There is a really important core principle of is helpful for any serious practitioner to truly understand, and that is:
It's not just what you do, it's how you put it all together.
A lot of people intuit this naturally, and we see this inherited as a part of most types of ritual, most types of physical cultivation methods, and even most types of meditative structures where you have multiple meditative elements being brought together. This is not new. You see it interspersed into many different frameworks of practice.
A proverbial example of this is: A warmup, a workout, and a cool down.
People understand that even though you're doing different exercises, the structure matters, what order you're doing it in, and when you are doing it in terms of the pacing is important for a good practice session.
But this principle applies to the overall context of your practice.
It's not just what you do, it's how you put it all together. A quick example to give you some brainstorming of how this could go severely wrong is this:
Let's say your workout plan was 100 squats, and then you had the exercises you would normally do for a warmup and cool down. Now let's say you did 20 squats, and then you did three warmup exercises, and then you did two cool down exercises, and then you did another 20 squats!
And then you would do some more cool down exercises, and then you would do 5 squats, and then you would do some more of the warmup exercises, and then you would do 10 squats, and then you would do some of the cool-down exercises….and then you would try to put that into a 10-minute timeframe.
It would be an absolute mess! It would be chaos, and not in a good way.
So think about how that matters…
Thatthe sequence that you choose to do something in is either facilitating what's coming after it and integrating what came before it.
…or that you're just throwing together a mess of processes.
The real trick and beauty to this is when you can start to do this in a very coherent, intuitive, and, spontaneous way in real time.
This comes when you have worked with practice enough that you understand the various ways that your different currents of practice feed into the order of how you put everything together.