive.
In today’s world, we tend to polarize ourselves around this reality because we collectively honor and venerate the forces of growth and expansion, and shun limitation.
+We want personal freedom but not responsibility.
+We feed the myth of “becoming whatever we want”, but not in becoming who we were seeded to be from the start.
+We explore different disciplines endlessly without a set of principles of tradition to “hold” what we do learn.
This is also reflected collectively in our frantic pace, economic models of incessant advancement, and new-age models of “anything is possible”. I point this out not in criticism of these ideals necessarily (especially not in this article, which is in fact about expansion), but to illuminate the backdrop by which to understand the nature of bottlenecks.
Not all constraint is toxic or to be avoided.
Discipline and freedom go hand in hand. Expansion and contraction pulsate together in a balanced whole, and that which we perceive to be restricting movement can also offer stability and structure. I do not know about you, but I like not being a formless blob myself.
Limitations create boundaries, containers, and thresholds that we can both exist within (or be trapped by) and at other times, crack open like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon...only then to encounter another set of defining limitations.
In Astrology, the force that constricts, binds, and narrows is Saturn. While rummaging through the catacombs of the internet I found a quote I liked, from an unknown author:
“Saturn gives us structure and stability, but also challenges us to break free from our limitations.”
It should come as no surprise that our culture tends to have a less-than-shiny view of Saturn, the planet that says NO and tends to favor the forces of Jupiter: expansion, and growth, as it is the planet that says YES. We gravitate towards the accelerator and not the brakes. Yet, we cannot really navigate without both, and as sorcerer Jason Millers says:
”Saturn is the barrel of the gun that directs the bullet”. Without limitation, we have no focus and no place from which we can expand. Both constraint and freedom are states and forces that we must dance with as living creatures and there is no such thing as a “constraint-free life”.
Consider that:
-Resistance is the fuel for growth and adaptation. Resistance occurs at some kind of edge or limitation.
-Knowing when to pump the brakes is a critical skill. Life is not just about acceleration.
-The drive for expansion at all costs is cancer, eating at its host, like an out-of-control flame consuming a candle at both ends. With no container, we have nothing to “hold us”.
Wisdom from an African Oracle
For those of you who know me and my work, you are aware that I was initiated into and raised within a household devoted to Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions that included deity worship, shamanism, and divination. In this tradition, there is a profound four-cowrie shell oracle that speaks in a binary language, and for the purposes of this article, we will simplify the vocabulary to basic expansion and contraction dynamics.
Although I have been around this oracle my whole life, my understanding of it grew tremendously when I studied with elder and teacher Fabeku Fatunmise, who was able to show me how something seemingly simple can grow into something quite complex. How this oracle works is not the point of this article, but one small piece that I can share is that constraint can either be protective or frustrated (and so can expansion for that matter).
*What follows is not a “traditional” understanding of these teachings, but my own interpretation and take on them.
Protected or Frustrated
Protective: Some constraints are protective. There are many layers to this, but consider tension that might form around an injury as the body attempts to “splint” the area, or how a loving parent might tell a child no for its own safety, or how we might need to “set boundaries” with someone in our lives.
What we have here is a protective response or “defense mechanism” to keep us safe (or what we perceive to be safety). Some threat, whether real or imagined creates a type of membrane, binding, or limiting factor. This can manifest as the miracle of skin that holds all the blood in your body, to the fear of public speaking that prevents you from touching the lives of thousands.
This can be protection from progress because we fear the implications of growth (whether legitimate or illegitimate) or habitual patterns of behaviors that are defenses. It is basically a place we cannot yet (or ever) currently go for our own damned good (or what we perceive to be our damned good).
Frustrated: Frustrated contraction is more akin to a bear trap, prison, or…hey you guessed it: a bottleneck. Bottlenecks have a sense of frustrated, stuck, and stifled energy that feels it wants to move or shift. This is generally the blockage of a desired and/or needed expression, stifled growth, or restricted movement of some kind, from the flow of energy in the body to the dreams we pursue in life.
On one end of the spectrum you have externally imposed circumstances like slavery which deeply suppress the ability of individuals to act, and on the end of this gradient, we might see people working at jobs they hate which sap all their energy.
This is as much scar tissue in the body, as it is an old emotional wound that prevents you from opening deeply to a lover when all your soul wants is to be vulnerable.
This is fate that we resist against, destiny unfulfilled, or the seed that goes to ground but never sprouts. This is the fly running into the glass over and over again.
One of the secrets though, which you can find here for free is that: protective constraints can become frustrating ones and vice versa, and most importantly… not every limitation is a bottleneck. A bottleneck is a frustrated blockade that we must crack out of in order to continue advancement.
“Know thyself” is a timeless saying, once inscribed in stone at the oracle at Delphi. One way in which someone might interpret this is to “know your limitations”. Is it a shield, a suit of armor, a prison, a chalice, or a cocoon?
A Matter of Life and Death
It is hard for most of us to truly appreciate the psychosomatic experience of skillfully wielding a sharpened weapon against someone doing the same, and that the price for a single mistake could be a swift death. Surely, most of us could not imagine doing this dozens of times by choice…and yet, Miyamoto Musashi, one of the greatest swordsman to ever live (within recorded history) fought dozens and dozens of life or death duels, and lived.
In his Book of Five Rings, he famously said: “The way is in training”
When your practice has real consequences, the game changes. When your practice spills out into your chosen way of life in palpable ways, it instinctively gets taken seriously. When you live or die by your practice, real devotion becomes baseline.
Due to severe health challenges and shamanic sickness/Kundalini syndrome, this is something I have experienced first hand. My practices have literally saved my life, and they continue to facilitate the ability for me to live day to day the way I wish to. Fate placed me in these circumstances, and my destiny as a practitioner emerged from that. Many of the people I have worked with have arrived at my doorstep with difficulties that either leave them contracted with health or spiritual challenges, or fated to engage in practices that allow them to emerge more capable, and living a richer fuller life. Engaged. Active. Present.
While many people may not be drawn into the same overall pattern by fate, the purpose behind your practice can. The serious practitioner relies on practice to live or die according to their unique karma.
Defining The Serious Practitioner
What is a “serious practitioner”? The first time I heard the term “practitioner” used in this context (as someone who practices) was from my teacher Tao Semko, and he deployed it in reference to someone who earnestly engages in anything from physical cultivation to devotional work with deities.
Later, I heard the term again from the enigmatic movement teacher Ido Portal, who relies on it to describe someone deeply devoted to continuous practice. As time has progressed, I have come to own the term in my own embodied way, and have meditated upon its implications for many years now; to me, it has come to me something specific.
The serious portion of this name is to emphasize a focal quality of importance, consequence, and/or gravity. It’s a practice that matters. However, it does not refer to a stringent and joyless experience of practice itself. On the contrary, the serious practitioner loves to practice, and embraces the difficulty along with the bliss, as real love can hold all polarities.
In my sense of it, the serious practitioner displays certain qualities and traits:
1. They prioritize the “spirit of practice” in their daily life. Not only do they have “official” practice time they side aside, but work, relationships, energy management, recovery, and learning itself, take on the crisp air of practice.
2. They value the virtues that practice teaches...persistence, consistency, creativity, devotion, progression, determination, learning, focus, flow, skill and refinement.
3. They anchor their personal orientation in life through practices.
4. They address challenges in life with practice and they create bases of support with practice as well.
5. Practice becomes a temple where all the forces of human life culminate: victory, failure, bliss, pain, release, gain, injury, recovery, trance, sobriety, the divine, and the mundane.
6. It is the primary self-directed and adaptive catalyst for the continuous “evolution” of the person.
7. Studying the art and science of practice or skill cultivation itself.
When all of these elements come together an interesting theme emerges:
Life “problems” become practice problems and practice problems, become life problems. We start to know deep in our bones, that life itself is the practice.
The Imbalances are Fractal
If life itself is the practice, then the areas we neglect within practice, show us where we choose not to go (or are afraid to go). We all have unique dispositions, and these are best honored, so balanced development can often be asymmetrical, but not completely devoid of a touchstone.
By balanced development, I mean DEEP physical, emotional, mental and spiritual cultivation, while still carrying out the demands of modern life, having sexual relationships (if we are into that), and engaging in the process of continuous learning. The difference between choice and fear here, is the difference between a protective or frustrated constraint.
There are many people in today’s world who focus on single aspects of practice, ignoring the rest due to protection or constraint. You see virtuoso’s of movement, meditation, magic, nutrition, sex, music, hypnosis, creativity and more. I have no judgment about people who develop one arena of life and self at the expense of others, as these types of practitioners often create incredible sights and skills.
I bring this up because….constraints often show up in our blind-spots, areas of neglect, or places we fear to go. What are we avoiding and why?
The Daoist Ideal
I love Daoism, and in many ways the collective principles of Daoist thought that I have been exposed to thus far, form a baseline set of principles for me. Daoism is one of the greatest treasure troves of serious practice on the planet. One element that is common, and is also taught by Daoist teachers, that I currently know such as Craig Mallet of the Da Xuan tradition, is to divide practice time among different aspects of self in order to cultivate balanced development.
It was not uncommon for traditional teachings in many schools of Daoism to include: movement, energy work, mind skills, Feng Shui, magic, sexual cultivation, divination, I Ching studies, systems of medicine, calligraphy, nutrition, astrology and more.
In the same person….
This is serious practice and has built into it ways of addressing areas of neglect and hidden constraint. It is difficult for parts of you to hide.
Going Deep
The art of developing this type of path is a skill set, and it usually requires years of trial and error (and the perfect set of character flaws). It is not for everyone, but for those us with certain dispositions, nothing else will do. It is a hunger for deep cultivation, and only the nectar that emerges from profound daily devotion seems to feed it.
It is not uncommon for those of us called into this way of life, to have devoted practice time ranging anywhere from 2-8 hours a day, and I myself tend toward a 2-4 hour time frame more or less. This is on top of letting the “spirit of practice’ to infuse daily and nightly life. In reality, this a stressful way to live, for as Hans Selye the father of modern stress physiology states:
“Stress is any demand placed upon the mind or body”
The thing about cultivating one’s self for hours every day, is that it is stressful, and depending on factors such as type, intensity, volume, complexity, and individual appropriateness, we might be swimming in a sea of demand, and this is especially true if we seek “balanced development”.
However, constructive stress is the antidote to destructive stress. The more high-quality stress we can constructively adapt to, the more we thrive. We are shaped by pressure, and we can warped or made more integral.
A day for me easily involves divination, shape-shifting mental and emotional stories with written exercises, deep physical cultivation, internal alchemy, devotional work to ancestors, resting poses, hours of creative work or client calls, study, sex and time in nature. Others I know can actually manage much more.
If one truly tries to take all their practices into advancement and progression regularly, the system will buckle at the places where it is “weak”...and these are bottlenecks.
All humans have constraints; areas where the flow of energy contracts around a limiting factor. Much like the neck of a bottle that compresses and restricts the movement of a liquid, these “rings or bands” are currently constraining some aspects of our lives. This is so pervasive, we can collectively call it a feature of life, and not a bug.
Qualitative Differences in Constraint
Now, it might be obvious that different stages of advancement carry with them different classes of constraints. The advanced practitioner faces different problems than the novice. The ability to maintain progression and momentum is an ongoing feature of the serious practitioner, and each person must discover how to do this for themselves. What works for one, may not work for another.
In this way, developing a serious practice is “oracular”, revealing the innate qualities of your inborn path.
Despite this qualitative difference in constraint among different practitioners, there are common themes that present themselves.
1. Insufficient resources to support you, which can range from large-class economic factors to personal neglect. Here, recovery becomes the biggest obstacle. Recovery at this level of practice can easily extend beyond “eat good food and sleep well”, though, these are certainly foundational.
However, I know of practitioners who literally move to different states to better facilitate recovery or get access to better resources, or teachers. That is devotion. This may also reflect in the overall infrastructure of your life as a whole, and ways in which work, relationships, housing, pacing, scheduling, and more, may not be congruent with what you are cultivating.
2. A clash between the old identity and the new one. This is much more common than some might think and can range from dropping outdated modes of perception, to existential questions about the nature of “self” as a whole.
What are we if identities are malleable?
Who chooses directionality?
What is willpower?
Age-old questions about consciousness, personality, individualism, and collectivism may emerge. So can deeply cherished storylines that us place into playing roles such as the victim, martyr, hard-worker, weak one, strong one, sick one, elite one, and the like.
Serious practice has a tendency to drive us towards authentic expression, and for us to continuously drop that which is superfluous to our essence.
3. Pursuing incoherent practices. In Western culture we tend to believe that there are “universals”, that are equally good for everyone. This is bullshit that emerges out of multiple cultural and religious constructs, attempting to homogenize the world into a simpler, blander, beige version of the real stuff. You need to look no further than YouTube, to be told why you “should” be doing this, or why everyone “has to have” this magical morning routine.
In reality, each of us carries a unique soul, constitution, and story. We all have our own rhythms, imbalances, gifts, curses, fates and destinies to contend with. This is especially true in our world because genetics, cultures, environments, and personal factors are melting pots today.
If the practices are not the ones truly suited to you, and aligned with effective principles, you may never be able to adapt to them harmoniously.
Common Bottlenecks
What follows will be the most valuable to those of us who are serious practitioners, and who are not a member of a long-established tradition that has built-in ways of teasing out bottlenecks.
With that said, these are common bottlenecks in today’s world that I myself have encountered and that I have seen clients encounter as well. This list is by no means exhaustive; they are low-hanging fruit.
1. Nutritional Deficiencies: These are exceedingly common in today's world due to poor diets, soil depletion, contemporary stresses, familial/genetic needs for more of some nutrients and the inability to absorb what we do eat due to weakened digestive capacity.
On top of that...as we spend hours a day in practice (or seek to), across all these different aspects of self, then we begin to cycle through neurotransmitters, hormonal messengers, and energetic resources at a much faster rate. We need more nutrients to keep up with this new demand, in a world where there are fewer nutrients, and we need better absorption of what we eat.
My suggestion is usually improving the quality of the diet and supplementation in combination, as well as cultivating the gut through practices and herbal aids and/or digestive enzymes; sometimes tracking down genetic mutations which create the need for therapeutic dosages of some nutrients can also play a role in this.
The goal is to be as “replete” as possible. Basically, it means removing any possibility of a lack of nutrients to slow you down.
2. Identities/Stories Incongruent with the Changes You Are Catalyzing: An identity is a deep story and deep stories literally shape anatomy and physiology. As identities and deep stories change, so does the functioning of the body. Deep stories are not just “yours”, but emerge out of larger story arcs as much as the personal self. Consider...
-Ancestral & familial stories
-Religious stories
-Societal stories
-Cultural stories
Will power, imposed expectations, and pain/discomfort can get us started with practice, and can often be insufficient to take us the distance; we can rationalize the value of a particular practice, perceive some aspect of who are that we want to shift, or adopt the perspective of “other” telling us we “need” to do X. What happens when those practices start to actually shape and mold us into someone else? If we are attached to a different identity, refusing to let it die, and be reborn in the fire, we will not be able to complete the transformational process.
What to do about this is much broader than a simple suggestion, but some questions you might ask are:
1. Do I really want this change?
2. Is this change aligned with my deeper values?
3. Am I ready to support this change?
4. Do I have the infrastructure in place to allow this change to take hold?
5. What I am afraid of losing or gaining through this change?
Not all practices and adaptions are “for everyone”, but many times, the very change we resist the most is the one that will take us where we truly want to go.
However, determining this is a nuanced art. You can change most aspects of yourself..but do you really want to?
3. Energy Leaks & Blockages: If we are hemorrhaging energy somewhere inside the overall system, then we are wasting resources that could be directed towards more generative work. The leaks are places that prevent us from fully expressing our power. As our ability to act (energy/power), moves through our channels, it dissipates at places of leakage making us less effective.
Energy leaks can actually originate in nearly any area of life, but prevalent ones are:
-Trauma that is suppressing the body’s energy, by allowing parts of physiology to stay stuck in the past. This creates friction and static.
-Chronic muscular tensions or disrupted movement patterns, as maintaining these in place takes more of our baseline energy.
-Chronic/Dormant infections sapping biological energy. Infections that are half on/half off are very common. They pull resources. Whether or not they are actual parasites...they are parasitic.
-Odd spiritual karma coming from ancestral remnants or poor spiritual
l hygiene. We are much more than the dense energy we think of as the body, and there is a whole universe of unseen forces acting upon us.
-Ineffective/inefficient time management. Not focusing on priorities, and letting distraction take the reigns and making task more difficult than they need to be.
-Excessive use of social media. Enough said.
The key principle here is to look for limiting factors that are bleeding away the resources we already do have available to us.